I entered an online competition through ninemsn.com on Thursday 16th November 2000 for a $1000 travel voucher from www.travelshop.com.au and won! Yes, the competition was valid for one day only, and it said you could enter as often as you’d like to. I decided I’d like to enter as often as I liked, having always been a sucker for that sort of competition.

In fact, a couple of you might recall me liking that style of competition so much that I once lost email access for a week since someone set up a cycling survey that said “vote often”, but then turned out to have set all incoming entries to their email address, so they complained I was using my Uni email for non-research purposes, and the people in the IT department shut down my email account as a result. The irony of the situation? The person who complained was a lecturer at a University, and had set up their Uni email account to be the one where all survey results went to. Still, being a lecturer, their behaviour was perfectly acceptable, whereas I the postgraduate student was clearly in the wrong…*mutter mutter*

But I digress.

The ninemsn competition seemed to be a good chance to pick up a hefty discount off the travels, and so I spent 35 minutes sitting in front of the computer with two browser windows opening, entering the competition with one, while pressing the “back” button on the other, before pressing the “back” button on the first window, and entering the competition again with the second window. All in all, four hundred and nineteen entries were lodged in quick succession. Assuming maybe 1000 other entries were lodged for the day, there would be a 1 in 3 chance of me winning.

And I won!

So, let this be a lesson to you kiddies. Pay attention in statistics when the lecturer describes the odds of winning, and the sorts of lotteries one should enter into. Pick the ones you can win, and not the ones that are not worth taking part in.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001