As you can imagine, there are a whole lot of topics in the news that we'd really like to talk about this month. We even submitted a new slogan: "MIND: For After You've 'Sold Your Soul' Just to Win a Cheesy Contest." Sadly, our lawyers have advised us to "shut up," which is evidently some sort of arcane Legalese. So you won't get to hear all about our views on xxxxxxxxx, or xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx, or even xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Or even how xxxxxx xxx is a xxxxxxxxing xxxxxxxxx! Since we're severely hamstrung in what we can actually discuss, we've had to search the news for other stories that caught our eye.       Here's one. The White House recently proposed dedicating $8 million to setting up a Web site for job hunters. Eight million dollars! That might not seem like much when compared with the budget as a whole, but remember something: this effort will just be revisiting well-plowed Internet ground. As of this writing, the newsgroup misc.jobs.offered has 198,115 messages on it, and few if any seemed to be X-rated. But that's just Usenet. We want the convenience of today's Web! Fair enough. A trip to http://ny.yahoo.com showed not only the Yahoo! job classifieds, but 11 job banks, 13 temporary agencies, 273 individual resumes, 110 company job pages, and 100 recruiting and placement links.       Now we're no advocates of small government here. In fact, the more free cash payouts we get the better! But there might be a better way to spend tax dollars than creating a site that does nothing more than duplicate the efforts of small companies. Why should the government put these small firms out of business? It seems unfair that they should be compelled to remove the "Improve Your Resume" functionality of their sites just because it's not an integral part of job hunting.       As fresh as today's Spice Girls gossip, we have news on MSDN Web Snapshot CD that lucky readers received with their February issues. (If you read this magazine, you're automatically lucky, so all of you should have one.) If you've never installed Internet Explorer 4.0, Visual Basic 5.0, or any Visual Basic 5.0-based programs, your machine probably doesn't have MSVBVM50.DLL in the system directory. If this is the case, the CD won't autoplay correctly. Fortunately, there's a simple solution. Surf on over to http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/nts/downloads/recommended/NT4OptPk/NTRelNotesUpdate.asp for the workaround, a small (about 60KB) EXE that unpacks this DLL from the CD and puts it into your system directory so you can continue. This only affects the setup program; you can still browse the rest of the CD and install individual components if you feel up to it.       Continuing our round-the-globe coverage of the hot issues, we were recently tipped off to a story in Fortune magazine. Bless their hearts, Microsoft is looked upon in a positive light by 76 percent of all people polled. 10 percent looked upon Microsoft unfavorably. But we're almost positive that some of that 10 percent erased their cookies and voted twice, so that number'll probably go down even further after the recount. (The story was at http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980202/mic.html at press time, but we can't promise it'll still be there when you read this.)       Of course, the best stories of all are the ones that leave Earth entirely. It was announced recently that John Glenn would be on the space shuttle for a trip later this year. We're all for the elderly getting out and about, but that shuttle costs a lot of dough. Couldn't he have proven he was fit by taking an extra-vigorous walk around the mall one morning? (And yes, the grammar checker in Microsoft Word 97 did just suggest we change the previous sentence to "Couldn't he have proven taking an extra-vigorous walk around the mall one morning fit him?") We don't want to sound ageist here, so don't flood our inboxes with letters. We're not even going to use the joke about how the bus to the shuttle was held up for an hour as he was fumbling for exact change. Anyway, Glenn will probably have the last laugh on us all when his age resets to 14 on Jan 1, 2000.       Beyond mere elder-mocking, there's a more important point here. Is NASA doing this "experiment" for the scientific value? Or is this designed simply to make news and gather some good PR? If it's the latter, we suggest that they save this valuable seat on the shuttle for the real stuff, like scientists who want to train ants to make $150 pairs of sneakers or editors who want to see how well blue pencils work in the weightlessness of space. Does the Internet Explorer icon spin clockwise in space? Now we'll never know. —J.T.