Here's an email I just received from one of my mailing lists: "To all who have the honor of my acquaintance, here is my new email..." That just sounds so self-important to me. I would have said something like "to all who honor me be being an acquaintance..." It just annoyed me for some reason...

One thing I hate about ICQ (and probably conversations in general) is that some people don't answer all your questions. To save time and make myself clearer I'll ask a few questions but then some people only answer the questions that they want to answer and ignore the rest. That really doesn't help me. I suppose in a conversation you don't normally ask several questions at once so that problem doesn't crop up.

Email correspondence can have that problem too, but I see it less often. There's something about ICQ that makes people sloppy and flighty. Email tends to be serious, with people thinking more about what they're writing. Mailing lists can go either way, depending on the people on the mailing list and the frequency of messages...

I'm been reading way too much the last few weeks. Averaging about two books a week (100 pages a day). I'm probably postponing doing real work or preparing my campaign. It's just one of those phases and once I feel better I'll work harder and read less. This is one of those things I do. If I'm trying to avoid something I'll do something else and put a lot of effort into it. But I also have a lot of books to read still. Some 100 books in the queue, with more added occassionally. Aggressive reading will cut that number down.

One of the books I'm reading right now (I usually read 2-4 books at a time, switching among them to keep it more interesting) is "Bright Star" by Harold Coyle. Sort of a standard "what would a war fought today be like" scenario, like the early Tom Clancy books. Coyle has less idealistic characters, they have more flaws and problems than Clancy's characters. I don't like that Coyle uses fictitious units. I'd rather read about the 101st Airborne rather than the 17th Airborne. Coyle also doesn't try to be as realistic as Clancy, although the technology and tactics are still relatively accurate. As far as I can tell.

One good thing about the current problems with the Star Trek RPG line is that I'm also caught up reading all those books. With nothing new (well, maybe one or two things) in the horizon, I'm down to reading three books, including the TOS and DS9 RPGs. The sourcebooks are well written, much like the old BattleTech sourcebooks were. Lots of source material without too many rules to clutter up the book.

I have one technical book left to read. Well, that's not quite right. One technical book that isn't some college text. For my profession, I tend to look for books from certain publishers. O'Reilly, SunSoft Press, Addisson-Wesley are all good computer book publishers. O'Reilly tends to be more examples based, SunSoft is good official materials, and Addisson-Wesley is more academic.

And then I look at the kind of books published by Oracle Press. Well, the actual manuals including with the software purchases are good. But the other stuff that's all extra is just awful It's not detailed enough and the layout is rather confusing and the examples have way too many errors. And I've read 3-4 books so I know it's a problem with the whole line. Maybe a bad line editor.

The 100 books were just the recreational books I read. There are hundreds of RPG books that I haven't read, but I won't have to read them until I run a campaign with those games. Another dozen computer books from college, some of which I should reread. I think that's all the books I have left to read.