Madness Marches To The Net

Computer Life column for March 6, 1999
by
Richard Gordon

March is the month for my mother's birthday, daffodils and lawn mower tune-ups. It's also time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament; suddenly caring about the likes of Samford, Stanford, and Penn; having to mute Dick Vitale; and everyone and his auntie filling in an NCAA tournament bracket--either in the office pool or just for fun.

Three years ago, there were just a handful of on-line contests that let you submit predictions for every game in the tournament. Now there are dozens, and most of them are free. Besides, it's fun to be able to brag about finishing in 1,223rd place in the ESPN contest.

Before you begin your career as an on-line prognosticator, stop at the NCAA's official tournament Web site (www.finalfour.net). This is a good source for information about the teams in the tournament and the tournament itself.

ESPN's NCAA Tournament Challenge is one of the few contests that offers equal opportunity prognosticators a chance to handicap either the men's (games.espn.go.com/cgi/tcmen/Request.dll?FRONTPAGE) or the women's (games.espn.go.com/cgi/tcwomen/request.dll?FRONTPAGE) brackets.

CNN/Sports Illustrated's Hoops Bracket Challenge (hoops.cnnsi.com/college) allows you to enter a big contest or to set up a "division" with your friends and family. They are not the only contest to provide this feature; for example, Lasvegas.com (lvrj.contests.pickem.com/cgi-bin/lvrj-hoops/home.cgi) openly offers a place where you can track your office pool.

CBS Sportsline's contest (ww3.sportsline.com/u/madness/) is usually one of the glitziest ones on the Web. This year, it lets you act like a real basketball junkie and check the daily estimated RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) for every team in the nation.

New this year is Lycos's It's Madness contest (wallstreetsports.lycos.com/itsmadness). It's a typical fill-in-the-brackets contest--with one large wrinkle. If you pick the correct winner of every game, you are eligible for a $1,000,000 prize.

Lots of other companies sponsor contests to generate interest in their products or services. These three look promising: Excite's Hoop Madness (www.hoopmadness.com), Compaq's NCAA NetPicks (compaq.totalsports.net), and Student.com's Manic March (www.student.com/ncaa/manicmarch).

The winner of one contest, the NCAA Basketball Tournament Prediction Extravaganza (www.ganza.com), doesn't even get a free pizza. This is a contest for real junkies. You pay a small fee to enter the 'Ganza; your money really buys a subscription to four issues of a fun tournament newsletter. The winner gets bragging rights and a cool plaque.

For those of us who may need a mulligan after the first round, try EnterSports' March Madnet (www.marchmadnet.com). In this multi-round game, you can enter a new contest every week.

A final note: All these contests are listed for your amusement; this column should not be construed as encouraging illegal gambling.

Tip of the week

Save first, then print

Most people who use programs like WordPerfect or Microsoft Word know to set their word processor to "auto-save" their work every 10 to 20 minutes so that, when disaster strikes, they only need to recreate the past few minutes worth of work.

We're all used to being told to "save your work regularly" no matter what software we are using. Let's get more specific.

It's particularly important to save your work just before you perform some "special" function--printing, checking spelling or grammar, uploading or downloading, importing a file, sorting data in a spreadsheet, applying a filter to a graphics file, making a global change of any kind.

Those rare instances when your software crashes or your system freezes happen most often when you do something special to an entire document, data file, or picture.

Copyright © 1999, The News Journal Company

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