So I was watching a recording from some routing research conference last week, and there on slide 34 is a traceroute visualization with my ASN highlighted in red as an example of "significant path inflation." The ticket said... well, nothing, because nobody told me. I found out via YouTube like everyone else. The researcher had this whole narrative about how my little network was adding 40+ ms because of some suboptimal peer selection. Mixed feelings. On one hand, hey, we're big enough to be in a research dataset. On the other hand, we're the bad example. I emailed the presenter, got the raw traces, and spent the weekend actually fixing things. Two paths were genuinely busted—one because of a stale localpref I forgot about, another because I was trusting a route server too much. Both fixed now. AS path length dropped. Latency dropped. Still weird.
