Sunday, Valentines day was the Big Contest Give Away of a Useless Machine.

I asked that comments be left on the above video, no more than one per day.  You also had to subscribe to my YouTube channel to qualify.  After the deadline a comment would be picked at random, and the writer of the comment would win a machine.

1180 comments were left.  There were lots of great comments, but creativity wasn’t a prerequisite.  Just the dedication to come back many times and type a few characters.  And to read the instructions.  Some folks didn’t realize that channel comments didn’t count, or that you couldn’t post more than once a day.

I kept my own replies to a minimum, only replying to the cool ones, and others asking questions. If one of my replies ended up being the winning comment, then the person I replied to would be considered the winner. So creative comments had a better chance to win.

At noon eastern time I turned off permission for comments on the video, and then went to a random number generator on the web.   Generated a random number betweeb one and 1180.

It came back with 669.  Now I’m not into numerology, but I’m pretty sure numerologists would have a field day wit’ dat one.  If it’s some kind of omen, I’m happy to report (or sad if the numerology can be believed), that nothing significant has happen.  I think I might have used up some of my luck with the previous video.

Now when it comes to how Youtube displays the comments, I could just forward to the 500th comment and then from there count down 169 to find the winner. Of course, the 669th comment was one of about 15 identical comments posted by a viewer one after another on the same day. So that person voided the rules disqualifying the entry.

No problem, I had anticipated something like this happening. So I got out my lucky loonie, and flipped it in the air.  Heads, the previous valid comment wins, tails the following comment.  Tails it was.

The lucky winner turned out to be hescreem34 from Forest Hills, New York

I also auctioned one on E-Bay: You can see it here.  Half of the proceeds from the auction are going to be donated to the Haitian relief effort, if Paypal will ever release the funds.  Feel free to rant and complain to them.  Maybe it’ll help speed up things.

That’s it for this second post on my new WordPress Blog.  Please check back soon, I’ll be posting about my viral Useless Machine video that led to this crazy contest.