Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

I bought an advance reader copy of John Ringo’s Ghost via Webscription. It was a good book, but not worth the $15 US I paid for it. Here’s my review.

My biggest complaint it that this book has John Ringo writing like Tom Clancy. Basically, if you’re not a born and bred American, you are evil and/or incompetent. If you are an American, but not a Republican, you are fuzzy brained, ignorant, or evil. Ringo singing the praises of George W. Bush gets tiresome.

The rest of the book is basically an action hero story. It’s not Hollywood - bullets hurt and time is needed to heal wounds. There’s some sex in it, teasing in first part, somewhat graphic in the second, brutal in the third. I’d put it about on par with an average western or non-Harlequin romance as far as sex goes.

Overall, I’d give this book 6/10 - a decent read, but not a book I would read again unless I’m very bored. I probably wouldn’t buy other books in this series, though I’d probably check them out from the library.

Jaimie and I are reading Bill Bryson’s
A Short History of Nearly Everything. I would say he does a fine job a science popularizer. It’s fascinating to read the stories of the people who advance our knowledge of the world. Forget celebrity gossip, science gossip has characters who are at least as weird and entertaining. I hope I remember to give this book to my kids when they’re old enough to read it.

1. Join Field and Crops into a theme
2. Export that theme as a shapefile
3. Merge Crop scouting points for various days into a shapefile
4. Use Geoprocessing Wizard/Assign data by location to merge Crops and Crop Scouting shapefiles
5. Save the result as a shapefile
6. Exit Arcview
7. Run addnoteid.prg on resulting dbf
8. run notes_merge report
9. re-open arcview, label notes with noteid field

I’m trying to figure out what information to give for various knowledge rolls. Here’s what I’ve worked out so far.

Knowledge of Dangerous Beasts (Monsters)
DC
10 Easy
- General Type
15 Basic
- Monster Race
- Best Save
- Usual Attacks
- Traits
- Organization
- Environment
20 Difficult
- Vulnerabilities
- Tactics
- Special Attacks
- Treasure
30 Very Difficult
- How it differs from the average monster of this type

Common monster -5
Uncommon monster +0
Rare monster +5
Unique monster +15