It’s really hard to choose a decent sig. Anything anyone with taste might reasonably want has already well gone.All the same, there is little excuse for some of the ones I’ve seen recently.

MSN messenger provides emoticon images for sticking in your Msn messages, not for sticking hearts and smileys in a huge string as your user name. This is barely acceptable from kids. Anyone over the age of 16 had better have a good reason for it and I find it hard to think of one.

There is absolutely no excuse for a smiley face in your sig.

I’m not going to go on to a second point because there will be no stopping me. You know who you are.

I’m not claiming the moral high ground here. I  have rubbish user names for everything I do and I can never even remember them so I set them up and then can’t remember them to get back in to whatever i joined. All I can say is that I have never knowingly used any silly pictures or deliberately soppy names,

Sorry about this, it’s not ground-breakingly brilliant but it’s entertaining. There is something good about having a mathematician and his physicist not-quite girlfriend as the relatively glamourous heros of a cop show. This makes a change from scientists always being portrayed as total geeks.

There is an odd physicist as well – the short guy from Ally McBeal – but there are odd non-scientists – liek the man who used too be the central character in Taxi. The programme doesn’t necessarily assume that having mathematical skills makes you a social outcast, which is nice.