So one of the things that’s of growing importance in the networking community is creating an optical networking environment and an associated control plane that offers capacity-on-demand from authorized users/applications for usage that pushes beyond the capability afforded by even very fast packet-switched networks. For one perspective on this, and an idea of what sorts of usage might drive this need, there is a good paper from the folks working on the CHEETAH project. One of the pundits I follow very closely in the optical networking community is Bill St. Arnaud of the Canarie project. I get Bill’s newletters; he also maintains a column in LightReading. Earlier this month, Bill was at a NASA Research and Engineering Network meeting, and posted this very interesting perspective on the needs (or lack thereof) for such networking, as presented by a senior technologist at Level3.

So, one of the things I’m doing right now is acting as program chair for the UNC CAUSE fall conference. The program is really coming together, and promises to be a lot of fun, and very informative.

So, I’m sort of a latecomer to actually setting up and using blogs & wikis. I’ve done web stuff for a dozen years, literally…it was in November of 1993 when I said to myself, you know, this Web stuff is pretty cool, and might replace Gopher (anyone out there remember Gopher?). I downloaded and set up a simple web server on my department’s first unix server.

So much for history! I’ve been a fan of collaboration software and virtual communities for years, but somehow (probably too busy) had never sat down and set up a wiki or a blog. Well, in the last month, I’ve remedied both of those. You are reading the results of my blog experiments, and I’m using wikis quite a bit with my NCNI colleagues. I plan to post things here periodically as I explore how to use this stuff to better do my job.

Stay tuned…