My essay wan't an essay at all. I took the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and replaced various Lifes, Liberties and Pursuits of Happinesses with Instant Replays, TrickPlays and Pursuits of TiVolution. And it still won.TiVo claims to be giving away 10 14-hr units a day in an essay contest -- which can't be true, considering that about 3 dozen Metafilter readers have won today (see above), myself included. The catch is that you have to give them your credit card info and pay at least $9.95 for one month of service -- not bad considering the 15GB hard drive alone has got to be worth more than ten bucks. I'm going to be spending some time with the Hacking the TiVo FAQ to see if I can't turn this thing into a 52 hour beast.
If you're interested, the contest claims to judge essays on humor, creativity, and content (discussion of TiVo features) but lots of winning entries barely include the word TiVo at all. The real question is: how do they pick the losers?
