23 Nov 2001 MikeCamel   » (Journeyer)

Books
Finished Ross Anderson's "Security Engineering, A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems" - a must-read. Covers everything from crypto protocols to "How to Hack a Smart-card", "How to Steal a Picasso", military systems, banking, telecoms security and nuclear command and control systems. As he points out, if you deal with one part of a security system (or design it), you really need to understand how all the other parts work, too, as they'll be interacting with your bits. Heartily recommend this book - you'll find a slightly longer review of this, and some others I've been reading, at www.p2ptrust.org.

Music
Barenaked Ladies are excellent. Just got Maroon, the last album that I didn't have, and I'm listening to it at the moment (whoo - "Tonight is the night I fell asleep at the wheel" is wierd!). After that, it's Bill Jones' Panchpuran - I loved her first one, and this has got excellent reviews, too.

Phd
We're getting there - I've got two supervisors, and one referee for definite (I need to decide who to approach to be the second). I'm looking into the issues of funding, and getting accepted to do it part-time, which is more difficult than you might expect. Went Cambridge University Library yesterday to find out about getting a card again. It was strange being back there after so long, but great, too. Booked a time next week to get a card, and I'm seeing one of my supervisors on Wednesday to discuss the PhD proposal. Once it's a bit more refined, I'll post it on www.p2ptrust.org.

Work
I was in Paris for some of this week at a trade show. A complete wash-out - though got to meet a couple of interesting sets of people. My boss and I left early. The poor organiser had such a cr*p time (two laptops got stolen, to just help things along) that I ended up buying her flowers. Seemed to go down well - a little later, one of my females colleagues came round to mention how bad a day she was having, and didn't she deserve flowers, too? No, but (-8.

Life
Catherine's away for a week and a half in Portugal from next Wednesday, but as I've got MBA work to do, and my sister and her husband (Polly and Lee) are likely to be coming to stay, I'll probably have enought to do anyway.

Had contact with a long-lost friend (sort of an ex-) from about 12 years ago. She had better memories of our time than I might have expected, which was nice, as I was very fond of her, and felt that things had been somewhat unresolved. Catherine was amused by some of the comments about me "confident and cultured" in particular. Heigh-ho - she (Catherine) was the one who described her first impression of me as "an arrogant b*st*rd", but then again I thought she was "prim and proper", so at least one of us was wrong. And she did marry me.

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