The Twit Filter: The Know-It/Done-It-All by Dave Bealer This loathsome creature is common throughout human society, though they seem to occur most frequently near universities, government buildings, and computer centers. Everyone knows the type: if you have a 3.96 GPA, the Know-It/Done-It- All (KIDIA) has a 3.98. If you've climbed Mount Everest, the KIDIA climbed it backwards walking on his hands, and set a new record time in the process, of course. If you coded the current Data Structures lab assignment in three days using 71 lines of C code, the KIDIA coded it in two hours using 674 bytes of binary machine code. When asked to produce proof of these astonishing feats, the KIDIA hems and haws. Now is not the right time for such disclosures. Eventually it becomes clear that there will never be a right time. Particularly dangerous online, the KIDIA knows the extreme difficulty of asking for proof of any fantastic claims. The KIDIA always has the fastest CPU, the biggest hard drive, the fastest modem, the most efficiently configured WINDOWS.INI settings, and all the newest whiz- bang peripherals. For some reason simply possessing these things isn't good enough for the KIDIA. She has to remind everyone that she has them in at least one post every day. There are only three options to choose from when confronted with a KIDIA: 1) Kill yourself. Sure, this solves your problem, but what about the rest of us? 2) Kill the KIDIA. Actually the ideal solution, although you may have to spend a couple of weeks in jail. (Applies to the United States only. This solution is NOT recommended in countries that actually punish people for murder and other violent crimes.) 3) Put the KIDIA in your twit filter. Probably the best solution, at least in countries where option 2 is not viable. It can even be effective in the U.S. There's nothing KIDIAs hate more than the thought that people are ignoring them. {RAH}