I should know that any book that compares fundamentalist Islam to Nazism twice in the first half of the book is going to be a bit of a knee-jerk, flag-waving, post-9/11, pro-American piece of thriller fluff. That being said, The Last Patriot wasn’t the worst piece of knee-jerk, flag-waving, post-9/11, pro-American piece of thriller fluff that I’ve ever read: the plot was pretty interesting, I learned some things about Thomas Jefferson and the pirates of the Barbary coast, and the action kept moving along at a brisk pace. You can be sure that there’s a movie in the offing for this, and I actually think that it will make a much better movie than the book, with the help of a good screenwriter who can turn the crudely-drawn caricatures into proper characters (everyone who liked dogs, for example, was a “good person”; I’m fully expecting that the final print version came out with a picture of the author with his pet poodle, Fluffy).

The basic premise of the book is that the prophet Mohammed made a last revelation that could radically change the nature of Islam, then was killed shortly afterwards to hush it up. Thomas Jefferson, while still the US Minister to France, started to uncover some of this secret, then some present-day researchers get close to the secret and start getting bumped off. It’s an interesting story, and one reviewer called it the “Da Vinci Code of Islam” for the way that it purports to reveal secrets about a powerful religion that would greatly impact that religion and its followers.

However, I think that the author may be taking himself a bit too seriously: in an interview with the author just before the book was released, he claimed to be receiving death threats, and stated:

There has been a plot afoot that was set in motion by the Muslim Brotherhood in this country [the US] to undermine the United States and to basically destroy the Constitution and replace our democracy — as crazy and far-fetched as it sounds — with Sharia law.

Crazy and far-fetched? Yup. Worth reading? It’s okay, but you might want to wait for the movie.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US. You can find the author’s website here.

Update: I have no interest in discussing religion or US politics on this site; this was just a book review. I’ve closed comments on this post to avoid having others use this as a place to promote their religious or political views. Feel free to express those views, just not on my site.

The one good thing about Rogers Wireless’ really shitty customer service is that waiting on hold gives me time to take snapshots of their non-functioning website — the reason that I’m waiting on hold in the first place — and blog about it:

I’ve been trying to change my price plan online for 3 days now, and keep getting the above error. After 20 minutes on hold, I got through to a CSR who changed my plan, but think about what that costs them in terms of that person’s time, not to mention the ill will from me because I couldn’t do this on the website?

I’ve moved to a month-to-month plan now that my contract is up, and will be waiting for the new GSM entrants into the Canadian wireless market in the spring to see if there’s one who can provide the wireless service that I want and have a decent self-service website.

You may have noticed (if you don’t read this via RSS) that I’m playing around with a new theme on this blog — I decided that it needed something a bit more colourful and whimsical. This is a free WordPress theme called Notepad Chaos from Smashing Magazine. No widget support, and I had to dick around a bit to get the About and Archives links working properly, but otherwise seems to be working.

Are you an artist creating something for Nuit Blanche, but not on the official program? Rannie saw this posting calling for information about unofficial Nuit Blanche participants, with the aim to create a “program for the renegade installations”:

The contact email, difficult to read on the photo, appears to be stephanievonawesome (at) gmail.com

Today, we walked to the farmers’ market at Nathan Philips Square, the first time that I’ve visited the Wednesday market this year. As far as I know, you’re buying directly from the farmers here, or at least their Toronto agents, and everything is very fresh: I’m sure that corn was picked this morning.

The first purchase was two bunches of the largest radishes that I’ve ever seen: I’ve eaten apples that were smaller than these. The greens on the top are very fresh, and I plan to saute them with a little garlic for dinner tonight. The same stall had both green and yellow beans, so I bought a small basket of the yellow ones, although not sure quite what I’ll do with them yet, besides eating them raw.

Next was the cheese stall, which boasted only Ontario cheeses, including cow, goat and sheep’s milk varieties. I chatted with the proprietor about Fifth Town Artisan Cheese, the new goat cheese-making facility in Prince Edward County, and ended up with a small slice each of Vigaroso, a pecorino-style sheep’s cheese washed in Baco Noir, and Tomme de Gaston, a country-style cheese made of raw sheep’s milk. While I was chatting and making my selection, Damir wandered to the next stall and bought a bag of freshly roasted unsalted peanuts in the shell; many of the tobacco farms of southwestern Ontario converted to peanuts when tobacco sales became less lucrative.

We continued on, buying field tomatoes, red and yellow peppers, and peaches-and-cream corn on the cob until our two canvas bags were full, then walked home through the garden at Osgoode Hall and along Queen Street, eating peanuts from the shell as we walked.

After stopping in the front garden of our condo to pick fresh basil, I made a salad of sliced tomatoes, basil and a bit of the crumbled Vigaroso cheese dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and lightly cooked the corn. With the exception of the oil and the vinegar, both of which are from Italy, our entire meal was produced in Ontario. At this time of year, it’s easy to eat really well from local producers. Three months from now, that won’t be the case, so enjoy it while the summer’s still here.

Since I travel a lot on business, it’s not unusual for me to end up eating alone in a restaurant. I usually pick a higher-end place with an interesting menu and wine list, order good food, drink expensive wine, read a book or browse the web on a mobile device, and tip well when I pay the bill. However, I’m a strong believer in tipping for service, and I likely help to propagate the folklore of the low-tipping lone diner when I’m not treated well.

Recently I was in Boston, and had an extraordinary example of how not to treat a woman (or man) dining alone. I had a night free — or rather, opted not to attend the conference dinner event — and walked down to the Legal Test Kitchen, which is part of the Legal Seafoods chain. The menu on their website looked good, and their site said that they had wifi, which was doubly good for playing around on my iPod Touch.

It was a Tuesday night, so they were a bit busy but not overly so, and there was a free table immediately available. So far so good, until I had to wait 15 minutes for the waiter to take my drink order. I ordered a glass of one of the most expensive wines on their list (still reasonably priced), and asked the waiter about the wifi since I couldn’t find an open node. He didn’t know, but promised to find out. A long wait for my glass of wine, then I ordered the most expensive dish on the menu, a lobster Pad Thai, in part on the recommendation of the waiter who claimed that it was his “favorite dish”. No wifi information was forthcoming, and when a different waiter dropped off my food, I didn’t even get a chance to order a refill for my now-empty glass. The Pad Thai was okay, not great, and I really missed that second glass of wine. My original waiter came back when I had finished and asked if I wanted another glass of wine (um, a bit late for that, buddy), then asked if I still wanted that wifi information (ditto).

All in all, I felt ignored, and am unlikely to go there again. This may be an issue of a single diner, since the larger tables around me seemed to be getting fairly good service, although not from the same waiter — mine seemed to just disappear off the face of the earth for a long period of time, that being the time when I wanted another drink and the wifi information. I probably should have complained, or flagged down enough other passing waitstaff that one of them would have reminded mine that he had a customer here, but was feeling too lazy and non-confrontational to make a scene.

I tipped a standard 15%, feeling that I should have reduced it due to the bad service, but the bill amount was small enough that the difference may not have been noticed anyway. I was left with the feeling that I’d really like to get a message out to waiters everywhere: consider that we’re not leaving a crappy tip because we’re cheap, we’re leaving a crappy tip for crappy service.

It’s not the nirvana of free airport wifi, but better than nothing: 15 minutes of free wifi via Boingo in the Toronto airport, which is enough time to sync your email in a pinch.

Living with an electrical engineer is always…interesting. I’m also an engineer, but my desire to tinker is more software-oriented than hardware, whereas Damir likes to build things. After our initial experiments with the HD TV antenna that we bought for $35, he started researching on the web, and ended up building three other HD antennae.

First up was actually the most expensive of the home-builds, since he bought heavy-gauge wire instead of using the coathangers suggested in the YouTube video that inspired it. It was mounted on a piece of Ikea shelving that we had lying around (if it had been the final version, we would have trimmed it back just to a single wooden stick), and consisted of the above-mentioned copper wire ($13), a TV matching transformer (needed on all the antennae to convert the signal to the coax connection to go to the TV, $1) and some screws for that shelving that we already had. With no amplification, it worked as well as the commercial one that is amplified, although we couldn’t find the sweet spot that allowed us to get all 7 HD channels — or at least the 5 that we care about — without moving it around. Also, it could have put out someone’s eye.

That night, he took his copy of the ARRL handbook to bed to brush up on his antenna theory.

The next model, a discone model, never made it past the early prototype stage. Shown here is the cone part (he was still working on the disc part), which would have been covered with aluminum foil. He later found this to not be the right type anyway, but he had fun making (and wearing) the cones.

More research ensued.

The 3rd version, a.k.a. HD antenna 4.0, is what we’re sticking with for now. It’s made of two sections cut from aluminum foil (yes, the type from the kitchen) taped to an old wooden ruler. The sections are connected on one side by a 390 ohm resistor (4 for $0.25), and on the other by the TV matching transformer. You can see a close-up of the construction in an earlier phase when he was trying it out on a larger board here; he calculated the exact size of the foil pieces from his antenna theory textbook. Technically, it’s a T2FD antenna.

The antenna-on-a-ruler is attached with 2-sided sticky pads to an old wooden salad server, then mounted on an unused tripod to allow us to easily move it around to find the right spot.

With this configuration, we get the five main HD digital channels that we wanted without moving the antenna: CBC, CTV, CityTV, Global and Sun TV. We can also get Omni 1 and Omni 2 if we move it around, but we rarely watch those so aren’t concerned about it.

Keep in mind that we are less than 1km from the CN Tower, but are west of Spadina and face west, so we’re bouncing our signals off the surrounding buildings. When we tried our Philips antenna (the one that we bought) at a neighbour’s place that has a clear line of sight to the tower, it picked up 7 or 8 HD channels with no fiddling, and several VHF channels as well (since her TV used a single feed for both analog and digital tuners).

I’ve now cancelled our Rogers cable, which will take effect mid-August. The only remaining thing is to use the (currently unused) Philips antenna as a VHF antenna to pick up the lower-range analog channels and feed them to the DVR (which has no digital tuner) and then on to the TV via the HDMI connection — if we get any decent reception on VHF, that will allow us to watch and record those channels.

Okay, I don’t think that I’m going to do this very often, but I just have to prove that I can. Tonight, I downloaded the Internet Channel to my Wii (500 Wii points = $5), and I have a fully-functional Opera browser. So here I am in WordPress, typing a blog post on my Wii. I cheated a bit and am using a USB keyboard attached to the back — the thought of doing this one character at a time using the Wiimote was just too much for me.

It seems to enter carriage returns in this entry field okay, but links didn’t work when I entered the HTML code.

My first book to review from MiniBookExpo, and I picked a light “chick-lit” read to complement the summer weather: Stuck in Downward Dog. Chantel Simmons’ debut novel is a pleasant, humourous read about Mara Brennan, a mid-20’s woman who hits a rough patch — job, boyfriend, apartment, friends — and gets through it while learning something about herself and her friends.

There were a lot of things that I liked about this book. First of all the Toronto setting was used well, and there were great insider references, such as when Mara’s friend tried to pass off her new Mississauga location as “Port Credit” (an accurate place name, but to anyone who lives in the 416 area code, it’s all just undifferentiated suburban wilderness). I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a new boyfriend does not figure in her miraculous turnaround — in fact, Mara does it pretty much on her own, with a bit of help from her friends. There’s a nutritional epiphany about a healthy-sounding smoothie. There’s some great inner monologues of Mara’s thoughts during yoga class.

There were parts of the storyline that could have been improved. First, Mara spends 25 years getting herself into a complete disaster of a life, including the worst two months of it chronicled in the first part of the book, then manages to turn the entire thing around in 3 weeks. A bit unrealistic, considering that she comes off as a bit of a naive pushover. The two girlfriends were painted as cruel caricatures; if they were really such bitches, I can’t believe that Mara, pushover that she is, would have been best buds with them all this time. She refers to her size 10 body as if it were bordering on obese, which is not a great message to be sending to her target audience, even if they are pigging out on those calorie-laden smoothie.

In spite of its flaws, I found Stuck in Downward Dog to be a fun read with lots of laughs, and may even be inspirational to young women who are looking for the courage to find the right job, the right apartment and the right relationship with their friends.