Its Monday morning, just after 8am. The DevSta competition starts any minute now. 200 hours and 8 minutes to complete a Visual Studio 2008 project. The brief will be announced any second, and developers all over the country will start madly coding! For 200 hours, wives will be ignored, chores undone, children with no lift to school, washing up pile stacked up on the floor... society will be brought to its knees. Undoubtedly you've heard about the sub-prime market failure in the US? Hurricanes destroying cities? Countries in civil unrest? Its all in anticipation of what happens next, what happens in the next 200 hours.

The combatants nervously await. The topic will be announced any moment. They glance at the clocks of the 3 machines humming nearby. They all report different time! A quick Google for "time" indicates that there are still a few precious seconds to go.

Pressure in the bladder. Do I have time to go for #1? I deliberately built a toilet in my study for just this reason. A quick cost/benefit analysis indicates that its probably better to go now, because hospitals don't allow electronic equipment.

Finally, the climax. A new email in the inbox from Microsoft... the topic is announced. It says to go to the website for the competition brief. Doing as asked reveals nothing though. Could the email have been sent 3 minutes too early? Could it be a cache issue? CTRL+F5 is repeatedly pressed about 100 times.

The countdown clock on the website has ticked over! It now says 200 hours 8 minutes remaining. Yet there is no brief! Feeling like I'm falling behind already...

In the end its the helping hand from a friend that reveals the PDF containing the brief.

Game on!