Somehow, the Gray Monk has managed to weave Terry Pratchett’s Nac Mac Feegle into an essay on political correctness, learning styles, and the value of learning by rote. He begins with some choice quotes from A Hat Full of Sky.

Some time ago someone left a rude comment to one of my posts, asking the
question (at rather more length) of how an apparently rational person like
me can believe in all this Christian nonsense. I was in a bad mood at
the time, and merely pointed out his comment as an example of how not to
win friends and influence people. Still, it seems to me that he deserves
a real answer, not just an ill-tempered grimace.

The short answer is that by the grace of God I cannot do other than
believe.

I don’t expect any non-believers in my audience to find this answer
terribly helpful, but nonetheless it’s true.

Here’s the long answer.

The first point is that (from an intellectual point of view) Christianity
isn’t nonsense, but rather a belief-system capable of being rationally
defended. Indeed, it was St. Thomas Aquinas’ view (so I am given to
understand) that the propositions of the Christian faith are susceptible
to rigorous logical proof–with the minor problem that the details are so
lengthy and intricate that few men or women will ever have the time (or
make the effort) to follow them. I mention to this say that this most
certainly isn’t the way I came to belief in Christ.

However, even without going to such lengths, I still claim that it is
rational to believe in Christ. Indeed, what’s the basis for claiming
that it’s irrational? There’s only one, and that’s materialistic
atheism–the claim, in short, that only the natural exists; any
belief in the supernatural is nothing more than superstition.

Abler writers than myself have disposed of this; I can recommend
C.S. Lewis,
especially Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy (Lewis,
I may say, is the clearest thinker I’ve had the pleasure to read.), as
well as G.K.
Chesterton, particularly Orthodoxy and The Everlasting
Man.

And the point is this: the claim that the supernatural does not and
cannot exist is a statement of faith, not a scientific truth. It is,
in fact, the statement that nothing contrary to the Laws of Nature has
ever been manifest in the universe, from the beginning of time until
now. Can you see the flaw? The Laws of Nature are taken as a given,
as an immutable fact, when in fact our knowledge of them changes
with each advancement of science. As I say, it’s a statement of faith; and
interestingly, it’s a faith that affirms, a priori, that any
counter-examples can be discounted without investigation.

On the other hand, just because I accept that supernatural events might
in fact occur, and believe that they have occurred in the past, it
doesn’t necessarily follow that I’ve jettisoned my critical faculties
altogether, or that I’m a credulous fool who believes six impossible
things before breakfast. My worldview takes in things that the
scientistic (note–not scientific, but scientistic)
worldview does not, but I still don’t believe things without reason.

So what’s my reason? Why do I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
the crucified and resurrected and living messiah?

The answer is simple. I’ve met him. I no more need proofs that Jesus
exists than I need proofs that my wife Jane exists.

I grew up Roman Catholic, and so I was first introduced to Jesus at an
early age. But you know how it is when you’re little and you meet your
parent’s friends. No matter how often you see them, you never really
know them. And then, by the time I was a senior in High School, God had
begun to seem like a really bad idea–a nuisance, an inconvenience, a bad
excuse for living with everlasting guilt. I decided that I was, if not an
outright atheist, at least an agnostic. I didn’t want to know God. I
didn’t want there to be a God. I wanted there not to be a God.

Baldy put, my disbelief had nothing to do with any intellectual or
rational process, but only with a desire to avoid the consequences of
God’s existence. Which is rather pathetic, when you come to think about
it.

Anyway, the change came shortly after Christmas during my senior year of
high school. I attended a Christian rock concert–a friend, likewise agnostic,
had been invited by yet another friend, who was a Christian; the first
friend wanted company and invited me. I wasn’t especially interested, but
I was bored and it was something to do. And during the evening I was
asked, as part of the present company, to make a decision for or against
Christ.

Really, you can’t be too careful. Lack of faith has to be nurtured
lovingly, or the incalculable may happen.

For that’s when I heard the Lord speaking to me. I don’t mean that I
heard actual spoken words; it was very much in the stillness of my head.
And it didn’t really come in the form of words; it was more of an
impression. More, as Chesterton would say, of a Presence. But the
message came through clearly:

Will, you know perfectly well I’m here. Are you going to acknowledge me,
or are you going to live in denial for the rest of your life?

And the plain truth is that that still small voice was correct. Whatever I
might tell myself, and whatever the desires of my heart, I did know. And
I felt I was really being given a choice–if I elected to live in denial,
God would honor that decision. Or I could acknowledge him, and accept
the consequences.

I have no way of knowing what would have happened if I had chosen to
reject God that night. I expect that I would have persisted in my denial,
and I further expect that at best I’d have turned into a mordant,
sarcastic, bitter, sorry excuse for a human being. I’m sure that I’d
have come to hate Christianity with a passion; that, after all, would be
the human thing to do.

God be thanked, I didn’t go that way. Instead, I admitted to myself that
God exists, and that he is Lord–that is, that he has a claim on me.
That his opinion matters. And that was the first step. That was the
beginning of my knowledge of God. It was a small step–there was so much
I didn’t understand–but an essential one.

Since then, my friendship with God has had its share of ups and downs.
I’ve had bleak depressions, and upon occasion I’ve had “Jordan
moments”, times when Jesus was so present to me it was as though he were
sitting next to me. And now I know him…I won’t say “well”, but
certainly much better than I did on that long ago night. And no matter
how bleak my mood or enormous my doubts, there’s one thing I’ve always
been sure of. No matter how unlikely it seems at times, I know that God
is there. He told me so himself.

He’ll tell you the same, if you ask him.

Now this book is a genuine oddity–it’s a Jeeves novel without Bertie
Wooster. Nor is Bertie’s absence the only anomaly.

In general, Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves live in a world on which
the passing years leave no mark. This novel, on the other hand, is firmly
set in a time after World War II in which, thanks to punitive taxation
and other social legislation, the stately country became a larger than
usual albatross about the neck of its owners–and in which, consequently,
the landed gentry have all had to seek employment. Sir Roderick
Carmoyle, for example, is a floorwalker at Harrige’s department store,
and our hero, Lord Rowcester (pronounced “Roaster”), has embarked on
a career as a Silver Ring bookie, taking bets on horses.

This might seem an odd occupation for one of England’s younger earls, but
it is easily explained. It seems that, thanks to the winds of change
blowing so strongly through England’s mighty oaks, Bertie has decided
that he must learn to fend for himself, just in case, you understand,
and so has taken himself off to a boarding school dedicated to teaching
upper-class drones how to darn socks and fry an egg. This has left
Jeeves at a loose end, and to fill in the time he has taken service with
Lord Rowcester. It was at his suggestion that Lord Rowcester has taken
up his new trade, having gone through the classified section of the
telephone book from A to R without finding anything for which he was
suited and then stumbling upon Silver Ring in the S’s.

Because Bertie’s absent, we don’t get his usual first person narration;
instead, the book is told in third-person. And if I’m not mistaken, that
makes this the only book in which we see Jeeves from a relatively
objective point of view, rather than filtered through another’s eyes.
Jeeves remains himself, of course; yet he seems a little freer with the
literary quotations, and perhaps a little more likely to take liberties
than when he’s with Bertie.

There’s one Jeeves and Wooster short story told from Jeeves’ point of
view, in which it becomes clear that Jeeves’ entire aim is to make sure
that Bertie never dispenses with him (or marries anyone who would force
Bertie to do so); for he’d have the dickens of a time trying to find
anyone so easily managed as Bertie. Jeeves comes off as rather
cold-blooded, really. And I think something of the same is going on
here. I don’t think that Jeeves is really working for Lord Rowcester,
however much he’s paid and however satisfactory his service is. I think
he’s just having fun seeing how much he can get away with.

Well, anyway, it’s a fun book; if perhaps not one of Wodehouse’ best,
it’s still much better than Much Obliged, Jeeves.

When I got home from work today and tried to download my e-mail, I couldn’t get through to the e-mail server. Well, I thought, that’s interesting.

I think I’ve figured out the problem.

The protocol used to access the Internet over DSL is something called “PPPoE”, or “PPP over Ethernet”, whatever that means. The DSL Modem we got from Earthlink has a “PPPoE” light on it; and it tries to do the PPPoE login and connection all by itself. On the other hand, our Airport Base Station also understands PPPoE, and when I configured things on Friday I ended up telling it to do the PPPoE login.

I think what happened today is that the Airport Base Station dropped the connection (why, I don’t know) and the DSL Modem picked it up. And since the Base Station was expecting to talk PPPoE to the Modem, and the Modem was expecting normal Internet traffic from the Base Station, nothing worked. At least, the PPPoE light was lit up on the DSL Modem when I checked, and when I told the Base Station just to use normal Ethernet to connect to the Internet everything started working again.

So I’ve left it that way for the timing being; we’ll see how things go.

This did not, in fact, take place at our house…but it could have.

When I first learned to program, back in those Halcyon days of yore, the language I learned to program in was BASIC — the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The year, if I recall correctly, was 1977, and my dad had built a microcomputer from a kit. It was a big black box with a couple of switches on the front, a dumb terminal, and a paper tape reader/punch for program storage.

BASIC has changed since then; it’s acquired fancy control structures and data types and block structure and long variable names and all kinds of stuff, but back then it was a really simple language. And the joy of it, at first, wasn’t that we were writing complicated programs; it was that we were writing down our wishes, and the computer was carrying them out! I still remember the thrill I got from writing programs like this:

100 PRINT "THIS IS AN ENDLESS LOOP!"
200 GOTO 100

and

100 FOR I = 1 to 100
200 PRINT "WILL IS GREAT!"
300 NEXT I

Both programming and programming languages have gotten more complicated since then; most application programming these days involves writing GUI applications, and that’s nothing I’d want to try to teach my seven-year-old. On the other hand, programming requires clear, logical thinking, and that’s a skill I want to teach my seven-year-old as early as possible. And while I wouldn’t want to teach my kid C or Java or even my beloved Tcl, there’s always good, old, classic BASIC.

So I did a little web search and found a program called NBASIC that runs on our kid’s computer; it emulates the kind of old-fashioned BASIC that used to come built-in to microcomputers like the Apple ][ and the early IBM PCs. I installed it, and then sat Dave down next to me, and started showing him things. You never forget to ride a bicycle, and evidently you never forget your first programming language, either, because in just a little while we’d written a simple program that picks a random letter and then makes you guess it. If you guess the wrong letter, it tells you whether the letter you picked comes before or after the computer’s letter in the alphabet, and lets you guess again. And that’s it.

And David was as happy as a pig in slop playing this simple little game for about half-an-hour. Old-fashioned BASIC might not have a lot of glamour, but I think it’s got a little more mileage left in it.

A couple of folks have responded to my last DSL post with comments about how archaic their communications hardware is; one of them said,

bah, in my day, i had to pick-up a handset, dial a number and utter screeching sounds into it: “psheeeeewwwweeeeeeeschrreeeeeeee bzoooiiiing bzoooiiiiiinnng schreeeeeeeee”.

I never had to use an acoustic coupler modem myself, but my first computer came with a 300 bps modem. Three-Zero-Zero, 300.

The computer was a Kaypro 4+88, which cost me $2495 IIRC. It was a Z80-based 8-bit machine which ran CP/M-80. It had dual 5.25″ floppy drives, a monitor with green letters, a VT-100 style keyboard (very nice feel to it, as I recall) and it all came in a package the size of a suitcase that you could carry around with you if you didn’t mind your arms lengthening by an inch or so each time. It had 64K of memory, plus a daughterboard with an 8088 chip and 256K of memory that you could run MS-DOS on; that was the “+88” in the name. The only MS-DOS software that came with it, though, was dBase II (anybody else remember dBase II?), and this particular version of dBase II was too buggy to use. On the other hand, the 256K of RAM on the daughterboard could be used as a RAM disk (anybody else remember RAM disks?); I used that all the time–I had my WordStar disk set up to copy WordStar and its overlay files to the RAM disk automatically for me, which made WordStar run ever so much faster. (Anybody else remember WordStar? Or overlay files?)

This was back in 1984, and a 300 bps modem was not too quick even then. I shortly went out and spent $750 on a new external modem, and was in heaven. It was a Hayes 1200bps SmartModem, and it was Four Times Faster than the internal modem! Wow!

IIRC, the last time I actually went out and bought a modem it was a 28.8K Zoom modem that cost me less than $100. That was (I’m guessing) about 8 years ago; let’s call it 1996.

And the DSL modem I got from Earthlink? It didn’t cost me a penny on its own; it’s rolled into the monthly service fee, and if I cancel I get to keep it. I’m not sure how much faster it is, but it’s a lot.

That’s some progression, that is.

This is Pratchett’s latest juvenile and his latest Discworld book;
it’s also the sequel to The Wee Free Men, which I reviewed
last
month.

I read it aloud to Jane, and we both loved it.

The Wee Free Men introduced us to a young girl named Tiffany
Aching. She lives on a sheep farm in the Chalk country, and is in charge
of the dairy. She’s also a budding witch, which in the Discworld is a
sort of combination of country doctor, clinical psychologist, and
defender of the neighborhood from evil forces. She first assumes her
role as defender of the neighborhood when she clobbers a nasty monster
from Faerie with a cast iron skillet, having first staked out her little
brother as bait. (Witches are not generally particularly sentimental, but
they get the job done.) Later she has to rescue her little brother from
the Queen of Faerie, which she does with the help of the Nac Mac Feegle,
the Wee Free Men of the title.

The Nac Mac Feegle are fairies of a sort; at least, they lived in Faerie
until the Queen cast them out for being drunk and disorderly. They are
about six inches tall, are tattooed a vivid blue color, have red hair
with a variety of objects plaited into it, and wear kilts. Some call
them “pictsies” (a name I wish I’d thought of, darn it! though I doubt
I’d have made a quarter as good a use of it if I had). The only
thing that makes them happier than drinking is fighting–which, as they
are immensely strong and nearly indestructible, they are exceedingly good
at. And they are very fond of Tiffany, who they call their “Big wee hag.”

At the conclusion of [btitle “The Wee Free Men”] Tiffany meets Granny
Weatherwax, one of our favorite Pratchett characters, who is clearly very
impressed–not that it’s obvious to Tiffany. As there are no other
witches in the vicinity, Granny tells her that she’ll need to leave home
for a while to train, if she’s to develop her skills.

[btitle “A Hat Full Of Sky”] begins a couple of years later, just as
Tiffany is leaving home. She’s going to spend a year apprenticed to
a witch named Miss Level, learning what being a witch is all about.
Unfortunately, there’s a strange creature called a “hiver” that’s
determined to make things deadly difficult for her….

There’s so much about the book that I like. The Feegles are a delightful
creation; I particularly enjoyed watching a drunk Feegle get into a brawl
with one of Miss Level’s ceramic garden gnomes (the Feegle won). We get
to see another side of Granny Weatherwax, which is neat. But my favorite
part is probably the Witch Trials. You know, the Witch Trials? They
hold them every year. All of the witches get together and have a
competition to see who can do the neatest stuff. You know, like sheepdog
trials.

Anyway, if you’ve not encountered the Discworld, you’ve been missing out.
And if you’re a fan but have not seen these particular books, check out the Young
Adult section; they are well worth it. Order them if you have to.

As of thirty minutes ago, we are up and running on our wireless network using Earthlink DSL as our internet connection. I have to say, getting the DSL modem to work with our Airport wireless base station was tough. Really tough. Really, amazingly, incredibly tough.

I had to plug the DSL modem into the wall. The horror!

I had to connect the DSL modem to the phone line. Gosh!

I had to connect the DSL modem to the Airport base station. Oh the humanity!

I had to disconnect the DSL modem from the wrong port on the Airport base station and reconnect it to the right port. Oh the stupidity!

I had to disconnect the DSL modem from the wrong phone line and reconnect it to the right phone line. Oh the absurdity!

I had to tell the Airport base station to connect to the Internet via PPPoE instead of dial up. Oh the pretty interface!

After that, it all just worked. The two mis-steps cost me about five minutes; hiding all of the cables and putting the furniture back where it was before I started took longer.

And it’s a lot faster, too.

Set up was pretty easy. I plugged the modem into the wall, connected it to a phone jack, connected it to my laptop using the included ethernet cable, and turned it on. A few minutes later it agreed to talk to me; I told it who I was; it connected up to Earthlink’s net; and here I am!

Unfortunately, I can’t leave the modem on my desk–got to get it hooked up to my wireless router. But that’s a problem for another day.