It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Well deep breath then, and on to removing all doubt. I’m going to level with you that the primary purpose of this entry is not to pass on some wonderfully entertaining bite-sized chunks of modern micro-culture, nor is it to inspire or confound you with strange new paradigms. It’s to get rid of the annoying ‘Out of Cheese’ error that appears on the front page when there have been no entries in the last week.
I’ll avoid any more than a simple mention of the release of Mozilla Thunderbird version 0.2, since becoming excited about a 0.1 revision to a mail client is reminiscent of Steve Martin shouting that "THE NEW PHONEBOOKS ARE HERE!"
As an admittedly contrived segue from the mailnews client, speaking of email and newsgroups, I recently rediscovered an old haunt of mine, rec.puzzles (Google Groups). The reason I mention this is that I want to draw attention, what little I might generate, to the Rare Entries Contest. The concept is simple and compelling. You must answer ten questions, but the aim is give correct answers that other people will not give. For each correct answer you give, you score a number of points equal to the number of other people who gave the same answer. For a wrong answer you get a penalty. The aim is to have the lowest score (ideally only ten points, corresponding to all correct answers with no-one giving the same answers as you.)
I’m particularly interested to see the answers given to the questions with limited possible correct answers. Take the Nobel Prize question ("Name one of the five original categories of Nobel Prize.") for example. This is where the second guessing comes in. The results will be posted soon so, unless I do embarrassingly badly, I’ll tell you how I got on.