Summary: An annual look at all that was silly, embarassing and wrong in the year past. A summary of all that was messed up, fouled up, or goofed up in 1998

The 1998 Annual Egg-In-The-Face Awards

Things We Don't Need Ported To OS/2 Right Away

There's trivial, there's absurdly trivial, there's obscenely trivial, and then there's Comet Systems' Comet Cursor. This is a company with a product, and boy what a product. A plugin for Netscape that changes the mouse cursor into custom designs that are embedded in the web page. The idea is that a web developer can have the mouse cursor change shape when a page is loaded, or when it glides over a hot-spot. In their words, a basketball site could let the user "pick their favorite basketball team's logo," or a Spice Girls site could... well... do the same I guess.

Now this is perhaps mildly interesting to say the least. This is something you might think about only after you've written Javascript that changes the browser's status bar to scroll "Hi! Welcome to our cool web page!", and this might be something you think about adding to your site after you've finished individually animating the bullets for your links collection, but no way would you ever pay for it, right?

Wrong, at least that's what Comet thinks. They actually want to charge web developers $1,500 and more per month for the power to change the mouse cursor. Here's an idea of what kind of competition Comet Systems is up against: Practically every 14 year-old who's checked into the Mozilla source-code tree and has 30 minutes of spare time. Now here's an idea of their customers: The NBA and the Spice Girls.

Comet Cursor is currently only available for Windows, which means we won't be able to show you how hilarious it looks when you shift Netscape's "pointy finger" cursor over by one digit. We also believe the web masters of all the companies who shelled out to use this junk on their web sites might also be interested in a new wardrobe too - with clothes made out of a special fabric that only other smart and intelligent web developers can see.

A Ten Year Old Might Snigger

Innoval deserves a tip of the hat for the admirable work they've done on J Street Mailer - still the best Java e-mail solution there is and one that got a respectable number of votes in our Reader's Choice awards too. But we were wondering what they were thinking when they made Web Willy, or more precisely, when they named it. Web Willy is a form of parental control software that blocks questionable web sites from innocent young eyes. But despite its smut-busting image... does Innoval know what "Willy" is schoolboy slang for?

Things We Find Interesting...

That the word "vaporware" is in Star Office's default spell-check dictionary.

That television ads for the Microsoft Network claim their service is brought to you by the same company that made your computer "reliable" and "easy to use".

That Microsoft is trying to sell off the Microsoft Network to IBM.

Oh, and the Winter Olympics are canceled too!

Early last year disaster struck Warpstock as the Chicago committee quit over irreconcilable differences with the Warpstock steering committee. I guess this was a blow, but the first we heard of the news was that "Warpstock is canceled!" This overreaction came from a number of people, including a web site that proceeded to publish the entire e-mail conversation between the Chicago committee and the Steering committee. They thought that if they blanked out the names of all the people involved and replaced them with numbers instead, nobody would guess the identities of each e-mail's author. This might have worked, but I bet you a big bar of chocolate it never occurred to them to edit out the give-away mannerisms of those authors too.

And we were also going to have live coverage of Burning Man

In the tradition of all Egg-in-the-face awards since January 1997 when they first started, the last tauntings are reserved for us. This time we get a pawful of yolk in the mush for claiming on the front page to have "Live" coverage of Warpstock '98. It weren't to be so, folks. After organizers suffered too many troubles getting a network connection out of the hotel, our reporters barely managed to squeek a couple of short summaries to the unlucky staff back home. Alone. Not having any fun. Not getting chummy with a girl and a beer like that freewheeling ex-editor-in-chief of ours.

On other unfinished business, Chris Wright, the guy in the leather jacket at Warpstock, was not me. We only have the same first name and last initial. Please... please stop confusing him for me. You'll know me when you see me. I'll have a beer and a girl on each arm.

If you didn't get to go to Warpstock either, come mope with me in our interactive forum. We can trade stories of other humorous goof-ups in 1998 while we cry into our Heineken.

Recent feedback:

• Get over it! - Pete Grubbs
• I just can't believe it... - Wayne Swanson
• Would you look at what he's doing now??? - Barry Lemon
• Selling MSN - kkrieser_news
• WarpStock - First timer instruction... - Wayne Swanson