/ 19 March 1999

Enough about you, let’s talk about me

Karlin Lillington

Here’s one for the “but enough about you; let’s talk about me” department. At the All About You website () you can take a personality test designed by a Berkeley PhD student and submit it for instant analysis of your key characteristics. You also get a percentile rating for where your quirks and charms place you against a study group of students in the United States, which can only be enlightening.

It is the perfect resource for your next pub quiz. The World Sexual Records website, , is short on pictures but has plenty of information on every imaginable aspect of everyone’s favourite topic, from human anatomy to sexual technique to prudery and the law and – why, yes – even love and marriage.

Written with a wry sense of humour (“Chastity didn’t hold much value to our earliest ancestors – if you’re not propagating the species, then what good are you?”), the site is matter of fact rather than prurient. A word of warning: men may feel rather inadequate after reading statistics on male versus female performance.

Test your literary mettle at First Lines, . Visitors are challenged to recognise the source of dozens of opening lines from all those books you should have read by now. The warm-up exercises feature toughies like “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” and “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loin”.

Skins – also known as textures or styles – really haven’t taken off for Microsoft Windows, but that could change now that StarDock Systems is cranking out new versions of WindowBlinds and Object Desktop.

With skins you can make a Windows desktop look like a Mac or something out of Star Trek, or perhaps a very bad dream. WindowBlinds is free for those not worried about making their PCs more unstable. You can try or .