DreamHost still sucks, but it helped Elliott Bäck win an iPod in the June iPod shuffle giveaway.

About the Winner

Elliott, of Elliott C. Back: Your Modern Peter Pan, wrote a post about DreamHost (Dreamhost Sucks At Hosting), which included a prominent link to a post on Upstart Blogger (Why Dreamhost Sucks). His post was dugg, eventually receiving almost 1500 diggs. As a result, he had more than a few entries in my logs.

I sent him an email on July 1st to inform him of his good fortune, but it must have been snagged by his spam filter. So today, I called him to break the good news and we exchanged a few emails.

For winning I’m quite suprised. I remembered seeing your shuffle contest, but I didn’t pay it any attention—in fact I’d forgotten I’d linked to you from the Dreamhost article! I have exceptional luck!

Elliott already has an iPod, so I asked him why he chose the iPod shuffle instead of taking the cash. “Well, I have trouble with electronic cash, ala paypal. It doesn’t feel real to me and I spend it too freely.” (I probably have that to blame for these giveaways.)

He picked green for the color and had it engraved, In aere aedificare, “Built in the air.” Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter n, Occam’s razor (”Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”), was too long.

Congratulations, Elliott! You iPod shuffle should be there soon.

How the Winner Was Picked

You might be wondering how the winner was picked.

I woke up Sunday morning, July 1st, and said to my wife, “Hey, today’s the first. I have to give an iPod shuffle away today.”

“Really? How are you going to decide who to give it to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I can decide however I want. I guess I’ll just pick somebody at random.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Well, I could look to see the total number of entries in my logs, find some random number picker on the web, and pick a number.”

“How many entries do you have?”

“Thousands,” I said. “Tens of thousands!”

“Oh,” she said. “Then it’s 13,155. That’s the winner.”

And just like that, 13,155 become Elliott Bäck’s lucky number.

I’m giving away another iPod shuffle this month.

What’s your lucky number?