You know you're a geek when...
You know you're a geek when you wake up at night thinking about cryptography. I've been reading Simon Singh's Code Book. The book describes in detail how cryptography has evolved over the ages. For example - Julius Caesar himself used to use a simple form of encryption. In the cipher alphabet, each letter would be shifted a number of spaces to the right (see below).
normal alphabet: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q ...
cipher alphabet: y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o ...
So the word “hello“ would become “fcjjm“. This became known as the Caesar Cipher. Ovbiously this was a very easy one to break as it only had 26 possible cipher alphabets.
The Code Book is an excellent read. I blame this new-found interest in cryptography on The Da Vinci Code.