Ilium Software Blog

Some of you may have noticed that we haven’t run our usual monthly blog contest since May. Of course, many of you probably didn’t mind, since the reason we skipped a month was due to our 11th anniversary in June. Instead of picking one winner, we picked something like 30. (Really, I’m not going to go back and count, but I’m sure you’ll agree that there were a lot of happy people on this blog last month.)

But no birthday celebration can last forever, and we now return you to your regular contest. I was interested to see if the name I pulled out of the hat would be from one of our anniversary contest winners…but it wasn’t. Then I thought, certainly it’ll at least be from one of the anniversary contest posts – after all, there were so many. Wrong again. For June, the lucky winner is Dave L, for commenting on the post The Revolutionary iPhone App Store. Congratulations! I just sent you an email explaining how to get your prize. If you don’t receive it, reply to this post and let me know.

So there you have it, folks. All it takes is leaving a comment, and you never know what might happen. Be sure to stay tuned to our blog, because not only will you be the first to hear about all of our exciting news – you could win a prize too!

You know, I found that trying to write a double dactyl was really difficult. I’m glad to see that for many of you, it was the opposite, and that gave us a lot of great entries to read this morning.

The first prize of a $121 Amazon gift card, plus a complete package of our software and swag, goes to Bob. If you’ve scrolled through the comments this weekend, you probably know Bob wrote quite a few, and it was hard to pick just one. We especially enjoyed the ones about Freud, the racecar, and – well, like I said, they we all really good!

The runners-up, who each receive a complete package of our software as well as some cool swag, are Will Lane and Laura. We also thought the double dactyls from daverage and Charley were top-notch, but since they are friends/family of some of us here, we can’t offer any prizes for those entries. Matt and Marc churned out several great double dactyls here at the office while we were preparing for the contest; I was impressed, because as I said, I felt like my brain was going to explode when I tried to make even one. If you haven’t read the comments yet, go check them out!

To all the winners – I’ll be sending out an email to each of you with details on how to get your prizes, so keep an eye on your Inbox and Spam folders too!

Now, as you know, this was our final contest. All good things must come to an end, and so too for our anniversary party. But I do want to thank everyone for helping us celebrate our 11th birthday – we had a blast reading all the contest entries, and I hope you had fun playing along and reading the results as well. Stay tuned to our blog, because even though the next anniversary is a long way off, we’ll be running contests again in the meantime, as well as keeping you informed on everything else that goes on around here. Thanks again!

Today’s contest is a little harder than the others have been. But – that means you’ll have less competition for the prizes! We’re asking you to write, and send us, a double dactyl.

What’s a double dactyl? Here’s the definition, plus a few examples. To be clear, we’re asking for the 8-line poem, not just two dactyls in a row. Here are a few more examples, though I’d take issue with the third one. There are many others online too, you don’t have to look hard to find them.

They don’t have to be about handhelds, mobile, or any kind of tech – we’re adding no restrictions to the ones imposed by the form. Just write a double dactyl following the rules (8 lines in the correct meter, 2 rhyming verses, one proper name, one single-word line).

It’s not really as hard as it sounds, once you get started. I gave people here a few days to work on theirs, and at least some of us had a hard time stopping.

We’ll judge and announce winners on Monday, so you can have all weekend to work on them.

Good luck!

This is the last contest in our week-long 11 year anniversary celebration. We’ll give away one $121 Amazon gift certificates for the best and funniest entry, and runner-up prizes of a complete package of our software and swag to many others. Enter as many times as you like, by sending your entry as a reply to this post. Employees and friends of Ilium Software aren’t eligible to win the prizes, but are welcome (and encouraged) to participate anyway. Today’s contest closes at 9:00 a.m. eastern time Monday morning.