Today has been a pretty lucky day for myself.  Earlier today I won a bowling party at Frederick Lanes in Kitchener.  This was quite funny because I had just dropped my business card off 2 days earlier, after attending a free bowling party that a Twitter friend had won and invited me to.  This is a party with free bowling for up to 25 people, which is pretty awesome.  I think on any other day I would have been content with winning a bowling party and call it my lucky day.

As it turns out that was just the first thing I won.  At roughly 4pm I receive a direct message from @taptaptap telling me I won an iPad.

My first reaction to this was to source out whether this was in fact a scammer just trying to pull one over on me.  Checked the Twitter account, definitely legit.  I had entered the contest through TapTapTap to win an iPad. It was one of those follow this account, then tweet this message to win types of contests that are so popular on Twitter these days.  I entered once on the first day, then probably would have forgotten to enter any of the other days.  The contest was to promote the new Digg iPhone app that launched this week.

I’m not 100% sure whether it’s a case or some type of skin, but the iPad comes with a custom, individually numbered Colorware exterior which looks fantastic.  I’ve been a daily Digg user since 2005, so this will be quite the awesome item to own.

Once I got that DM from TapTapTap things just pretty much became a flurry of emails and activity.  They had announced that I was the first winner over Twitter, so basically my username got broadcast out to 70,000+ Twitter users.  At this point I started getting a deluge of congratulations from kindly Twitter users about my win, lots of friendly jibes about how jealous people were and how they were going to win one of the other 13 iPads that were up for grabs.  I started getting a deluge of notifications as people started following me on Twitter.  Up to this point I have roughly 40 new followers, which is pretty crazy.

I wrote a blog awhile back addressing some of the perceived shortcomings of the iPad, but never did I anticipate I’d actually end up getting one.  I kinda figured I’d wait until the second generation when the price dropped a bit.  As it is I’ve still got at least a month of painful waiting for my new iPad to arrive.  They told me it’ll be roughly 3-6 weeks after the promotion ends, which means since I won on day 1 it’ll be 5-8 weeks wait.  They have to wait to get the iPads from Apple, then they need time to do the customization, then send it out.