I don’t remember the date, but I think it was about thirty years ago the local newspaper had a best decorated house at Christmas time contest. I do remember that a family named Erikson won. It turns out that they had their friends and their laptops joining together in a vote fest. In other words they used a few computers and just kept voting.
This kind of grated on me as unfair. Generally, these contests are set up so you can only cast one vote from a given computer.
So, I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper. I explained how I thought their contest was not a fair judgment of the entries. If they did not correct this, I told them that I would play by those rules, and I had enough friends and computing power to do the following.
We would nominate my front porch light. We would cast enough votes to insure it’s winning. It would be so appropriate to have this forty-watt bulb as the winner of the best Christmas decorated house in the city. I actually got a call from the editor asking if it was okay to publish this letter. Of course, I said yes.
Of course, they changed the rules, and the annual winners were darn nice looking displays
