I'm Garrett. As stated in my quote, I was already in the library all day for the air-conditioning, and thought this would be a fun way to waste some time. My submission was the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" highlighted in the article. It was honestly shocking how obvious of a patent it was, it basically just described an online yellow pages. I could find one of those before 2004, easy. Internet Archive wayback machine, away!

I -really- could have used the winnings back then, (I made my submission ~4 years ago), but hey, it all worked out in the end. I'm an SRE living in SF now, with my own apartment in a nice neighborhood. Still no AC though.

I went back to the blog article to read about Garrett. Pretty awesome attitude in this case!