The World Needs More Ninjas

One of our friends are in a neck-and-neck battle online to win Kleenex’s #1 Fan for Life contest. The deal is you submit a story and people vote on their favorites once per day (so, if you vote on Sunday, you can vote on Monday as well). To the victor goes the spoils of a digital camera for both the person that submitted the story and the person that the story was about.

Right now, our friend, Valerie Smith, is behind by about 5 votes last time I checked…so ya’ll can help pull her over the top and get her and her sister that digital camera.

The contest ends on Monday (March 6) at 11:50 pm EST, so you have time to put in a vote for her today and tomorrow depending on when you read this. To vote, follow this link (yea, you have to do one of those registration things with an email address). Then, vote for Valerie and Rebecca’s story from Champaign, IL.

Update: Valeries barely lost. From Valerie’s husband, Will (yes, Will Smith):

As you all know, I have been leading a campaign to get votes for Valerie for the contest (the reason you know this is that I have been pestering you to vote)! Well, the contest is finally over, but we don’t know the winner, and that is an interesting story that goes something like this…

Yesterday was the final day of the voting (it was a 7 day contest) and Valerie and a teacher from New Jersey were neck and neck all day. Valerie started to pull away during the late afternoon and had a 12-20 vote lead (total votes at this time
were around 550). At around 7pm, Adam and Rebecca (Valerie’s sister) made it back to Korea from Thailand and they started contacting all the people that they knew. By 8pm, Valerie was up close to 40 votes, but the teacher was getting votes at a steady pace (she had 614 at 8pm). So we had bombarded everyone we knew, what else would a successful politician do, but go harass people they don’t know…

So we took to the streets (we went onto campus), but before we started our crusade, we checked the votes: 668 Valerie; 630 hated teacher from New Jersey. The University of Illinois has a great engineering program a we witnessed last night of students filling the engineering computer labs. We harassed these unsuspecting students for votes and managed to get quite a few. We tried to limit it to those who weren’t doing homework but we became desperate as the competition was coming to a close (the end was at 10:50 CST; 11:50 EST) and our rival was gaining ground. Now everyone was fair game…Valerie interrupted someone taking an online quiz (she decided she
didn’t have time to vote), I bugged some undergrads working on their design project, all of the computer lab workers were fair game. We were averaging 4 votes per computer lab (some students didn’t see the magnitude of this contest and thought that their studies were more important then helping out complete strangers, crazy kids). We stopped at every engineering computer lab on campus, but we were losing ground.
The curse of Microsoft reared its ugly head as numerous computers hung up during the registration…and the votes were getting closer. We then discovered that Firefox didn’t have any problems and the registration data was already saved…we made a last ditch effort to go back to interrupt those students that we willing to spares some time put Internet Explorer was trying to deny the equal voting opportunity. At 10:49pm we finished up the last willing student and the votes we were up 8. There was still another minute, but the official time was to be kept on the administers computer clock. We
hoped that his clock matched ours…

We walked back to my office (~5min) and checked the results…the enemy from New Jersey 753, Valerie 750. I refreshed it again: New Jersey devil (that is for all you
hockey fans) 754; Valerie 750. So what does this mean…we don’t know. We know that on Saturday night someone voted at 11:01 CST and the vote counted for Sunday and not Saturday, so hopefully the administrator’s clock was right. At 11:00 CST,
the next week’s competition started and our pictures were taken down…so now we wait for the official tally and results…

As Valerie’s campaign manager, I want to thank each of you for taking the time to vote during your busy schedules…it was greatly appreciated because every voted was crucial. (And if you didn’t vote, SHAME ON YOU!!!) And a special thanks to all
of those you badgered others to vote as well!!! Hopefully it was a successful campaign, but it was definitely a learning experience…and a to leave you with a quote for last night’s efforts. As we were refreshing the computer screen Valerie’s dad exclaimed in an exasperated voice, “This is worse than election night!!!!”

Anyone interested in the results, they should be posted on the link that I sent out sometime (last week they were up by noon). Just click on the “Winners” tab at the top of the page. Well I guess just like the election in 2000, we don’t even know the winner after election night…hopefully this one doesn’t involve any legal battles!