Member: Noisy

CollectionsYour library (1,497), Currently reading (2), Wishlist (4), To read (49), All collections (1,501)

Reviews34 reviews

TagsFiction (1,144), ~Series (448), Non-fiction (354), Science Fiction (348), ~Incomplete (317), Thriller (191), Spy (128), ~Complete (126), Anthology (122), Adventure (116) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Groups18th-19th Century Britain, Ask LibraryThing, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Atheists review books, BBC Radio 4 Listeners, Board for Extreme Thing Advances, Book reviewers, Brights, Brits, Build the Open Shelves Classification — show all groups , Calvin and Hobbes, Cartoons, Cognitive Science, Combiners!, Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing, Consilience, Cthulhu Mythos Homeschoolers, Dictionaries & other reference books, Evolve!, Flaggers!, Geology, Group Reads - Sci-Fi, Group!, Happy Heathens, I Survived the Great Vowel Shift, Librarything Series, Maps and Atlases, More Power to the Date Fields!, Pastafarians, Pedants' corner, Philosophy of Science, Purely Programmers, Puzzles, Real Ale (& Other Beers), Reviews reviewed, Science Fiction Fans, Science!, Single Booklovers, Stalking Tim & Company, Taggers!, The Culture, Wikipedians, Words and phrases, Written in Stone - The Literary Cemetery

Favorite authorsDesmond Bagley, Iain M. Banks, Chambers, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Ursula K. Le Guin, Adam Hall, Peter F. Hamilton, Robert A. Heinlein, Michael Innes, Douglas Reeman, Gavin Lyall, Steven Pinker, Alastair Reynolds, Matt Ridley, Eric Frank Russell, James White, Edward O. Wilson (Shared favorites)

About meI am an Englishman. I work in the computer industry, trying to interface between the business people and the techies, but it's hard, so hard. I don't blog or anything, but I do get addicted to internet sites until I burn them out of my system. Currently, I spend most of my life on Wikipedia ... oh - alright, I mean LibraryThing.

About my libraryI was a bookworm as a kid, and devoured Golden Age science fiction. Fiction was all I read, until a friend recommended 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins. I've never looked back, and have a growing number of popular science books (and growing faster than being read).

Most of my library was sitting in boxes in the garage, just waiting for me to get my house in order. I have finally started the cataloguing process: only the science fiction left to do!

Stop Press: Thanks to aethercowboy, I’ve learnt how to put tabs in talk posts, as described here. Details below.

Tag cloud from wordle.net:


Older (and nicer) tag view which you get using <a href=/tags.php?view=username>tag view</a>.

When viewing my catalogue using my preferred display style, I recommend that you first sort on 'Stopped' and then sort on 'Started'. This will show my recently read books.

The image is from the t-shirt of the book of the comic Watchmen.

My timeline. And yours. (Use <a href=/lttl/?view=username>timeline</a> to see another's timeline.) This is only at alpha development stage, but still looks pretty nifty unless you've added books en masse, in which case most of the data falls off the bottom. (Back again, hoorah!) Instructions from conceptDawg:
"There are two options: (a) view=USERNAME (b) tlmode=0 or 1
- 0 will show you dates based on start/finish times or date bought values (if there are no start/finish times).
- 1 will show you a timeline based on the date the book was entered into LT.
To use the options you'll have to use a URL something like this:
/lttl/index.php?view=conceptDawg&tlmode=1"

Currently reading …


(Create the 'currently reading' text line here.)

Recently added …


You can add this information easily by cutting and pasting from the source view of your home page (instructions based on Firefox browser):
a) Choose your 'Home' tab, and then do View -> Page Source from the browser menu
b) Look for "javascript:edit_section('recentlyadded'... and then click at the beginning of the line below this. (The line is nearer the bottom of the page than the top.)
c) Press back-arrow until you are positioned just before </div></div>. (Holding CTRL down while you do this lets you move a 'word' at a time.)
d) Hold the SHIFT key (and keep it pressed until we've stopped selecting the required text) and press up-arrow
e) Still holding the SHIFT key, press the CTRL key at the same time and right-arrow forwards to position the cursor just after "<div id="recentbooks_inside">". (You'll need to release the CTRL key for the fine adjustment at the end.)
f) You can now release the SHIFT key and copy the selected text and paste it to your profile page. (Of course, if you've got other HTML on your profile page, you'll have kept a copy of the profile page text as a document on your computer, so that it's easy to paste the copied text in the same place each time. Use paste special if you're using MS Word, to get rid of any wanted formatting.)

Public Service Announcements
Combining
As a member of the Combiners! group, I welcome comments pointing out any inconsistencies in my library entries.

Cataloguing
You can enforce a particular sort order for a book if you find that it is displaying in the 'incorrect' order in your catalogue listing. Usually (at least for English-language titles, and maybe some other European languages) the reason is that the sorting algorithm ignores words like "A", "An" and "The" at the start of the title. The trick is to put a double pipe - "||" - before the place where you want the sorting to start. Tim illustrates it here, and the rest of that thread may provide further information.

Posting messages in the groups
I've forced long links (and, indeed, long strings of characters) to display in full by embedding HTML in the text, which seems to break the recognition software. I use <i></i>.

Caveat: The HTML shown here is what I have found to work, and is not necessarily 'legal' HTML. For instance, within the <a> syntax, the URI should be enclosed in quotes (" ") according to the formal definition. [Credit: PaulFoley]

Basic HTML commands. (You can even use these in topic titles.):
<b>bold</b>
<i>italic</i>
<u>underline</u>
<a href=URL_for_a_link>your descriptive text</a>
(<strike></strike> will put a line through text, but it doesn’t work on profile pages)

(&lt; &gt; and &amp; are <, > and & (remember the semi-colon after the code), but they are interpreted if you use them in a post, so you have to enter them again if you edit your post. The [ (left square bracket) symbol can be generated in a post using "&#x005B;" or "&#0091;". The ] (right square bracket) symbol can be generated in a post using "&#x005D;" or "&#0093;".)

Formatting in a post can be preserved using <pre> </pre> around your text. Using this, you can format charts, and the tab character (&#09;) helps with this. Tabs are preserved within the ‘pre’ segments, and can be cut and pasted, rather than entering &#09; for every occurrence. Beware, though, because ‘pre’ causes a blank line to be inserted before and after its use, so include the whole of your chart in a single ‘pre’ pairing.

For an URL (more properly, URI) that references a page within LibraryThing, you can help people who use other language variants of the site by supplying a relative link (one without the "http://www.librarything.com") rather than an absolute link. For example, the relative link to my catalogue is <a href=/catalog.php?view=Noisy>Noisy’s catalogue</a>. [Credit: boekerij]

Go directly to a post in a thread by adding "#messagehead99" (where 99 is the post number). <a href=/talktopic.php?topic=16986#messagehead50>post 50</a> takes you to one of Tim’s comments about future development priorities.

When posting a link to an external URL in the Groups, you must put a space before and after the URL in order for it to become an automatic link.

ETA in a group message means 'Edited to add'.
OP in a group message means 'Opening post'.

Adding messages elsewhere
Disambiguation notices and descriptions have different rules for HTML, and one useful command is to use <p> to force paragraph breaks when carriage return fails.

WikiThing
WikiThing is a repository for information about LibraryThing. It is new, and is being populated by members of the LT community, so that means YOU! Please help. At the moment things may seem a little disorganised because people are just finding their feet and experimenting. Discussions still belong in the groups, and discussions about WikiThing are ongoing in the WikiThing group.

Every Thingamabrarian has their own user page on the wiki where they can experiment: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:YourNameHere. (As yet, there is no internationalization.)

You can now add your WikiThing link to 'Also on'. Activate the link to your WikiThing page by using 'Edit profile/account settings' on your Profile page.

Pretty Profile Pages
I would tell you how to post images, but GreyHead has already covered that ground.

Hmmm. Your visitor map doesn't seem to have changed recently? You probably need to bypass your cache. If you are using MS Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers, this is done by pressing [CTRL]-[F5] (at the same time).


Create your own visitor map!

My profile page has been visited times since 28AUG2007. View my statistics from http://www.statcounter.com/ here.

count started 20080406

[updated 2009-07-10]

Also onWikipedia, WikiThing (LT)

Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Member Giveaway

LocationHampshire, England

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/Noisy (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Noisy (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (234), Awards (161), Characters (2332), Places (551)

Member sinceAug 18, 2006

Currently readingService Oriented Architecture For Dummies (IBM Limited Edition) by Judith Hurwitz
Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner