Ilium Software Blog

Our big tenth anniversary party is over now, and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped us celebrate. I know I had a lot of fun with the contests on this blog, and I hope you guys did too.

Speaking of blog contests, there’s still one more contest to announce the winners to. We spent some time and voted on our favorite five haikus, and the winners are: spmwinkel, Dave, Tim Heimerl, doog, and Mark Jones. Congrats to everyone! All of the submitted haikus were really creative, and you can read them in the comments to this post. The winners should see an email from me shortly requesting their info so I can ship out their swag packets.

Thanks once more to everyone, and we’ll do it again next year!

It’s time for another contest, and since you guys did so well making up captions for our anniversary picture, we decided to see if we could squeeze any more creativity out of you!

For this contest, all you need to do is write seventeen syllables about mobile devices. Or about Ilium Software. That’s it! Of course, the technicality is that they need to be in the form of a haiku. Before you rush out and dust off your old textbooks – let me remind you what haiku is all about, and the rules for this contest:

1. Haiku is a quick little poem, three lines long, consisting of 17 syllables
2. The first line is 5 syllables, the second is 7, and the third line is 5 again
3. Your haiku entry must be related to mobile devices or software in general
4. If you want to earn some extra points from the judges, write a haiku related to Ilium Software!

Want some examples? This site defines haiku for you, and has some sample poems. And check out this page too for some pretty humorous haikus. Oh, and our judges are a little lenient, too. If you think of something really, REALLY cool to write, but it’s one or two syllables too long, go ahead and submit it anyway! We’re not sticklers; just don’t write an entire sonnet! Keep them as short and sweet as possible.

Because sometimes you can’t rush creativity, I’m going to let this contest run until Monday, at 8:00 a.m. EST. Then we’ll choose our five favorite haikus. The winners will get an Ilium Software swag pack – 2 click-pen styluses, one stick stylus, and one luggage tag, and the chance to have your haiku read at the next Ilium Software Annual Poetry Slam. Oh, and as mentioned in the blog title, here is Ode to a Pocket PC, my example for the contest:

I grow impatient

As you sit in your cradle

Recharging for me

It’s time to announce the winners of our recent caption contest. We stayed up all night, and even had a couple of pretty good screaming matches trying to decide….well, maybe not. But  there were a lot of great entries, so it wasn’t easy!

 The winners, in no particular order, are:

1. Jaimie Birk: “It was a banner day at the Ilium Home for Wayward Programmers.”
2. spmwinkel: “The Ilium Software team shows the result of another productive day”
3. Judy Dye: “The Harry Potter Wizard theme party got off to a slow start. Only 2 people managed to conjure up non-standard hats”
4. Brian: “This is the best picket line I’ve ever been on! Hats and streamers! Just wait until those scabs at Developer One show up to work!”
5. David Tucker: “Don’t laugh at our thinking caps. When all 10 of us touch the tips of our hats together, our brainpower is amplified beyond all human imagination.”
6. Joe D: “Kirk to Enterprise: Scotty, we have installed NewsBreak 2.0 on our tricorders. Nine to beam up.”
7. Melvyn: “The new range of Ilium Garden Gnomes promises to make your lawn the talk of the town.”
8. Ernie: “Ok, ok, just so you promise you won’t post this picture on the webpage”
9. Aaron: “It’s been 10 years, can we take the hats off now?”
10. Timothy: “See I told you..We couldn’t get jobs at Jack in the Box, but the hats came in handy anyway!”

Congrats – you should see an email from me shortly, so I can get the info I need to send out your prizes! Thanks to everyone for playing, there were a lot of funny entries. I’ll have another contest up and running soon!