Consolation Awards

This is the award mail ... a tradition of the POTM has been to recognize
entries that may have fallen a bit short of the ultimate goal.  Or have
fallen a LOT short of the ultimate goal.  Or for any reason whatever.

In the meantime, thanks to ALL of YOU who participated.  If you aren't
among the award-winners - the next POTM is coming up soon!

=Fred

FASTEST ENTRY:  was from the overall winner - Vince Goffin (odomatic).
	Vince was the only one to break the 1 second mark for the 1000
	final examples .... coupled with the fact that his entry was also
	the third shortest entry (at 405 characters), it's easy to
	see why he won!  Which brings us to the:

SHORTEST ENTRY:  is from Julius Collins.  His entry (qcd) clocked in
	at 372 characters.  Honorable mention to James Yang (hcy) at
	373 characters - beaten out with an 11th hour entry from Julius.
	Julius set the pace in our weekly leader boards with an early 
	entry - but he is a previous winner and therefore can't win 
	again until I say it's OK.

	Which brings me to my *L*E*S*S*O*N***L*E*A*R*N*E*D*: don't have any
	tiebreakers that count characters of the source code - it makes
	for very ugly entries.  One could argue that the mere act of
	code compression is a fine art, but perhaps one which is best
	reserved for the obfuscated "C" contest.  BUT, in honor of this
	"last" time, we have the following award:

MOST COMPRESSED ENTRY:  is from Palith Balakrishnabati.  His program
	(palith) made some clever use of #defines to expand from
	536 characters to 1358 characters.  Check out the first two
	lines of palith.c :
				#define _ define
				#_ T 10000

	Palith also wins the award for MOST ANONYMOUS PARTICIPANT ...
	but we managed to track him down eventually!
	At the other end of the spectrum is:

LEAST COMPRESSED ENTRY:  from an early participant who (for obvious
	reasons) wishes to remain anonymous!  I have changed the name
	of the entry to big_guy for obvious reasons:

-rw-------   1 fah      xxx      3226884 Sep 25 16:40 big_guy.c

	close to 41,000 lines of "answers".  This was the reason I had
	a tie-breaker that encouraged shorter programs - I had been
	burned on an earlier POTM by someone who just coded up all the
	possible answers ... but THAT was years ago and I am now older
	and wiser (Scott) .... well, older for sure.  Which brings us to:

EARLY BIRD AWARDS:  to Gregg Wonderly (potm) and Steve Sommars (pumpkin)
	who submitted entries on September 12.  And of course:

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER AWARD:  to Perin Jathavedam (olds) who waited 
	until October 30th to submit his first entry.

FAR AWAY FROM NEW JERSEY AWARD:  goes to Warren Koontz (holland) who
	spent the rainy Holland weekends thinking about odometers.
	We also had entries from England and Mexico ... in fact, England
	may be farther away than Holland ... but Holland "sounds" like
	it should be farther away.  Mailings are going as far away as
	Japan... but no entries from the Far East yet!

BONEHEAD AWARD:  goes to the POTM-master himself, Fred Hicinbothem.
	Fred's entry (woody) managed to stay in the top ten right through
	the final week.  Unfortunately, when I picked the final 1000
	problems - "woody" couldn't solve them all.  Since I resisted the
	urge to go back and fix up my entry, I figured I'd give myself
	this award as consolation.

BEST ENTRY NAME:  I liked "igottagodad" from Keith Vollherbst and
	"odoretentive" from Tim Tjarks.  The winner, "odomatic" was
	pretty good too - but Vince had too many awards already.

BEST NON-AT&T ENTRY THAT I KNOW OF:  is from David Jones of Ohio State.
	His entry (osu_odo6) was the best one from outside the
	uucp network ... apologies if there is someone I missed!

BEST NON-C STUFF I GOT TO WORK: was a Fortran entry from Ken Haruta
	(hold_da_fort) and a perl entry (contest64) from Joe Kruskal.  
	Perl is a language distributed by the exptools folks.  
	Fortran is a language most of you are too young to know about.  
	Which brings us to:

BEST NON-C STUFF I DIDN'T GET TO WORK: goes to Greg Fiore who submitted
	a Basic program he claimed worked - I hope Greg had some fun
	with the problem, but unfortunately I didn't have any Basic
	compilers available 8*( .... nor time enough to run the result
	anyhow 8*) ...

AWARD TO ANYONE WHO READS THIS FAR:  goes to YOU.  You get to send me
	some mail with your opinions on the next two questions:

	1. Is the weekly leaderboard useful?  Did it spur you on or
		discourage you?  How could it be improved?  Should I
		discontinue it?

	2. How do I make the POTM be more FUN?  (After all, that's
		the primary objective!)

	3. Got any good contest ideas??? I promise you'll receive credit
		for any that get used.  I don't want full-blown definitions,
		the germ of an idea is enough ... I figure I've got the
		next two POTMs defined ... but beyond that??? Who knows?
		Ideas can come from life, work, or anywhere - but try to
		stay away from already published stuff ..... I'd really
		appreciate some good ideas!  (send them to homxb!fah)