Well, here’s what I’ve been reading this year. I said there was a lot of graphic novels.
Over on the LiveJournal version of this blog you can fill in a poll to show which of these you’ve read as well (not necessarily in 2008). I understand that you can use OpenID to log into LJ rather than creating an account there but I’ve never tested it myself.
Non-Fiction
A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich
Counterknowledge by Damian Thompson
Dry Store Room No. 1 by Richard Fortey
JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz
Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich
Stand and Deliver: The Autobiography by Adam Ant
The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey
The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Fiction
A Spectacle of Corruption by David Liss
Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell
Flashman’s Lady by George MacDonald Fraser
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Matter by Iain M. Banks
Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell
The Coffee Trader by David Liss
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
Graphic Novels
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: No Future For You
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wolves at the Gate
Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman
From Hell by Alan Moore
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore
John Constantine Hellblazer: Bloodlines by Garth Ennis
John Constantine Hellblazer: Family Man by Jamie Delano
John Constantine Hellblazer: Fear Machine by Jamie Delano
John Constantine Hellblazer: Joyride by Andy Diggle
John Constantine Hellblazer: The Laughing Magician by Andy Diggle
Lucifer: Inferno by Mike Carey
Lucifer: Mansions of the Silence by M Carey
Planet Hulk Omnibus by Greg Pak
World War Hulk by Greg Pak
Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon
Ultimate X-Men :Ultimate Collection Book 2 by Mark Millar
Doctor Who
Ahistory by Lance Parkin
About Time 6 by Tat Wood
Doctor Who: Bullet Time by David A. McIntee
Doctor Who: Business Unusual by Gary Russell
Doctor Who: Companion Piece by Mike Tucker
Doctor Who: Emotional Chemistry by Justin Richards
Doctor Who: Endgame by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris
Doctor Who: Grave Matter by Justin Richards
Doctor Who: Halflife by Mark Michalowski
Doctor Who: Sometime Never… by Simon A. Forward
Doctor Who: The World Shapers by Grant Morrison
Faction Paradox: This Town Will Never Let Us Go by Lawrence Miles
Odds and Ends
Star Wars: Dark Empire II by Tom Veitch
Star Wars: Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore
Star Wars: Dark Tide 1 – Onslaught by Michael A. Stackpole
Star Wars: Dark Tide 2 – Ruin by Michael A. Stackpole
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.
For a little while the size of my LibraryThing has been on 999 books. I knew that the first book I unwrapped on Christmas day (betting that I wouldn’t receive any books would have been a real long shot – I am married to a librarian after all) would be book number 1000. And so it was.
According to LT I’ve finished 49 books this year. I have twenty pages to go on another and there are a few more that have been more dipping in an out books than read from cover to cover books. So roughly one a week. Not too bad until you look at how many of them are picture books graphic novels.
Starting in 15mm, Splintered Light Miniatures have a range of animals including terror birds, wolves, boars, komodo dragons and others. Oh, and Giant Weasels.
In 28mm, the beastie featured here is one of two packs available from Gary Hunt Miniatures in New Zealand (but priced in US Dollars). Very drool worthy.
And finally, if dino fans put their money where their mouth is then Wargames Fcatory may create some plastic figures for us, on the suggestions list so far are Tyrannosaurus Rex and Small Carnivorous Dinosaurs. I think I may do a little research and suggest a small herbivores pack to give those meat eaters something to chase other than foolhardy time travellers.
What is up with all the spam comments that reference prayers? They’ve been popping up for a few months now and this one, plucked from the Akismet filter, is fairly typical:
I like this website. This website helped me with prayer learning. Good job. Thank you. Please provide more French prayers. Bye-bye.a
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.
The death of Mark Felt puts Paul on two deaths in this year’s Deadpool game, bringing him level with Mike and myself. Under the tie-breaker rules I would win as I have the youngest death (relatively speaking as Charlton Heston was 84). There are, of course, just under two weeks left of the game.
contemplative
annoyed
cheerful
I rarely update my oldest web site these days. But to end the year, I get to add a couple of new links to