Month: August 2009

Win a SIGNED copy of Adventures in the Dream Trade by Neil Gaiman!

Still can’t get enough of Neil Gaiman? Here is your chance to win a SIGNED copy of Neil Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade (trade paperback edition)!

SIGNED by Neil Gaiman
SIGNED by Neil Gaiman

This giveaway is part of Avalon.ph (still) celebration of our 10th year online. We are one of the longest running online shopping websites in the country. You can read a quick history and timeline here.

Adventures in the Dream Trade is one of Neil Gaiman’s harder-to-find book locally. The book covers Neil Gaiman’s web log during the publication of American Gods, some essays, introductions, stories, poems and song lyrics.

Just how can you win this amazing signed book?

Complete this phrase: “Ten years ago……..”

Be creative, sentimental, funny or just be honest! Feel free to add images if you write your entry in your blogs. I reserve the right to disqualify tasteless entries.

So how to submit an entry?

Easy/basic:

a) Answering in the comments section below gives you one (1) point.

or

b) Answering in your blog, with a link back to this post gives you three (3) points. You must mention Avalon.ph in your blog entry. Note: one blog per person/entry.

On blog entries, I will award you one (1) extra point if I like your post. This will be purely based my personal discretion and I expect myself to be stingy with it.

Basically that’s it, you are now qualified to win this Neil Gaiman signed book.  But wait! Want to have more chances of winning? We are giving options to submit more entries that’s worth the effort.

Advanced:

twitter– Twitter – one (1) extra point. You may also follow our Twitter account: avalonph. Twitter entries can be easily traced as long as you use the following tweet format:

RT @avalonph Win a SIGNED copy of Neil Gaiman’s Adventures in the Dream Trade! Exclusive giveaway only on www.avalon.ph #avalonph

I suggest you copy and paste before you tweet. Helpful comments before RT is okay, the rest must be entered once and as is during the contest period (Aug 26 – Sep 22). Please do not spam.

Sorry, no Plurk entries because their search system isn’t optimize to guarantee your entry gets counted.

– Purchases on Avalon.ph. For every valid purchase worth Php500.00 on Avalon.ph, you will earn one (1) extra point. This is valid during the contest period (Aug 26 – Sep 22) and must already be paid/fulfilled before the end of the contest period. There is no limit to the number of points to be awarded.

shareI’m tempted to include a Facebook point reward system but I believe that’s too much already. However, I will deeply appreciate if you “share” the contest details once it is posted in our Facebook Page. If you are not a fan of Avalon.ph yet, here’s our Facebook Page link: www.facebook.com/avalonph. We also have giveaways exclusive to our Avalon.ph Facebook Page Fans so make sure you add us up.

Adventures in the Dream Trade

This giveaway will run from August 26 until September 22, 2009, 11:59pm Manila time. Raffle is only open for those with a Philippine-based address that’s serviceable by major couriers. Raffle will be through Random.org or other facilities that can handle random drawing.

Raffle winner will be announced before 12:00nn September 23. We will exert best effort to communicate with the winner within 5 days, but if efforts fail we will use our discretion in choosing a new winner either through a re-draw or pick #2.

As much as we want everything fair and square there might be unseen issues. Loopholes or oversights regarding rules- common sense applies!

So what are you waiting for? Good luck! Most of all, reminisce something in your life ten years ago!

www.avalon.ph

Why You Should Get Pingdom For Your Website?

– This is an unsolicited post.

Pingdom tracks a website’s uptime and performance. In the unlikely incident your website goes down (that 0.0005% downtime), you will be alerted through e-mail.

pingdom

Pingdom.com started offering one website or server for monitoring for free a few months ago. Since a monitoring service is something I feel that’s essential for any website I signed up. Early this morning I received my first downtime e-mail alert:

Pingdom email

Website went back up after 3-4 minutes without issues.

I strongly suggest you take advantage of the free website monitoring offer of Pingdom.com. This is one way of silently monitoring the reliability of your webhost, besides it’s free – www.pingdom.com

– This is an unsolicited post.

New Titles Posted, Jul-Aug 2009 (1st)

The Reader

Unsorted:

The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri (1972)
Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman
Tatterhood and Other Tales
The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera
Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs
The Government Manual for New Wizards
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage by Kurt Vonnegut
Angels & Insects: Two Novellas by A.S. Byatt
How Rich Countries Got Rich… and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor by Erik S. Reinert (HB)
100 selected poems by e.e. cummings
Food: True Stories of Life on the Road (Travelers’ Tales)
Slam by Nick Hornby (Hardbound)
Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman
The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (Bradbury, Matheson)
A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin
Richard Matheson: Collected Stories Vol. 1
Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto
Just Curious, Jeeves : What Are The 1001 Most Intriguing Questions..
Surely, You’re Joking.. + What Do You Care… Richard P. Feynman 2-in-1
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (HB)
The Works of H.G. Wells (Leatherbound Collection)
The Awful Truths: Famous Myths, Hilariously Debunked
The Best American Poetry 1991 (Mark Strand)

Wicked
Wicked: The Life & Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
Introducing Postmodernism (Comic Book Form)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
The Vintage Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
Good Benito by Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie
Identity by Milan Kundera
Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The Directory of Possibilities by Colin Wilson & John Grant
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles by David Thomson
Cosmic Critiques: How & Why Ten Science Fiction Stories Work
The Lost Wine: Seven Centuries of French into English Lyrical Poetry by John Theobald
The Best American Poetry 2000 (Rita Dove, Guest Editor)
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories by Italo Calvino
Origami Sourcebook: Beautiful Projects & Mythical Characters by Jay Ansill
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan
The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Atonement by Ian McEwan (Movie Cover)

Happy shopping!

www.avalon.ph