Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Well, my brother just sent me this news piece from atnewyork.com about McDonalds and AT&T offering wireless Internet access and I just had to wax a little about it. The article is mainly about how McDonalds is going to offer wifi service at a bunch of their New York and New Jersey locations for free in August. McDonalds actually has been offering wifi for a while now in some of its locations. As you may know there are completely free wifi “hotspots” out there, some being the negligence of a person with a home wireless network that hasn’t encrypted it so anyone can use it, others intentionally left open for altruistic purposes. There are other places you can pay to attach yourself to the internet via wifi. I’m sure there are smaller and maybe even single-location hotspots that charge, but the main company out their selling wifi services at public locations is Tmobile via their “Hot Spot” service. The service isn’t just available in Tmobile stores but in many Starbucks and Borders Books and Music stores.

Tmobile offers a service that one can subscribe to on a monthly basis. It’s $30/month or $20 if you get your cell phone service through Tmobile. McDonalds doens’t offer it. Tmobile also offers a “day pass” for $10. After August, McDonalds will be offering a day of access for only $3. So it seems like for people who only need service on a fairly irregular basis, McDonalds may actually soon trump Tmobile. I guess we will have to wait and see though how many people would rather save $7 but have to sit on uncomfortable plastic seats and eat food that is mostly bad for you and patronize a business that’s generally deleterious to its workforce and many related industries like ranching (anyone read Fast Food Nation), or if you’d rather spend that extra $7 to be in an environment more conducive to working, writing, etc., where you may be surrounded by lots of reference books that could complement your internet research capabilities, or alternate be somewher with some relaxing music (with the occasional din from the espresso machine), plush chairs or couches, and the temptation of spending an additional $7 on each new coffee concoction that you are driven to try.

If McDonalds can get this wifi into all of its locations - which are still more ubiquitous, I believe, then Borders and Starbucks Combined - it may actually make a run for Tmobile’s money. Perhaps it doesn’t have a monthly plan because it doesn’t think anyone will want to spend more than a few days a month sitting for more than a couple of hours in your average McDonalds. But for the traveler, especially one not going to places with a Starbucks or Borders, this might be a good deal. Starbucks has started showing up in rest stops in the highway, but these locations offer no places to sit generally, and a McDonalds does. So this could be a big advantage. The only problem is, will McDonalds actually make it available everywhere. Only making it available in Urban centers they will have direct competition from all the Starbucks and Borders all over most urban centers. At least this should engender some healthy competition and maybe even some addition parties getting into the game! I do think it motivates one to partonize a place if it has free or very cheap wifi, and maybe this is one of McDonalds hopes since there sales have been down recently. Eventually of course none of this stuff will matter because wifi will be ubiquitous - either provided for free as a public service or via municipal districts for a fee from non residents and free for residents, or perhaps via national carriers like AT&T and Tmobile. But you won’t have to go to just certain locations. Maybe they will start putting wifi on cell towers. Only problem being wifi doesn’t have near the range as even GSM. At least not yet. I’m sure a future version will have a much longer range.

We made our way down to the Kiev from our Moscow trip, I believe, but it’s a bit hazy. We had been planning on going down as far as Armenia but at the time the area was unsafe due to fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

I don’t remember a whole lot about Kiev. We were only there for a day, I think, and a bit too much Armenian wine (20% alcohol and 20% sugar) killed a sufficient amount of brain cells to make the visit somewhat hazy. What I do remember is separating from the group with a fellow participant in my program, Matt, and exploring a bit of Kiev. We started to see crowds of people and banners but not knowing Ukrainian, we could only make out so much.

Ukrainian is not that far from Russian, but for a non-native speaker it probably takes a good while to start to divine some of the Ukrainian words. It’s just different enough in other words, so that a non-native speaker of Russian would still have a very hard time understanding. Kind of the same as if someone learning English but without a mastery of it was all of a sudden faced with a really extreme Cockney Accent, or one from the hood, or something similarly distant from standard English. Maybe even a little worse then that since Ukrainian is actually considered its own language whereas Cockney et al are simply “dialects.”

Anyway, we tried asking some of the locals what was going on, but again, the language barrier made it difficult. We got to the hub of the excitement that was in front of some official building. We waited around for a bit and then what everyone was waiting for happened – Boris Yeltsin arrived in a limo, got out and started shaking hands in the crowd before going into the building. People were clapping and cheering (this was of course way before he became president and so his reputation was generally as a progressive and not as a drunk). My friend Matt was actually able to get through the crowd and actually shake Yeltsin’s hand. I was a bit more timid. I may have tried to get some pictures, but I can’t remember if I had my camera there. If I did try to get some of Yeltsin, I wasn’t able to due to the swarming crowd… I at least caught a glimpse of him – my only brush with fame while in the Former Soviet Union…

I don’t read a lot of fiction and I rarely read thrillers. But someone recommended The Emperor of Ocean Park to me and so I listened to an abridged version on audio via Audible.com. The abridgement was only 6 hours so this must have been 50% or maybe even less of what is a very thick book of 650 pages! It definitely kept my interest all the way through, but reading some of the reviews of the book, I somehow feel like I missed much of the seasonings if not some of the actual meat.

The book is about an African American law professor whose father, a former federal judge, has just died of an apparent heart attack. Almost immediately the protagonist, Alcot Garland becomes embroiled in a web of mysteries that his father has laid out for him. He is assumed by everyone to know something about the “arrangements” his father has made, but Alcot knows nothing and must put the puzzle together piece by piece and clue by clue. While doing this we get some glimpse into the upper-middle-class black enclaves of Martha’s Vineyard, the world of the Ivy League law school, and some of the Washington DC high-power political world.

The ending bothered me a bit in that it seemed kind of far-fetched, and also I could almost see it being played out on the big screen as I listened. A bit too dramatic and cinematic, but I guess the screenwriter will have a pretty easy time of it. Again, what I listened to is probably half of the book; so if this sounds like a less than stunning review, take it with a grain of salt.

I began studying the Russian in my sophomore year in college. At the time my major was journalism and they required 2 years of a foreign language. I’d taken Spanish in high school but was never very good at it, and not very interested in learning it. But somehow Russian was different. It was more of a challenge, more “exotic” and besides I was really interested in the initial churnings of democracy that country was going through - this was back in 1988 and I was listening to Radio Moscow on short wave if not every night then at least a few times a week.

Anyway, I really took to Russian and eventually switched my major to it, but I did this somewhat late and would not be able to graduate the year I should have - 1990. So I determined that I would get my last credits while on a study abroad program at Leningrad State University. Luckily my professors let me go through the graduation ceremonies even though I hadn’t fulfilled all my credits.

So at the beginning of September, 1990, I headed off to the Soviet Union (as it would still be called for a couple of years) along with about 30 other 20-22-year-olds (and maybe a few who were a little older). The program we were on was sponsored by the Council on International Educational Exchange, or CIEE (It was SMOO in Russian, so that’s what we called it). Most of us spent 4 months there, but some of my classmates became so entranced with the place (or at least with the men/women they met there) that they ended up going back and staying for much longer periods of time. I longed to return for a long time even though my time there was not always “fun.”

It was definitely a growing experience in a lot of ways for me. I mean of course culturally I got a flavor for a very different (and yet in some ways very similar) environment to where I grew up. I somehow got it that despite language and cultural differences, people were basically the same at heart. But at the same time those language and cultural differences can be a big barrier for some in actually communicating with others.

Other then this, I had started to come out of my own shell a bit. I was painfully shy during much of high school and college and really stuck to a very small circle, didn’t really venture out all that much, although I think given the chance I would have. But being in a foreign country without any good friends kind of forces one to either withdraw completely (which I probably did for the first few weeks), or actually put ones self out there and start actively trying to make friends.

Although some of the places we went to within the USSR were then considered part of it - “Republics” - I thought it would be better to address them seperately since they are now countries in and of themselves. So I will try to mention a little only about the places that are still within the borders of Russia. As I mentioned, we studied at Leningrad State University, which is in Leningrad, of course, but Leningrad is now referred to by its older name St. Petersburg. Our dorms were on Vasilevsky Island, right next to the beach that looked out onto the Gulf of Finland. We were only a few blocks away from a big hotel called the Pribaltiskaya where I would go every night to get dinner from one of the many “bufets” on almost every floor of the place. They would take rubles and even at the government rate at the time (which was much worse than the black market rate), you could get a good meal for next to nothing. It was much better in any case than going to the cafeteria at our dorm where you had no idea what exactly it was you were eating! The holy grail at the Pribaltiskaya was getting into one of the restaurants and getting actual restaurant meal items like roast chicken, blini, etc. But this was next to impossible it seemed. They only wanted to serve guests at the hotel, and we were only able to trick or cajole them a few times during our stay. Of course people who weren’t guests were not supposed to be in the hotel at all, and often some of my friends would get asked to leave as soon as they came in. For some reason I was usually allowed to come in without any hassles but I think I did a good job of looking like a dumb tourist so they just assumed I was a guest.

Aside from Leningrad, we went a few other places in Russia proper. We went to some outlying areas of Leningrad which I can’t remember exactly now, but they were sites of royal homes of various tzars. We also took a trip to Pushkin and Pskov to visit some very old churches. Actually, this turned out to be so much of a theme of our trips outside of Leningrad that we all proclaimed we never wanted to see a church again! Finally, we went to Moscow. Once we went with our entire group and another time I went on a type of weekend excursion that a few of us had designed and repeated a number of times to different locations. Basically we would get on a really late train and get a sleeper car and sleep on our way to Moscow (or wherever). We’d spend the next day at our destination and then do the same thing going back. Thus we never needed to arrange sleeping accommodations. Hey, we were in college! I don’t think I could do that sort of thing now! I remember once we even decided to play hookie and took off on Tuesday night and returned the following night!

They had just started opening some western places when we were over there and we of course had to take advantage of the McDonalds where everything was sold in Rubles. If we were able to exchange dollars for rubles on the black market, we could basically get everything on the menu combined for a couple of dollars! Generally food was cheap there at the time, although it was hard to find quality unless one went to one of the farmers markets where people were selling produce that you might want to eat. If you went into a “grocery store” one tended to just lose one’s appetite, either that or you just didn’t see much of anything on the shelves. We did go once a week to the top of the Pribaltiskaya where they had a foreign currency bar and we’d buy draft beers for $5 and feel like we were throwing our money away since that could have been a week’s worth of dinners bought with rubles! But I think the most expensive “meal” I had while I was there was in Moscow at a place where they served about 15 different dishes at least, banquet style. This extravagent meal came to all of $2.50. I know this is no longer the case in Russia or Eastern Europe. Westernization has brought a much greater leveling of the currencies. Still it was nice to feel “rich” for once in my life…

The only regret I have about the program is this. One of the stated goals of the program is to immerse you in a foreign culture. With this aim, there was a rule that you weren’t supposed to speak English to your classmates with the possible exception of in your dorm room. I tried to obey this rule and even as others spoke to me in English I would still speak Russian, but after a while this became absurd. It was either speak English or cut myself off even more from the people I had much of any chance of becoming friends with in this foreign place. Because of this, my Russian proficiency during this period may have improved slightly, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I met people I still call my friends on this program and yet sometimes I wonder how much deeper of an experience I would have had if I had done a home-stay and really was not able to speak English with anyone.

Addendum: Siberia! Sorry, somehow I completely forgot about this one! In the middle of our stay I, along with my two American roommates (Jason Pontius and Bill Reichert) and one Russian roommate (Igor Savelev) travelled to Syktyvkar which was in the Komi Autonomous Republic of Siberia. I’m not sure if Komi still exists in any kind of administrative way anymore. It was a cute town, but the only thing I remember doing is getting shuttled back and forth between Igor’s Parents’ Apartment (that’s where he is from) and his Wife Sveta’s Parents’ Apartment. We just kept getting fed all this great food wherever we went, but after a while it almost got to be too much! Thankfully we did actually make it out cross-country skiing at one point which was great exercise and fun, and probably burned of half of what we ate. It was a very memorable part of my trip even though it was just a weekend. Thank you Igor and Sveta wherever you are (unfortunately I’ve lost touch with them)…

Ok, I am shamelessly putting a link on my site for people to sign up for a credit card! I can’t believe it! But I will at least give you some honest opinions and stories behind my relationship with Amazon.com.

I started buying stuff from Amazon.com way back. Maybe it was 1996? I’ve almost always had a great experience. Almost always an item comes before I expect it. The only times this doesn’t happen is when I’ve requested the free shipping for larger purchases which seems to take an inordinate amount of time. Amazon is one of our wedding registry vendors because they partner with The I Do Foundation, which passes on part of the profit for an item to a charity of your choice. In terms of customer support, they have generally been good, but you have to know the trick of how to get hold of them by phone. I suppose you can communicate via email, but that is always prone to delay and miscommunication. They used to have their phone number printed on their pages, but it isn’t there anymore perhaps because the call volume was so high and the salaries they had to pay all the reps to keep up with it was too much as they were trying to attain overall profitability. Just call 1-800-555-1212 (that’s 800 information) and ask for Amazon.com’s number, and you will get right through.

As far as this credit card, I can’t vouch too much for it because I don’t have it myself. However, my brother-in-law and sister have had an Amazon.com credit card for many years and haven’t seemed to have any problems with it. Like many other cards, they are offering you a bonus with this one, being credit towards purchases. Since they sell a huge variety of stuff, this seems to be pretty safe. Obviously this won’t get you free miles for a flight somewhere or money towards a car or free gas, etc., but there are plenty of things to pick from. It also seems that if you use it to purchase things from Amazon.com itself, you earn 3 times the number of “points” that you would otherwise.

I still will not put something like this as a permanent “ad” on my left or right banner, or on my top banner. I want to keep this sight generally free of ads like this at least for now. This site is mainly for talking about stuff that’s on my mind and hopefully of interest to some of you out there, so I don’t think ads are really that appropriate. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a little bit of income generated from the site to help me pay for the hosting fees. Let me know what you think. Is this really uncouth, or what?

Hopefully this is the last you’ll hear of such things for a long time. And now we return you to your regularly scheduled program…

This book on the beginnings of modern Geology centers around Niels Stenson (A.K.A. Nicolas Stenonis, or Steno for short), a Danish scientist who uncovered for the first time the phenomenon of stratification. The book covers his life and in doing so showcases a who’s who of other scientists and philosophers of Steno’s time, many of whom he had personal dealings with.

Seashells had been found on mountaintops for as long as people could remember and the explanations ranged from spontaneous generation to the aftermath of Noah’s flood. Steno used the phenomenon and his sharp scientific mind to uncover truths about natural processes when many of the other scientists around him were asserting preposterous claims not backed up by anything. In fact, so much of science was subjective and affected by religious scripture back in Steno’s time (late 17th Century) that it can hardly be compared to science of today.

An interesting insight laid out in the book is that science and scientists were actually promoted and supported by the church! This seems impossible with all the conflict between the two in subsequent centuries, but the Church was out to combat the threat of “Atheists.” An atheist at that time wasn’t just someone who didn’t believe in God, but rather someone that thought that the universe was random. That there were no real laws (moral OR natural) and so people could really do whatever they wanted to. The Church was out to help science prove that there were natural laws and that the universe had order and pattern. However, there was still an adherence to scripture, and especially with the protestant religion to a very literal interpretation of scripture. So scientists were constantly compelled to shape their theories in order to back up biblical passages about genesis, the flood, and anything else. So while this burgeoning idea of experimentation and observation was distilling to the surface, at the same time the conclusions made were often leaps.

This is what made Steno such a special and ironic character. His demeanor and his objectivity as a scientist were unquestionable, even if these did not equate with scripture. Yet he was in the midst throughout much of his life of his own spiritual dilemma. He eventually converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism and then became a priest, renouncing science and devoting the rest of his life to religion. Despite this he never renounced his earlier discoveries that seemed to contradict much of the current orthodoxy.

The audiobook I listened to through Audible.com was unabridged and the narration was a bit on the dry side at times, but the subject matter was so interesting that this was not going to get in the way. The abridged audiotapes or CD are narrated by someone else so may be better in this respect.

Finally a convergence device to get excited about!

Those who have read previous entries should remember the frustrating quest to find a device that is both a phone and has wifi. And although this isn’t actually the announcement of a new product (that would be too easy!), Texas Instruments has come out with a “concept” or “reference design” of a Pocket PC with a GSM/GPRS Cellphone capability, Wifi (wireless networking), and bluetooth. The device is named Wanda for “Wireless Any Network Digital Assistant.” They are trying to get other companies to build this and incorporate with it their specifications and one of their chips. Let’s hope that a bunch take the call and maybe we will have something by the holidays?

Thanks to Gizmodo for the heads up!

Here’s another article from Pocket PC Magazine.

I forgot about this trip to The Bahamas, which was really my first to another country, possibly because I always thought of these islands as a colony or protectorate or something. As it turns out they were actually given their independence from the UK back in 1973, only about 6 years before I visited Nassau.

When I was 10 or 11, my mom was working as a copywriter for an advertising agency - I think it was Leber Katz. They had just gotten a new account with Holland American Cruise Lines and everyone in the agency had a chance to get a highly discounted fare on one of their cruises. My mom jumped at the chance. It was my first time on a cruise and so far the only one.

We went in April and it was pretty cold and overcast almost the whole way down from New York City to the Bahamas. The second or third day we were there I came down with a bad cold and had to miss out on the big luwow on the beach. I subsequently spent most of the rest of the cruise in our cabin, and also missed out on the big finale dinner on the ship, although I remember my mom bringing back some baked Alaska and lobster.

Of Nassau I don’t remember much. I think we took a small excursion one day in a glass-bottom boat to a smaller island off of Nassau called “Fantasy Island” although we didn’t meet Tattoo or Mr. Roark. We did have a meal at a place along the beach and hung out on one of the beaches. I also remember lots of people selling trinkets and that we bought a few of these, including some necklaces and straw hats.

I don’t think Nassau had a big impression on me at the time. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t really remember being all that impressed. After all, we did not really go into the town, try to meet or talk to natives, etc. We just hung out at the tourist spots, and to boot I was only there on that one day I think.

I have a confession to make. I am a horrible speller! I have tried to counteract that with the handy spell-checker, but I was seduced into using a spell checker for Internet Explorer that I thought worked. It does indeed show you spelling errors and let you correct them, but what I found out just today was that it doesn’t actually change the text when you submit it! So please except my apologies for all the horribly spelled blog entries up until now. I will try to now go into Word and check the spelling before I submit something…

I’ve been a science fiction fan for a long time, but also since I’m a slow reader I’ve not read the scores of books described by this genre as one might think. My favorite author is probably Philip K. Dick, although even here I’ve only read four of his novels.

Brave New World is one of those early precursors that some classify as science fiction and others as one of the classic dystopias that also include Orwell’s 1984 and Zamyatin’s We. Having read these other two, I thought I would finally read Brave New World, which I have been meaning to for quite some time. Unfortunately I don’t remember a lot about We, so I can’t really compare it to Brave New World, but 1984 does strike me as being quite different! In Brave New World, we encounter a future that is uncomfortable in many ways, but then again, not altogether horrible. Yes, it carries with it the ideals of happiness above all else, creates a rigid sociological stratification by prenatal and neonatal conditioning, encourages the use of happy pills, etc. On the other hand it seems that if someone is truly “outside the system” all one needs to do is make a ruckus and they will get sent to an island with other “individualists” where they can really explore this antiquated mode of existence. The one case where this fails seems to simply be the arbitrary decision of a bureaucrat, not a hard and fast rule.

Although it’s obvious Huxley is warning against totalitarian/socialistic mechanisms and materialism at the same time, one can also argue that he is not arguing for the “opposite” “savage” mindset of religion, valuing work, denial, and suffering over anything that feels good, etc. In many ways he seems to be arguing simply for moderation between the two and not using either as a dogma, since when taken to the extreme, both can have pretty horrible consequences…

Otherwise, I thought the book quite entertaining. Huxley throws in many cute, campy little phrases that are actually ones that have been drilled into the population in their sleep. Although some of the language and situations sound a bit old, many others are quite forward-looking, including the “feelies” where people go to watch, but also “feel” movies.

I actually listened to an unabridged version through my Audible.com account, but you can actually get the same version on cassette. Michael York narrates and does a great job of capturing all the accents, the emotions (be the real or induced), etc.