Happy 6-6-6!

Co-worker Douglas has given me what appears to be the perfect agenda for my 666 afternoon. I've already voted, so that Satanic ritual is already taken care of, but here's the plan:

1. Have a Big Mac Meal at McDonald's, and super-size it.
2. Go to Starbucks
-Order anything with coffee and chocolate
- Fire up the laptop and connect to T-Mobile wireless
- Launch Windows
- Open Internet Explorer
- Surf to www.microsoft .com

So my afternoon is planned.

For evening, I'm open to suggestions. I suppose it needs to include some BDSM porn.

Review: Da Vinci Code

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown is your average mediocre whodunnit, complete with the obligatory cardboard cutout characters, incredible coincidences, inaccurate technical explanations and merely adequate writing. It is patently a book of fiction, gives no proof of any of the claims it makes (nor does it need to, it's not written as historical fiction, it's written as a mystery thriller).

The chapters are very short - sometimes less than a page, never more than 5 pages - and often cover more than one scene. It's writing for ADD victims (or American TV addicts).

In a nutshell, avoiding spoilers here, there's a murder in the Louvre, and the clues send the plot on a search for the Holy Grail, complete with secret religious sects, Vatican intrigue and Crypro-Symbology Experts in Love. Well, lust, actually.

Part of the cryptology had to do with a Hebrew encryption scheme, and Brown got almost every detail of the technical description wrong. He consistently makes the mistake of putting in Hebrew words with the letter "j". There is no "J" in Hebrew. He also doesn't understand how the Hebrew "V" becomes a vowel (O or U, depending on the placement of a dot), and his explanation shows his ignorance.

He also makes claims about Jews having sex in the Temple as part of their original rituals, when in truth it was pagan practices such as this which Judaism was created to avoid. But it's a book of fiction, and he was inventing that bit to bolster other bits of fiction.

The book was written to be made into a movie. All the characters are unique individuals, from the chief of Paris police, known as The Bull, to the massive albino monk, to the sexy Paris policewoman/cryptographer to the Harvard tweed symbology professor who plays opposite her. It even leaves room for a sequel and prequels galore. Not that anyone would pay money to see them.

I read the book to see what the fuss was about, and the answer is that nobody who actually read the book could ever mistake it for a serious religious tome. All the protests you see are by idiots who have not read the book, who have taken the word of someone else who has not read it, who is knee-jerk reacting to something someone heard on Oprah.

I may rent the DVD of the movie, not to see the whole film but to see how Hollywood handles the murder scene which features a naked elderly man spread-eagled on the floor. And maybe also for the pagan sex ritual scene, but that's only a few seconds of time in the book.

For your listening pleasure

I have added another tune to howeirdhits, You Walk By which is a take-off on the 1940 song of the same name which was made famous by both Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra singing with the Tommy Dorsey band.

Computer History Museum lecture

Last night I went to what looked to be an educational panel discussion called Wireless Sensors: Inventing the Future at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (down the block from where I used to work). The announcement blurb was very vague, and I had never heard of any of the panelists, but that's sometimes a good thing.

The member's reception was well-attended. One can always judge the popularity of the lecture by how quickly they run out of Swedish meatballs, and how stressed the caterer lady is. This time they not only ran out of meatballs, they also ran out of most of the other nibbles. Unlike most of the receptions, people actually came up and chatted with me. I'm a real wallflower at these things, pretty shy about making the first effort to meet people. For example, I recognized Phil and Kathleen Gust, of BayCon costuming fame, and was tempted to tell Phil, who was wearing a jacket and tie, that I had never seen him in such an exotic costume before. But I was too chicken.

There were three panelists, the dean of Berkeley's engineering college, who was there mostly to tout a business venture he and one of his students have started in the wireless sensor field; a research director from Sun who was plugging a sensor/software thing called SunSpots, and a teacher from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, (who is about as Scottish as Ben Kingsley) whose area of research is micro chips. Their individual presentations were brief and to the point, and all through the presentation I was laughing at how they are talking about the next step towards nano-engineering, but never once even hinted at that word, and never mentioned Eric Drexler. The idea is to have computers so small that they can be airborne. They talk to each other via wireless technology, and may not require a base server - the idea is a swarm computer. Scary stuff, when you consider things like privacy and health. The visitor from Scotland noted that the small chips are made from arsenides, which are toxic. Not the kind of thing you want to release a swarm of into the air.

The Sun guy showed a couple of examples of his wares, which were primitive robotics-by-wireless-waldo. Amusing, but not impressive. Berkeley guy showed a sensor the size of a golf hole, designed to wirelessly communicate to a groundskeeping system the amount of water in the ground, and maybe more. It's bulky and rather old technology, including the concept of wireless. I worked with those kinds of things at HP in 1990.

As soon as they got into the conversation part of the panel, things got boring. Booooooooring. To add insult to injury, the museum's ace A/V staff had trouble figuring out what camera they wanted on the screen (the front wall, actually) and the wireless mikes kept crapping out. How appropriate. And it did not help that the fellow sitting next to me was on speed or something, and kept moving around in his seat and making a variety of unsavory noises under his breath.

Boo Hiss. Another one bites the dust

Got woefully turned around tonight on my way to Valley Fair mall, and found myself on Bascom by SJ College, passing the Espresso Garden, one of my favorite folk-ish venues. And it had brown paper wrapping in all the windows. Checked their web site and they have gone bye-bye.

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Instead of the 666 events Douglas planned for me, I went to the mall. It has both a McDonald's and a Starbucks, but I only made a token visit to them. On the way I made a quick pilgrimage to Satanic Santana Row.

The reason for the mall trip was to replace the broken back plate on my cell phone. Got a pretty blue face plate/back plate set with dolphins and whales on it. Now the back plate does not come off by itself, like it kept doing in Seattle. Inconvenient when the battery falls out during a call, what?

Had dinner at Ivar's, Dungeness crab Caesar salad, clam chowder, iced tea. And then went downstairs and around the corner from Starbucks for ice cream at the Ghirardelli stand. That was fairly sinful.

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Did the bike/light rail thing to work today, rode a little at lunch (racked up about 4 miles, counting the trip to work), and took light rail towards home, getting off at NASA, because (a) there were too many bikes on board and it was getting awkward and (b) it's a safe & easy 2 miles home from there and (c) I needed the exercise. Total of about 6.5 miles, I think.

Plan for tomorrow is similar, but this time I'll ride all the way to downtown MV for the monthly Peace Corps hangout. Easy 1-mile ride home along Central Expressway afterwards. Will probably take a later train in hopes of less bike foo.