Dumping Grounds

At long last, here’s a pic of the replacement for my little silver mini-car.

I managed to pick up an Airport Express for cheap at the Ultimate Electronics â??We can’t compete with Best Buyâ? celebration (also known as a going out of business in Texas sale, and I wanted to see how many of its cool little abilities I could get working. For the unfamiliar, the Airport Express can do all of the following:

• Act as a pretty capable router all by itself. If you have NOTHING but a cable modem or DSL, and want to share your internet connection wirelessly, the Airport Express will accomplish the trick for you. (Of course, your computers need to have wireless connections)
• It will extend an existing wireless network, acting as a signal repeater, and (theoretically) doubling your range.
• It will share a single USB printer to your entire network.
• It will hook to your home stereo, and allow you to route the output from your iTunes to either the computer or your stereo, with no additional hardware (except the cable from the Airport to the stereo itself)

I already have a wireless network, so I wanted to use all the capabilities except the first. There are a number of web pages dedicated to exactly how to do this, including the fact that you must patch the WRT54G with third party firmware in order to get it to support WDS (the range extending protocol). I’m not going to repeat their work here. You can see it for yourself at http://vafer.org/blog/tcurdt/archives/000184.html and http://ryanschwartz.net/2004/08/05/airtunes-airport-express-and-the-wrt54g.

It works pretty much like they describe, with one exception. My Airport Express would shut down DHCP requests on my network after it obtained an address, thereby preventing my computer from getting an address, and shutting down all internet access.

The solution is to have the Airport Express not request an address from the gateway, but simply assign itself one. (This may be a problem unique to Mac OS X 10.4, as the 10.4.1 update mentions some Airport Express related DHCP fixes. I’m on 10.4.1 now, but have not tested to see if I could turn the dynamic addressing back on, as I’m happy with the way it works now.) Once I assigned a static IP address, the light turned green and the Airport Express worked like a dream.

AirTunes also works well, although it is very sensitive to bad mp3 files. If you have an mp3 with clipping when the music gets loud, you may not hear it on 2 inch computer speakers, but you will if you have a pair of 2 foot tall floor speakers. I may need to rip some of my music again.

I have not yet tested to see if my USB printer can be shared (not all can) but for the price, I’m already impressed with the Airport Express.

But I finally posted all my pictures from the Jeep Jamboree at Palo Duro Canyon. You can get to them at http://www.dumpinggrounds.com/jamboree/. They are not fixed, retouched, edited or anything… just scaled down.

You see, I have been spending my evenings shopping for a Jeep. Yeah, I guess that means I had fun.

I’ll post a pic of the Jeep when I get one.

Not that it is unusual for me to not write for several days at a time, but I thought I would mention I am outta here for a few days.

I’m headed to the Jeep Jamboree in Palo Duro Canyon, and hopefully, I will come back with an assortment of good photographs. Or at least photographs. I shouldn’t put pressure on myself by pre-designating them â??good.â? I think I’ll be happy with no broken bones.

I have a neat story when I get back about destroying my router, then bringing it to life with a penny, of all things… how MacGuyver is that? Now I need to get some chewing gum and maybe a mechanical pencil in there, and it’ll be twice as fast.

Just this very morning, I finished Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card. This book represents the eighth (and unless Card finds himself desperately in need of money, final) story in what has commonly been called his â??Ender Sagaâ? but I think could more accurately be called the story of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon (not to be confused with the books of the same name in the story).

The series has been, even the biggest Card fan would have to admit, inconsistent. Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead each won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for outstanding science fiction, and well, the kindest thing we could do is not mention that Children of the Mind and Shadow Puppets ever happened.

I’ll end the suspense, and say that Shadow of the Giant is a fitting end to the series. It is far more comprehensible than the previous two â??Shadowâ? books, with their incredibly convoluted politics and â??cross, double-cross, and tripe-crossâ? interpersonal relationships. Unlike those volumes, events are tied in with the original â??Enderâ? storyline, and quite simply, the entire story makes sense. this was more than you could say for some of the recent outings with these characters.

The crowning achievement of Shadow of the Giant however, is precisely where 90% of novels fall apart. The ending. It is, in a word, perfect. It is satisfying, it fits, and the reader is not left confused, disoriented, disappointed, or wanting more. The story is finished.

There are a few small storylines that are left unwrapped, but none that I think should become their own novel. It is good to have a little think about, a little wonder… â??What do I think would have happened to…â? The very fact that not everything was wrapped in a tidy little package with a bow on top makes the ending seem more real. Real life does not come in a package, and the story never ends so neatly. Bad guys don’t always lose, good guys don’t always win, and they certainly cooperate to give storytellers a convenient â??ending.â? (Unless, of course, there’s a big fight and everyone dies… not usually a satisfying ending)

Card claims that the ending was reader-inspired, and he had the good sense to recognize an improvement when he heard one. This is not always a solid approach. Nelson Demille’s ending to Nightfall, inspired by a reader (his son) was nothing more than a convenient cop out to a writer who had written himself into a corner.

Unfortunately, unlike Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and even Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Giant is not a stand alone volume. I can’t imagine picking it up without reading the other â??Shadowâ? books first. And that would be a struggle after Ender’s Shadow. But if you are bound and determined to read all of the books in the series, rest assured that the payoff is worth it.

Oh, c’mon, admit it. You thought I had forgotten about this whole religion set of entries, didn’t you?

I was reading the â??Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israelâ? (yeah, just a little light reading for the evening, eh?) by Ronald Hendel. This wasn’t random, I took classes from Dr. Hendel while I was SMU, and the book was the expansion/revision of his PhD thesis. He compares different story traditions (both Biblical and not) and sees how there are similar themes, regardless of culture. Interesting book, probably very hard to locate. If you are actually interested, ask me nicely and I might loan you my copy. Virtually this entire entry is based upon Dr. Hendel’s work. If it’s insightful and thought provoking, it’s probably his. If it’s wrong, I probably added it.

The stories of Jacob and Moses are so similar in structure that it is difficult to see it as coincidence. Either they were both based on an earlier oral or written (but as of yet, unfound) tradition, or they both were told to fit the pattern that an ancient Israelite heroic story â??shouldâ? be. (or, if both stories are literally true and historically accurate, it can be said that God lacked creativity)

Please don’t take my feeble attempts at humor as some sort of heinous blasphemy. I don’t mean it that way, and you shouldn’t take it that way.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, or who maybe don’t see how the stories of Jacob (Patriarch of the Twelve Tribes of Israel) and Moses (Leader of the Exodus from Egypt) are so similar. Consider this:

• They both have a special birth story (this is almost completely consistent for every figure of any importance in the Bible)
• They both have an illicit act in their youth
• They both run from their homeland as a result of the fear of persecution as a result of that act
• They both get a promise from Yahweh at a sacred place
• They both have an incident at a well with their future wife
• They both get married and have children
• They both return to the land of their birth (at the command of Yahweh)
• They both have a dangerous encounter with Yahweh
• They both have a meeting with their brother upon their arrival home

It is remarkable, isn’t it? I’m not implying that the ancient Israelites were cheating by not coming up with an original story. It’s no more cheating than the fact that almost all chick-flicks follow a formula, or the fact that about 9 John Grisham books in a row were virtually identical. We expect it. We have story patterns that we are comfortable with. It’s safe to assume that the Israelites were the same. We also read stories from other cultures, and incorporate them into our own stories (Greek mythos, for instance, are routinely made into movies, and inspired the human religion in Battlestar Galactica). Why are we so averse to the idea that the ancient Hebrews might not have done the same?

Especially when there is a significant amount of evidence that they did exactly that. See my previous entry for a discussion on the similarity between the Old Testament Noah and Utnapishtim of the Gilgamesh epic. But we’re not talking about Noah today, are we? We’re talking about Moses and Jacob. Consider this:

My mother, a high priestess, conceived me, in secret she bore me.
She placed me in a reed basket, with bitumen she caulked my hatch.
She abandoned me to the river from which I could not escape.
the river carried me along; to Aqqi, the water drawer, it brought me.
Aqqi, the water drawer, when immersing his bucket lifted me up.
Aqqi, the water drawer, raised me as his adopted son.
Aqqi, the water drawer, set me to his garden work.
During my garden work, Ishtar loved me, so that
For 55 years, I ruled as King.
- translation from B. Lewis, The Sargon Legend, pg 24-25

Sargon was a legendary figure that was extremely popular in ancient Mesopotamia. Referring to him have been found throughout the Middle East, and have been dated as early as 2,000 years B.C.E. (Before Christ… literally, Before Common Era). Lewis, in his book listed above, on page 109, states that â??With the possible exception of Gilgamesh, Sargon of Akkad dominated the literary tradition of Mesopotamia as no other historical figure before or after.â? The Hebrews who first told the stories of Moses, and the later Hebrews who first wrote the story down, were almost certainly aware of the stories of Sargon. It’s reasonable to assume that they wanted THIER heroes to have just as remarkable of a birth story as the stories they had read of heroes in other cultures.

We do the same thing in our culture. Does anyone believe that George Washington actually cut down a cherry tree, and when confronted, declared, â??I cannot tell a lieâ? ?

I don’t. I think that is a story used to illustrate a point about the father of our country. What if a special birth story is used in ancient Israelite literature to foreshadow â??this character is destined for great thingsâ? ? It certainly does not make the story less valid. It just provides â??signpostsâ? that make the story easier to follow, much as a musical soundtrack does today in movies.

I don’t think that this is blasphemous at all, although I am sure some of you do. But I think it is reasonable to believe that some things are just â??human nature.â? One of those things is to make up stories about our heroes. Does the fact that George Washington didn’t cut down a cherry tree make him any less real? Does it in any way denigrate what he stood for? Does it make his accomplishments less impressive?

We do the same with some more modern heroes, as well. Did Babe Ruth â??call his shotâ? before he hit a home run? Some people think he did, and some people don’t. I think that is one of the sad things about the â??video intensiveâ? society we live in. It removes some of the mystery from our heroes. It’s difficult to tell fantastic stories about Nolan Ryan’s strikeouts, when we have a video record of all 5,714 of them.