New for Summer: Soft-in-Head Ware

Are your neighbors space aliens? Your computer could tell you, if you’d paid attention to last year’s first annual Weird Software Contest.

Now you’ve got another chance. The second annual contest is underway in San Diego, and already some 250 entries, most of them indisputably strange, have poured in.

“The one from Norway was a little off-center,” says Kevin Leap, associate publisher of ComputorEdge, the weirdly spelled magazine running the contest. “It’s about American whaling terrorists.”

The contest--first prize is $250 each for the weirdest visual and text-based programs--is part of the annual San Diego Computer Fair, sponsored by the magazine. Winners will be announced on opening day, Sept. 10. The magazine will accept entries until “about mid-August,” Leap says, Entries will be judged by a panel of computer columnists.

Last year’s winners were the space-alien program and a screen-saver featuring bungee-jumping cows. The developer responsible for that one is back this year with a flying-toilet screen-saver. Options, said Leap, include Elvis.