Several years ago I saw Vincent Cerf at the DePaul Lecturer series. He said at the end of the talk to a reply from a question from me that he thought that the best vehicle for learning would be to study packet radio. That has always stuck in my mind. I have followed Cerf since that time right up to the point he joined Google and beyond. I have been thinking about networking and the PhD since about that time in my life. Networking before that time it was just basic TCP and before that it was the first teacher workstation environment I had in my house on the TRS-80. I was doing development way back then in a sort of networked environment. But, until the Cerf talk I had not thought of it as a possible research area. Because of my work at my current company I often think about things like net neutrality, QOS etc. My current research at work has to do with QOS. I have had some trouble figuring out who it benefits. To me QOS has been a way that a telco can charge more for a service and not actually getting better service. Because of the way the network is setup preemption is not part of the design in wireless. So you ask, "What does QOS actually mean in that situation?" There are several problems of which I don`t want to go into them here. The point here is I am torn in what area to do a dissertation. In the last couple of days I have learned that the gyration at work has been because we are going to be acquired. There are several suiters. We have a banker that is handling the work. I am excited that my research will be a point of focus for this acquisition. Because I am the single person on a large part of it I hope that means good things are coming my way. My thoughts of dissertation topic were compounded by some video watching over the last couple of days. Van Jacobson Google Talk - Aug 30th, 2006 It is a really good talk about the history, current state and future of networking. Lots of the ideas given I have been thinking about myself. Things like integrity and trust are properties of the data and not the source of the data and the definition of networking or "The Network" is a function depending on your religious fundamentalism...are you a telco or a TCP person. Van Jacobson said something that I liked especially. He said is QOS to benefit the small tales of connectivity between you an the larger network, as it should be, or is it to benefit the charging by the telco for bandwidth used by big entities with money like Google. He suggested the telco intent is the later....I kind of concur because of my experience with QOS...But, it remains to be seen. So I am torn about what my dissertation should be even though I have been heading into formal methods and software engineering. My thoughts continue to bring less focus.