Last night I had the pleasure of attending a dinner to celebrate 25 years of JANET – the excellent high speed academic network that all Universities are connected to. We are extremely lucky to have this service in the UK and are the envy of many overseas colleagues. It was good to see the early pioneers of JANET recognised, especially my good friend Roland Rosner, one of the early architects of JANET, and responsible for its name. Many people still labour under the misapprehension that the origin of the name is the Joint Academic Network, but they would be wrong. It is actually called after Roland's secretary, Janet, the current acronym being retrofitted later.
On the way to the reception myself and a couple of colleagues thought that we would have a couple of pints of refreshing Fullers Ale, as we happened to be passing a pub. After our first pint of ESB, we thought we'd try a pint of Golden Pride - sounded like a nice pale beer, fairly weak, a Summer supping ale. I was a bit nervous when the pints arrived and found them to be very dark and my fears were confirmed after one sip, which tasted like barley wine. A quick check at the pump confirmed the strength to be 8.5% - hardly a beer to be supping on the way to a drinks reception. I'm ashamed to say we left more in the glass than we drank!
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