1524 H
I am sitting in the parking lot at the First National, wating for Laura, 
Rebekah and Nathaniel. Phyllis is watching Benjamin, who had gone to sleep
in the carriage when we left. Rebekah woke me at 5:30. I had planned to get
up earlier to work, but ignored the alarm peep of my watch. She wanted to
play a board game, and we played two. They were very benign in form: one
covered flowers with flower-shaped pieces, or moved figurines along a row
of colored circles. But suddenly, and as never before, I realized how
pernicious games of chance were. Rebekah was determined to win, (1905 H)
but no exercise of intelligence or diligence could influence the roll of the
die. I made the best of it by tallying for her the distribution of thirty
rolls of the cube, and by teaching her the word cube. Later in the morning, I
bought her a $7 chess set. She is concentrating well on learning the moves.
I am staying one step ahead. It is an immediately accessible intellectual
discipline.

It seems to me that games of chance are offensive precisely because the course
of our lives is so often and so profoundly determined by chance. Apart from
wasting time, throwing dice mocks our fate. I would be interested in
the classical and Biblical references to throwing lots. The only instance I know
is lottery at the foot of the cross. Since this fulfils prophecy, there
must by a corresponding Old Testament text.

With regard both to Rebekah's motivation and to your reflections:
competitiveness represents the need to be the best, usually without any clear
idea of what it means to win, to be the best, and almost never with rational
justification. Competition is fundamentally idolatrous, because one does not
know what is good and because in allowing oneself to compete, one worships
ones own gratification. (This line of reasoning leads to a radical critique
of anything but subsistence economic existence.)

I think that I follow your account of the modem-satellite interaction, but if
as you postulate the problem can be solved by software, what caused it? Is it
just that this modem has never been initialized for use with the satellite?

I look forward to MRG. Is it another version of X, or is it fundamentally
different? What sort of bells and whistles does it sound?