Part of the year-end retrospective reflex seems to involve

ranking everything conceivable that occurred or existed in 2005. We’ve done it

at TR: You can see all our top ten lists, which

include such things as the hottest downloads and discussions of the year.

I came across another interesting collection of top ten

items, a couple of which are IT-related, thereby giving me a pretext for including

the collection here.

Alternet’s Tai Moses put together The Ten Best Top-Ten Lists. There

are things like the top ten baby names (Emma, Aidan), worst jobs in science

(manure inspector, volcanologist), and most-wanted fugitives (their resumes are

pretty good: “Donald Eugene Webb, who is considered a career criminal and

master of assumed identities, specializes in the burglary of jewelry stores. He

is reportedly allergic to penicillin, a lover of dogs, a flashy dresser and a

big tipper.”). The list also includes Merriam-Webster Online’s 10 most

looked-up words, interesting because it appears to be disaster-driven. It

includes refugee, tsunami, pandemic,

and levee. And oh yeah, inept.

Also included are Top 10 Most Commonly Encountered

Hoaxes and Chain Letters (Elf Bowling… still??) and the Top 10 List of Strangest and


Funniest Data Disasters. The latter is based on reports shared by Ontrack Data

Recovery, and of course the message is that recovery is possible if you use its

services. Nevertheless, I found it slightly mollifying to compare my humdrum

catastrophic hard drive crash (see my list of top ten personal disasters… nah,

I’m not going there) with things like dogs eating memory sticks and a laptop computer

full of dead cockroaches.