The Few, the Proud, the AOL'ers

[jeriendhal]

The Good: The Marine Corps has a list of recommended fiction and non-fiction for the betterment of its troops, divided into seperate reading lists by rank from recruit to general, and some guidelines about book discussion groups.

The Bad: Apparently it was written by someone who got SAND IN HIS CAPS LOCK.

Link: http://www.marines.mil/almars/almar2000.nsf/1babcf316f87f38c852569b8008017e7/aa2cb37ddee25a2785256fa20073e625?OpenDocument

Comments

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Some interesting items in there: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Ugly American, Graham Greene's The Quiet American... Not necessarily what I would have expected.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

There is a pretty good mix, with the thoughtful and dissenting together with obvious hoo-rah! stuff.

Message Text Format.

[naraht1.livejournal.com]

The Message is in Message Text Format, which is Uppercase only (and numbers and a specific list of symbols. This is the same format that would be used for communicating everything from Quarterly unit status to reports of encounters with Enemy troops. http://usmtf.disa.mil/ is the place to start for information. Data Fields are separated by Single Slashes and Data areas by double slashes. Most of it is pure text inside of a GENTEXT/REMARKS field. The software that I work on day to day both reads MTF formats (and loads data out of it) and produces it.

Re: Message Text Format.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Oh, ick. I suppose it's more robust than depending on Word to format stuff, but it still makes my eyes bleed.

Re: Message Text Format.

[naraht1.livejournal.com]

After a while you get used to it. Its not only US standard, it's standard for NATO and communications between NATO Militaries and certain other close allies like Australia. And it has a lot of different defined fields, you just pick the ones you need for your work. Yes, it looks like shouting, but if you see enough of it, you get used to it.