My motivation for taking part in this contest (or at least, having written something that vaguely fulfills the requirements although I won't be sending it in due to lack of time) is the plain fun. I know how to use the modules from CPAN (LWP and Date::Manip in my case), and I know how to download something programmatically from the web, so I left these parts out as trivial. This contest gave me a nice challenge to think about a good control flow for such a program, together with a closely defined boundary. Playing with regular expressions and somemwhat striving for elegance, this was more like a scribbling and/or sketching session to me than the attempt to deliver a painting (and I don't think my scribbling is worth finnishing up and sending it in).

As I am too lazy to compete now (or afraid to show my inability), this contest has brought me some time of goal-oriented pondering much like other brain-teasers or searches for algorithms do as well - I find such things relaxing and entertaining.

Another thing contributing to my lazyness was the factor that the contest will be/will have been decided by the ability to time a mail transfer to jcwren such that the mail arrives/is sent at 00:00h EST. On the other side, the obvious problem (as discussed above by AgentM) is the problem of ranking, and time of arrival is one good method to judge.