Any submission that opens with "In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service" and then goes in to reverse engineering the OSCAR protocol gets my vote. When it then goes in to the origins of Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" thinking all I can say is - Thanks for the trip down memory lane.