Matthew S. Gast is a former aspiring research physicist who found computer networking too addictive for his own good. He was initially hooked during a summer research program, when he found the Ethernet drop in his dorm room far more interesting than his assigned task of developing monitoring software for a particle accelerator. Upon returning to academic life in the fall, he suffered severe withdrawal symptoms, which he conquered only with the help of a new religion-Unix. He has been connected and sober since that fateful summer. Matthew is currently a Research Fellow at Nokia. His work deals with the intersection of mobility and security, with frequent excursions into routing and cryptography. In the course of daydreaming about changing the world, Matthew has been known to imagine networks that are much less complicated and repetitive to manage. Frequent travels take him away from his Silicon Valley home to a variety of locations throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the occasional visit to the corporate headquarters in Finland. On his last trip to Finland, Matthew crossed the Arctic Circle on a snowmobile in February. Matthew is the coauthor of Network Printing (also published by O'Reilly) as well as several other articles and white papers.
