Award-winning admaker Bill Hillsman tipped us off yesterday to one of those odd programming bugs that seem to afflict some software programs. When you type "Obama" into a Hotmail message and use spell-check, the program automatically suggests "Osama" as the correct spelling. See Bill's demonstration below.

He notes, "It's gotta be an easy fix-- just install Obama in the dictionary as MS obviously did with Osama after 9/11. Hell, Obama's only been a U.S. Senator for the last four years and a presidential candidate for nearly two... how long do you have to be high-profile before it dawns on them to do it?"

That's a good question. As the Tribune's Swamp blog reported, according to tests done by Hillsman's firm, other popular email programs -- AOL, Yahoo, and Google's Gmail -- know Obama is correctly spelled.

The Swamp's Mark Silva got this statement from Microsoft: "For the convenience of our customers, Windows Live Hotmail spell checking functionality helps provide suggested alternatives for words not recognized by the Hotmail dictionary, including suggestions for other words or proper names similar in spelling to the unrecognized term. These suggestions are based purely on spelling similarity with other already-recognized terms. While the Hotmail spell checker currently recognizes the term 'Barack,' it does not properly recognize the term 'Obama.' We are working to update the Hotmail dictionary to recognize 'Obama.'"