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Well, I'm late again with this column. I could have gotten it done Saturday night, or been only a little bit late by writing it Sunday night. But, I've decided this week instead to indulge myself in a social life. A night out on the town with my wife and friends, and an evening at another friends home for a steak dinner.

Although I've received no response from Guy, I have located another old friends email address through my brother who read a message from her to a mailing list -- and also by the way noticed that I missed my deadline again. She wrote back to me Friday, and I wrote back over 1100 words -- longer than most of my columns -- but she asked a lot of questions and explicitly asked for detail.

I spent the time I would have spent writing this column writing that email, so Kathy, you got a personal edition of this week's column. Well, sort of, longer anyway.

I mentioned that my brother read a message from Kathy on a mailing list. I am presently subscribed to 11 of these lists. The information derived from a well chosen email mailing list, or list serv, can be as valuable as asking an expert in a given field questions directly. And, the best part, getting a thoughtful, meaningful response in far less time than ever before possible.

But there is a down-side. There can be many thousands or quite possibly millions of people subscribed to one of these lists. Depending on the list and how strictly it is moderated, you can read through many meaningless and erroneous responses as well as redundant questions, before getting to that one nugget of information that makes the list worthwhile.

In short, I've been spending more and more time reading mail.

This of course also means that I'm spending more time writing responses as well. I now put much more thought into my correspondence and thus more time. With practice however comes speed, and as my address book grows, I will need it.

As more and more old friends find there way online, and search for names out of the past, catching up, "So what have you been up to all these years?" will be an increasingly frequent request.

Encapsulating 13 years in 1100 words is not easy and I left a whole lot of stuff out. I never even mentioned my first "real job" out of Technical school, and my subsequent retreat to a paper route.

All of this comes down to time management. Rather than writing my life story in personalized versions to each inquiry, I need to get back to work on my bio. That means that I must free up some time by reducing my current volume of mail. I decided to unsubscribe from all but one list.

The information of the world is becoming more and more available, and as the amount of available information increases, I must become more selective.

While I have had some very interesting correspondences with other netizens, I am more interested in collecting email addresses and home page URLs of people I know, both past and present. Making real use of the net to keep up-to-date on real people, real time.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for this week, I've got subscriptions to cancel. I'll try to be on time next week -- still no topic but I'll think of something -- if I get another offer for a steak dinner though, the column will just have to wait.