Starting today through Aug. 10, 2008, budding designers can submit their proposed designs online at www.sony.com/mygraphicsplash along with a photo of themselves and a brief message revealing their “style.”

That they can't get through their own pitch without putting "style" in scare quotes betrays a certain cynicism, yes, but they'll be selecting three entries to become real-life limited edition laptops. That's money where its mouth is, even if you won't be getting any.

CALLING ALL FASHIONISTAS: SONY AND MICROSOFT LAUNCH “MY GRAPHIC SPLASH” PC CONTEST [Sony]

How long did Joel's reserve of willpower last? All it took was a single instant message from one Ms. Xeni Jardin proclaiming the iPhone "rad" to send him sprinting his flabby blogger's frame down the block as he wildly tried to flag down a taxi, destination: "habbadegeebideeIPHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!"

Frankly, it was an embarrassment, and Joel should feel shame. Now it's a year later. Joel's considerably svelter, more confident. He has come up in the world. He's a bettter, more dynamic man. Surely his resolve won't wane so quickly this time. But in BBG's private channel, we can already see him sliding down that path again. Yesterday, Rob and I spent all day listening to him "review" iPhone 2.0 apps. There wasn't a single one he didn't refer to as "innovative" "amazing" or "game-changing." This included such programs as tip calculators, die-rolling simulations and a virtual abacus.

So how long until Joel's internal thought process goes something like this: "Man, that virtual abacus really is pretty dude. But imagine how much more wanktastic it would be with the power of 3G?"

My guess? If he gets to Saturday without one, he's going to start seeing dead babies crawling on the ceiling.

We're now taking all bets, measured in hours and minutes from the time the iPhone goes on sale this morning in Brooklyn. Soothsay in the comments! No fair guessing, Xeni.

Image: Bizarre first hit for 'Joel Johnson' in Flickr, courtesy of the great spaghetti communist, Camillo Miller

Update: Joel is emphatically denying he ever called either the virtual abacus or iPhone tipping calculator "innovative." Needless to say, if true, this new information might add hours to the time it takes for Joel to crumple into a mess of primal, unthinking consumerist impulses. You should adjust your bets accordingly.

You came, you saw, you conquered. You backstabbed engineers, uber-ed pyros, farmed medic achievements and beat mesomorphic Austrians clean to death with baseball bats... all while the Boing Boing puppet masters clapped their hands in fey delight at the gladiatorial orgy they had Nero-like decreed.

And now we're ready to declare our awesomest player for last weekend's Boing Boing Team Fortress 2, with the adjective "awesomest" decided entirely by Happy Mutant whim. This player will receive a Neuros OSD video storage device. And by consensus, our winner is... Bunnystew. At over 10 hours logged into our server, Bunnystew was this weekend's most committed Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 player, by far. Congrats, Bunnystew! Drop brownlee at boing boing dot net an email to receive your prize.

For the rest of you guys, don't fear: we've got the server for a little while, and we'll schedule matches every weekend until we give it up. Thanks for playing, guys! See you this weekend.

So was the challenge—the winner to receive a Terabyte hard drive from Seagate, which is celebrating is billionth sale—and so are the many fantastic entries. What better way to celebrate Terabyte-size hard drives than with a competition concerning tiny filesizes?

We hated judging this. So we picked out some extra prizes from the gadget dungeon to reward as many submissions as possible. Congratulations, everyone! Winners past the jump.

"1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide."

That—making the most of limited resources—was our challenge to you. In return, we received a host of fantastic entries, ranging from short stories to procedural robot generators. Now comes the challenge of picking one to win a terabyte hard drive from Seagate, but not before we collect all the entrants in one place.

The gallery of 1K wonders follows after the jump.

We've had some fantastic entries, one of which will win a Terabyte hard drive courtesy of Seagate. Pictured here is Gabriel McGovern's 1k rendering of the Mona Lisa (resized from his original to give a better view).