Via Miss SB comes the Can you list all your MPs? meme.

• 1973 - 1974 Geoffrey Howe (Con) Reigate
• 1974 - 1976 George Gardiner (Con) Reigate
• 1976 1979: Sir George Evelyn Sinclair (Con) Dorking
• 1979 1983: Keith Wickenden (Con) Dorking
• 1983 - 1992: Kenneth Baker (Con) Mole Valley
• 1992 - 1997: John Patten (Con) Oxford West and Abingdon
• 1997 - 1998: Paul Beresford (Con) Mole Valley
• 1998 - present: Tessa Jowell (Lab) Dulwich and West Norwood

Baker, Patten and Jowell are the ones I was aware of, which was depressing enough...

Adam and the Ants - Stand and Deliver

Drill Queen - Born Depressed

Traveling Wilburys - Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Moxy Früvous - My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

Cerys Matthews - Oxygen

Pulp - Mis-shapes

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh - Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers - Tin Soldiers

Tanita Tikaram - And I Think Of You

Book

Luxury Item

The interest I'm getting paid on my savings account (Yes, I'm f***ing lucky to still have any savings):

Not quite sure what happened in April. Did the Bank of England forget to cut the base rate or something?

The good news is that the government is getting £2 instead of £8 each month. Which means they have less money to give back to banks to pay me less interest. Hang on, surely this can't be the way out of the crisis?

So at the risk of turning into an old NewsBiscuit story I've been sorting out the box, and the carrier bag next to the box, full of "computer bits". I think there may be some more elsewhere in the flat as well.

Weasels of the World, a part work, available from all good newsagents. Contents for the first few isssues as follows:

1. Pink Weasels
2. Bum Weasels
3. Space Weasels
4. Knob Weasels
5. Mustela nivalis
6. Cheese Weasels
7. Yarn Weasels
8. Head Weasels
9. Shoe Weasels
10. Bed Weasels

The things we talk about whilst doing the washing up..

Via linniekin

You Are An ISTJ
The Duty Fulfiller

You are responsible, reliable, and hardworking - you get the job done.You prefer productive hobbies, like woodworking or knitting. Quiet and serious, you are well prepared for whatever life hands you. You are conservative and down-to-earth. You hardly ever do anything crazy.

In love, you are loyal and honest. If you commit yourself to someone, then you're fully committed. For you, love is something that happens naturally. And you don't need romantic gestures to feel loved.

At work, you remember details well and are happy to take on any responsibility. You would make a great business executive, accountant, or lawyer.

How you see yourself: Decisive, stable, and dependable

When other people don't get you, they see you as: Boring, conservative, and egotistical

What's Your Personality Type?

Last time I did a Myers-Briggs based personality test I came out as ISTP, so this is the same in 3 out of 4 aspects.

Interestingly I recently took part in a team building day at work based on yet another variation on Jung's archetypes. Based on the slightly more in depth analysis (compared to an Internet meme) I came out as something that would be E*T* on the M-B system. So the only thing that everyone agrees on is that I'm Thinking rather than Feeling. Which ain't that much of a surprise

Yesterday I did something that made me feel like a total plonker. I was using a social networking site (I won't say which one - though many of you will know by now) and as these sites do it has the feature to check your webmail address book for existing members and send invites to other people. I avoided the "Auto-invite" option and went to "Manually invite". The next screen presented me with the title "Find your friends who are already on XXXXX" and a button labelled "Next", and a list of addresses with a pre-ticked checkbox next to each (and no uncheck all option).

Oops. Pressing that Next button did not find which friends were already members. It sent invites to everyone.

I'm really sorry if I spammed you.

Usability lessons

• Don't use "Next" as a label for the final step. To me, and I think to a sizeable number of others as well, "Next" implies that you'll be going onto the next step of a multi-step process. The final step that actually does something meaningful should have a more meaningful label.
• Give every page or every step of a process a unique page heading.
• Limit the number of emails a single user can generate at one time.
• Provide tools to help users manipulate large sets of data (i.e. an uncheck all option).

User lessons

• Don't assume that the people making the site have got the above right.
• If you're even slightly confused as to what will happen, assume the worst rather than the best and act accordingly.

After this I had a look at my Gmail address book. It was full of rubbish. People I had emailed just once (all those unsubscribe@ or abuse@ addresses for example. Irony.); people who had left the companies and email addresses in question behind; lots of people I didn't recognise at all; at least six of my own email addresses.

How many of you ever manage your Gmail address book? There's a bunch of features in there for doing so, but one of the selling points of Gmail is that you never need to manage anything - there's enough storage and enough processing power on the Google servers to keep everything, forever.

We're trapped in a half-way world where the computing power allows us to never delete or manually manage anything but the interfaces and mashups only really work if you do.

A badly formatted draft of this got posted to the Live Journal mirror by accident, so here's the full thing, only a few week's after everyone else did it.

A reminder that you can see where I work in the episode of Spooks that starts on BBC 1 in fifteen minutes.

Mike emails to tell me that Jack Weil and Arthur Andrews are deceased and that he is in joint first place in the Deadpool game.

I seem to have fallen off the NaBloPoMo wagon by failing to post over the weeked. Every day in November is hence out but I will try to make 30 posts in the month. This one makes it 19 in 17 days.

On Saturday pink_weasel (on a post-Cliff high) and I met up with some folks in Guildford and had lunch in a restaurant on top of a multi-storey car park. It sounds odd and a bit grim but the Thai Terrace is fantastic and I really want to go back in the summer and sit outside.

I also got given a copy of Grand Theft Auto, not the latest one, the last one. I like mayhem.