Fair Game

Okay, it's the new year, and what better way to start than with a renewed sense of soccer evangelism? And what better way to display your soccer evangelism than by trying to game an online poll?

The main Chicago Tribune online sports page (I'm not going to fall for their idiotic branding strategy) is running the question "What's your Chicago sports New Year's resolution?" with the following choices:

• Trust Bears / Bulls / Cubs / Hawks / Sox management
• Vilify Bears / Bulls / Cubs / Hawks / Sox management
• Not boo the Bear offense -- as long as Grossman's the QB
• Not let Cub fans get to me
• Not let Sox fans get to me
• Root for Chicago's winningest team -- the Fire

Obviously, you should vote. If you were to wish to vote more than once, you can probably just go into your browser's controls and turn cookies off, or you could do the following, if you're using Internet Explorer on Windows 98. Probably works for other version of Windows as well, but I can't say for sure.

1. Vote.
2. Close your broswer (this is important).
3. Go to Start>Find>Files or Folders.
4. Click "Browse" and go to C:\Windows\Cookies
5. Click the "Date" tab
6. Select "Find all files" "created" "during the last 1 day"
7. Highlight any files with chicagotribune in them.
8. Hit "delete"
9. Repeat.

If you leave the Find dialog box open, that'll make it easier. Netscape puts all the cookies in one file, which is somewhere under Program Files\Netscape, and I think is called cookies.txt, where you would probably just open it in a text editor and delete one line toward the end that has chicagotribune in it. Dunno about Opera. Does anyone actually use Opera? Dunno about Mac, either.

Keep in mind that I said if you wished to vote more than once. I would, of course, never encourage unleashing such civil disobedience on the twin pillars of the Internet and the Tribune company. Nuh-uh, not me.