Who I Am
I’m a networking geek. I co-invented Ethernet over Twisted Pair, contributed to the design of the Wi-Fi MAC protocol, and designed a number of obscure network enhancements such as the MPDU Aggregation system for 802.11n, the Distributed Reservation Protocol for UWB, and various tweaks and hacks to the Internet and OSI protocols.
I did this work with co-workers and colleagues in the standards community, of course, but I’m not a professional standards guy. I made contributions to these committees (and sometimes lead them) and implemented products to the standards. I worked for 3Com for ten years producing Ethernet products, worked for Airgo, Trapeze, Intel and Sharp Labs building Wi-Fi products, and for companies like Cisco and HP in the Internet space. My last regular engineering gig involved the home routers used by Verizon FiOS and Qwest’s vDSL+. I’ve never worked for a phone company, just Internet and network equipment companies.
These days I mainly do public policy work around networks, Internet regulation, and innovation. This involves testifying before Congress and the FCC, writing reports, and consulting with governments, manufacturers of network equipment, carriers, and content producers. My primary job is with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, DC think tank. I also edit the High Tech Forum blog, serve on the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group’s Technical Working Group, and advise the government of Singapore on network policy through my membership in the Infocomm Development Authority’s Regulatory and Economist Advisory Panel. I also do some consulting on patent litigation. My contact e-mail is “richard” at this domain if you have a project to discuss.
In a past life, I served on a number of California oversight boards and commissions related to the court system, offered rather frequent testimony to the legislature on family law, gave numerous interviews to the press, and appeared on television and radio programs such as the now defunct California Capitol Review with Jack Kavanaugh to talk about family law issues. I don’t do advocacy any more, but the experience working with elected officials and the media was valuable. Tech policy often seems difficult, but it’s a piece of cake compared the child custody and spousal support conundrums in family law.
I’m a big fan of the Oakland A’s baseball team, jumping on the bandwagon after reading Moneyball. I can recommend the The Drumbeat blog for A’s fans, home to funny and well-thought-out analysis. Everybody’s jumping on the sports blog bandwagon these days (even political blog entrepreneur Markos Moulitsas) but I prefer my baseball free of politics, and my politics free of baseball. It all works better that way.
In addition to the blog, this web site houses some curry recipes, holdovers from my first efforts with HTML that refuse to die. These are now assembled in World-Wide Curries and are apparently among the most definitive to be found, since they’re linked by sites serving the South Asian community in India and the United States. I haven’t tried them all, but the ones I have were pretty good.
The Chili of Excellence Page is much less authoritative, but it’s not a bad starter for those on the road to perfecting their “bowl of red.” Recent chili experiments confirm that Texas Longhorn beef produces a superior flavor lower in fat than chicken or fish, and that kidney suet in moderation sweetens the mix. Curry meets chili in the beef curries of Malaysia and Singapore, the most satisfying cuisine in the world and probably the Next Big Food now that Thai is so 20th Century.
Enjoy your visit, and drop a note to me if anything you see here intrigues or enrages you. And yes, I know that nothing on this site sets new standards for animation, multimedia, or Java; that’s just my cross to bear.