at a trade show -- that's how I got mine.

I also picked up a small Swiss army knife as a freebie from Maxon (Swiss company which makes micromotors).

Of course, someone at Semicon West 2001 was giving away Razor scooters; I'm sure they ran out very quickly.

Best prize I've won so far at a trade show was a Microchip development kit (about $150), but one of my buddies won a one year license to a C chip compiler (converts C code to VHDL/Verilog which can then be compiled to RTL and used to program a FPGA or create a mask for a custom chip) -- list price was something like $75K, and renewal (after the first year) was over $10K. And, yes, he did use it a bit.

Tony
Hey, if you want Smalltalk/Ruby/Perl/Python/etc to really fly, maybe you should write a compiler to VHDL or Verilog, then build a computer with a bunch of huge Xilinx or Altera FPGA's.....