Occasionally there are sites I like to give shout outs to not because they have any staying power or even any significant entertainment value beyond an initial five minutes, but because the initial five minutes you spend at the site are more entertaining that the first five minutes you spend on other sites. These sites are kind of like those kids that publish books to much acclaim when they are 23 and then don’t ever publish anything else, and yet that first book is still pretty good.
It is with this both disclaimer and promotion that I draw your attention to the online quiz, "Program Language Inventor or Serial Killer." It’s something of an Internet phenomenon and a favorite among web surfing hobbyists. The premise is that you are given a series of 10 photographs. For each photograph, you have to decide whether you think that the man in question is either a program language inventor or a serial killer, and at the end you get your score. Surprisingly or not, program language inventors and serial killers seem to have a similar physical aesthetic going on. They must all read the same fashion magazines or something: Thinning hair, a certain pastiness and a doughy physique are all the rage in both these subsets of humanity.
When I took the quiz I scored a six out of 10 and the site told me that "it might be best to avoid a career in either law enforcement or I.T. recruitment." I guess it’s a good thing, then, that I am headed in neither direction.