I wasn’t the smartest kid in school. I was either bored and making better use of my time in class or frustrated by things I did not understand. Even if I ignore my devastating track record of attempts in mastering the Latin language I was a below average student in terms of grades. During most, but not all, school years I made it to the next level.

On my way to space I am currently taking a little stop to help organizing the world’s information and doing my part in making it universally accessible and useful. Since my rocket building talents are limited I devoted my energy to the wonderful challenge of Site Reliability Management (SRM). That is, empowering people on top of Site Reliability Engineering. Basically what I love combined with what I enjoy. Plus meetings.

After the DEFCON conference earlier this year in Las Vegas, I watched David Copperfield’s show at the MGM Grand. I wanted to see him for years (he’s kind of a childhood hero of mine), but never managed to squeeze it into my schedule. This time, however, my return flight was a day later than usual so I used the opportunity to finally see the legend with my own eyes. What a wonderful, impressive show that was! The illusions were astonishing! I had a close-to-front-row seat, and since Mr. Copperfield was performing large parts of the show from within the audience space, I felt like being in the middle of the magic.

The Internet is notoriously hungry for bandwidth and much effort goes into increasing the throughput of Internet Protocol carrying media. One particularly successful approach in throughput optimization has been IP over Avian Carriers which, thanks to pleasant developments in storage media density, managed to stay ahead of the game by a factor of three. However, speeding up existing protocols is not enough to meet increased bandwidth demands. New protocols and unconventional link media have to be considered to keep the lights on and the bytes flowing.