I just happened to be on the server, doing a little maintenance this morning and I noticed the bubble count on the admin. page was 499,998. I refreshed and it was 500,003. What are the odds? We are running a contest for the 500,000th bubble and I happen to be there to witness it.

The database tells me the lucky 500,000th bubble belongs to James, a 2nd day trial user from London. James now gets a free account for life. Congratulations James! And congratulations to the BubbleTimer community for tracking over 7 and a half million minutes. That's a lot of minutes!

As a side note to the contest, while digging out the 500,000th bubble, the database also told me there have been 628,105 bubbles created, even though there are just over 500,000 in the database. This tells me that roughly 20% of the time we change our mind over what to bubble. What a fickle bunch we are!

Since bubbles can go away, there are two interpretations to the contest. There is the 500,000th bubble stored in the database, and the 500,000th bubble ever created. I had the former in mind, but by the latter measure, we have a different winner, and in fact, we had a winner a month or so ago before the contest even started. How's that for a little psuedo time travel

Alas, we can't know who that winner was because when I checked the database it turns out that the 500,000th bubble is part of that fickle 20%. It is gone, having been replaced by another bubble. Whoever you are, Mr. or Mrs. 500,000th bubbler, we salute you along with James.