Follow-up: Small Person, Big Life

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Madeline Spohr and her awesome, happy, life. We rallied around and others were picking up the torch to carry on Maddies name in support of the March of Dimes. I did the same with a small token of my appreciation for your support to help the Spohr family by donating a copy of MSDN Premium Subscription with Team Suite to a random donation (every $10 donation got you a chance to win).

Sorry for the lapse in follow-up but I did pick a winner on April 20th. In fact, two of them. The response was overwhelming and while I don’t know the final total (the number keeps growing) there’s been thousands of dollars donated to help the Spohr family out and over $50,000 donated to the March of Dimes in Maddies honour. That totally rocks! Again, I am so totally beside myself by the power of the Internet and the humanity and generosity of peoples. Strangers even. Strange people too.

Like I said, I decided to kick in not one, but two copies of the MSDN Subscription so the winning entries were drawn and the two recipients are Ray Houston, and Dave Burke. Both cool geeks in their own right.

The winners were chosen using a tool located at the random.org site. Random.org provides services to generate (fairly) random numbers via atmospheric noise using a discrete uniform distribution method. A good explanation of how random numbers work are on the site here.

On the home page there’s a form where you enter a min and max number, then click Generate. It comes up with a random number in the range you provided. As I was picking two entries, I didn’t want to enter the form twice. While it is “random” there’s that possibility it could come up with the same number.

If you visit the Integer page, you can enter the number of random numbers you want the site to generate for you. I also decided to put a little bit of a Maddie spin on it (thank goodness for Advanced Options!). If you click on the Advanced Options there’s a new set of choices that open up. In the Randomization Section you can choose the randomization method. I selected option 2, to use a pregenerated randomization from a specific date. For the date I chose Maddie’s birthday, 11/11/07. Seems fitting that she gets to choose the winners.

Thanks to everyone who donated to what I consider a very worthy cause. I really appreciate your support and just wanted to help out Mike and Heather.

If you’re really looking to pick up your spirits these days, check out Heather’s speech here (or below) at the March of Dimes walk a few days ago in Los Angeles (via YouTube). Trust me, you won’t be closing your browser dry eyed after watching this.

Thank you!