The Ten Thousand Thank Yous Giveaway Winner is...

When starting the Gundariumsmith blog, I had the intention of occasionally creating videos - either video reviews or holding a pseudo-podcast with some friends. Though I haven't reached that goal, I wanted to experiment with the tools on hand,

• Audio: M-Audio Producer USB
• Music: (mostly) Royalty Free
• Video: Canon Powershot SX150 (same camera for photography)
• Images: from the blog or from raffle entries.

Besides the full raffle process below, the contents of this blog entry, including the winner of the "Ten Thousand Thank Yous" Giveaway, is on the video. I hope you enjoy seven long minutes of nothing but my monotonous voice.

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Raffle Process
The responses were all put on Google Sheets, Google's spreadsheet program. From here I made sure each entry and his or her additional entries qualified. On a separate spreadsheet, I added each redditor's entry as many times as he or she qualified in one column. For example, if /u/ForExample submitted a photo of her workspace, she got ForExample entered into two cells, representing two entries into the raffle.

This is where it gets a little crazy. Before using a random number generator, I decided to further randomize the drawing by shuffling the names. I achieved this through some features on Google Sheets I learned from my Dad (through Microsoft Excel).

Figure 1: An example of what the function "RANDBETWEEN" might look like.

In a separate column, I typed in "=RANDBETWEEN(1,xx)" and dragged this function from the first name to the last. I copied the randomly generated numbers and pasted "values only" (found in "Paste Special" menu when right clicking).

Figure 2: Where to find "Paste values only," converting RANDBETWEEN to solid numbers

With these random numbers, I selected the column and sorted A through Z, sorting the random numbers 1-xx. Though the numbers are sorted, the names are now randomized.

Figure 3: Highlighted to show how sorting the numbers will shuffle the names.

From here, using RANDOM.ORG's random number generator, I produce the winning number and look for the name on the corresponding row number, revealing the 10k Giveaway winner - watch the video to see who won!