Mike's musings

The Big Smoke

In London today, meeting a project manager from one of our customers, just to keep up-to-date with what's going on, and also a journalist from Computing magazine. Interesting chat, actually - we discussed a variety of issues around security in general, and authentication in particular (e.g. - what about mutual authentication - can it be made to work?). He seemed very appreciative of the fact that I didn't spend the time trying to jam marketing for Cryptomathic down his throat, and that we managed to have a wide-ranging (and hopefully interesting meeting). He asked me questions, I tried to answer them. Seems like an obvious way to do business. I hope that he'll feel that he can give me a call at some point if he's got questions I might be able to answer.

I'm such a hick, in some ways. Embarassingly, I managed to turn the wrong way down New Oxford Street on coming out of Tottenham Court Road tube station, and so wandered for five minutes or so away from Oxford Circus. Heigh-ho. And is it just me, or is £9.00 an awful lot of money to spend to get into St Paul's Cathedral? I only wanted to pop in for a prayer or two and to enjoy the ambience, but felt that this was a little steep, as I only had about 15 minutes to spare.

On a different note completely, I'm very much in favour of women bishops in the Church of England. Isn't it odd that this is an area where it's considered fine to air one's views, whereas homosexuality is an altogether more dangerous subject. They're the two main issues that most people see as facing the Church of England, but I only feel "safe" discussing one of them. It seems to me that the theological arguments against are too specious, and too obviously an example of Paul being very much set in his own societal context. This seems a lot more obvious than the case against homosexuality (though I do wonder...), and I think that the C of E is bending over a little too hard on the compromise here.