Blogging for AOL has been an interesting experience over the last few years. For me it is one of those unplanned surprising things that pop up on life's journey every so often. For the most part it has been a rewarding experience. I have had to become a lot more thick skinned when receiving harsh and even crude comments from readers.

One of the great things has been the 'pen pals' I have made around the world. People that have taken to my stories and regularly add their insights. The dialogue makes it more informative and the immediacy somehow makes it more personal and real.

Just this morning I received a note from Dan, a frequent participant in the BloggingStocks.com dialogue. He had noticed that one of my colleagues Peter Cohan had picked up my infrastructure theme lately and was not able to find my stories about the subject from earlier in the year.

I think this is one of the themes that Peter and I could write about non-stop and it would not be getting enough attention. It is first and foremost about putting people to work doing things that the nation needs done anyway. If we have to run the printing presses let it be for things that last 80 to 100 years not 2 to 3. The following stories will illuminate the subject as to my views in more detail.

Thanks for writing Dan. I hope you and others will continue to comment and try and wake up our elected officials. I started banging this gong in February. Maybe someone in Washington will do something before next February.

• Suburban slums -- city centers being revitalized
• Fund roads & bridges NOT mad money stimulus
• Serious Money: Stimulate productivity not consumption
• Should Feds stimulate or stabilize; is there a difference?
• Re-think new stimulus package? Push infrastructure!

I think that the infrastructure story will continue to be a major theme next year and for many years to come. My stories have discussed roads, bridges, tunnels, highways and the like but future stories will be about water. In using the the picture above contributed by editor and writer Sarah Gilbert, I want to drive home the point that we all have expectations that our simplest needs will be met. That is not going to be so, if we do not plan for the future.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money.

Three recent technology-related failures serve as a reminder that there are significant though barely acknowledged vulnerabilities associated with modern financial markets' dependence on advanced communications and sophisticated systems.

The first was the hiccup that occurred in the stock market on February 27th, when an unexpected computer problem and unusually heavy trading led to delays in reporting the value of the Dow Jones Industrials Average. When the situation was eventually resolved, it triggered a momentary panic as traders assumed the large and sudden downward price adjustment represented a wave of forced selling (to be sure, astute market watchers quickly realized that other indices had already fallen more than the Dow by that point.)

The other two incidents, although unrelated to each other, occurred over the course of the past 48 hours. One apparently stemmed from a server back-up at software maker Intuit Inc (NASDAQ: INTU), following a rush of last-minute requests for electronic filing of tax returns. Another was a major outage affecting users of Research in Motion's (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry service, which prevented many subscribers from sending and receiving emails for a number of hours.