Dear Representative Lee: I’m writing to express my heartfelt congratulations for your re-election. Fact is, while it wasn’t going to take a blue tsunami to return you to the House1, it is a nice circumstance. And I was definitely going to vote for you anyway: one of the advantages of it having been Squirrel Hill that I left for Zürich-Höngg eighteen years ago is that I’m frozen in time in the 14th Ward of Pittsburgh for electoral purposes. ...
Dear Senator Fetterman: I’m writing first and foremost so that your staff can increment the “constituent says don’t support Chuck Schumer for Senate Majority Leader” counter. I have little faith that this action will have any effect in the real world. Indeed, I have a mixed record with this genre: in the small hours of October 25, 2001, I posted an open letter to Rick Santorum, then also a senator from Pennsylvania, urging him to oppose the USA PATRIOT Act. The Senate passed it later that day, ninety-eight to one. He was not the one. A big difference between you and Santorum is that I supported you. Indeed, if memory serves, this was the last thing I posted publicly on Twitter, before it got xombiefied, to the acclaim of two whole likes. ...
In the late winter of 2006, I realized, on a train from somewhere between Freilassing and Rosenheim, after an interop in Salzburg leading up to IETF 65 in Dallas, that I was probably going to have to move to Central Europe. A bit more than twenty years later, I’m sitting on a Railjet on the way to Landeck – a train that did not exist at the time – waiting at the platform in Freilassing – an occurrence more frequent now that Germany is reaping the rewards of running its rail network as a Volkswagen ad for the past two decades. This gives me time to reflect a long week at IETF 126 in Vienna before I disappear into the mountains for a bit. In addition to joining the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, on which more after I’ve understood the assignment, a couple of things of note happened that warrant talking about here. ...
For the next decade or so, the southern edge of my small home city on the north side of Zürich will be a complex linear construction site, after which we’ll have a segment of a bicycle highway between Zürich and the upper Glatt Valley, and a mostly-brand-new train station with two additional platforms connecting to a new tunnel straight to Winterthur. This is great. But in the meantime, that complex linear construction site has been placed directly over what used to be my bicycle commute, which gave me the opportunity to find a new one. ...
As a left-leaning white kid who grew up in what turned out to be a dying Southern city, going from a fully-integrated Montessori elementary school in a neighborhood named after the white flight it later suffered to an East Memphis middle school whose history includes a massive expansion of its boarding program for Little Rock families resisting integration in the 1960s, I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to point to the premature end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 as the point at which it All Went Wrong. ...
I waited long enough to write about Kein 10-Millionen Schweiz that I get to do so in the past tense, with a sense of relief, albeit incomplete. Yes, dear reader, the Swiss People’s Party ran yet another Schwarzenbach referendum to attempt to create their little island without resorting to kinetics, and despite some fear based on early polling numbers that maybe this time they’d managed to do it, with a campaign that tried (but ultimately failed) to break from their explicitly fascist house style (in the sense of “blame foreigners for everything, including the traffic caused by your own love of cars, and do it mostly with red, white, and black ink”), we will once again not be Doing A Swexit. ...
And welcome, once again to my blog, the last seven years of which seem dominated by me talking about the technical aspects of keeping my blog up to date. As I sat back and watched Claude migrate my Blogger and Wordpress content from a bitrotted Hugo template to one with an apparent present, it occurred to me that this most recent migration provides a pretty good excuse to explore what works about the Internet in 2026, and what doesn’t. ...
That people “disappear” into Google after joining (especially from academia) is a complaint so often told that it’s nearly a cliche… says the Googler whose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago. I didn’t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in the intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a bonus, some actual rabbits. ...
A couple of months ago, I posted about leaving academia. Two weeks ago, I joined Google as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager. I’ll be working to keep bits of Google’s technical infrastructure running smoothly, at least once I’ve learned enough about how it works and what all the various switches and levers do to be dangerous. The past two weeks have been a deluge of new things to learn, but I’ve finally got my head far enough above water to reflect on things a bit. ...
About three years ago I started working part-time (20%) on SCION, a secure, available future Internet architecture. Since I wasn’t around much, I was given a nice easy project that wasn’t on anyone’s critical path: desigining the naming system for SCION (as to that time it was assumed SCION would just use DNS with new RRTYPEs to handle the new address families it introduces). ...