THE WINNERS of the MATCH THE PEN TO THE PENMAKER CONTEST are.......

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mbroberg

IAP Activities Manager, Emeritus
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Coming in at 1st place, with a 100% correct entry received on February 7th at 8:10pm;

Winning A $50 Gift Certificate from R& B Crafts, 2# Resin Kit valued at $36 from Allumilite and a Box of Blanks valued @ $25 from Displaced Canadian!;


rholiday
Congratulations!​
 
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mbroberg

IAP Activities Manager, Emeritus
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Coming in at 2nd place, with a 100% correct entry received on February 7th at 8:23pm;

Winning a Gift Package from Bear Tooth Woods valued at $28, A Box of Blanks valued at $25 from Southernclay and a 1# Resin kit valued at $20 from Allumilite!;


edohmann
Congratulations!​
 

southernclay

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Whoa that's awesome! That was a fun contest and awesome to look at all of the pens. Congrats to the other winners.

Edgar, how cool, looks like we are swapping boxes with each other! Good stuff!

Mike thanks for running the game!
 

rholiday

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Woohoo!!!

Thanks everyone! Congrats to the other winners.

A big thanks to Mike for running the contest and to the vendors and members that donate prizes for these events. It is much appreciated!

Bob
 

Edgar

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Awesome! Congrats to the other winners & thanks to Mike for running the contest. It was quite challenging & a lot of fun. I was surprised at how many of these great pens that I couldn't remember having seen before.

Warren, I'm looking forward to our BOB exchange - should be fun!

Edgar
 

southernclay

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Hey Mark,
I went through them all and answered the ones I recognized and verified a few I was pretty sure on. The others I did an advanced search, searching only the show off your pens forum and using the username function of who started the thread. I started with members names I didn't remember seeing a lot of pens posted by. I took a couple of guesses near the end but they were semi informed, semi lucky : )
 

Edgar

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congrats to the winners.
to help the newbies out. How was the best way to discover the answers.

At the risk of never being able to win one of these contests again, here is what I did...

1. Copied all the full size pen images into a folder on my computer, so I could open them all in a Preview window and quickly scroll through them. (Preview is a built-in Mac app - I'm sure there is something similar on Windows).

2. Copied all the User IDs of the pen makers into an Excel spreadsheet & added a column for the matching photo number.

3. Opened a browser window to the IAP Member List page. Clicked on the Search Members button and used copy/paste to enter a user ID from the spreadsheet into the search field (faster than typing).

4. Clicked on the User ID, then Statistics, then All Threads Started by the Member. Then looked for postings to the Show Off Your Pens forum during 2014. Opened each of those threads in a separate tab and checked to see if one of those pens matched the images in the folder by having the browser window & the Preview window open side by side for easy comparison.

5. I also had the contest form open in a Word document window & when I found a match, I would enter the User ID into the word form and the pen number into the appropriate column on the spreadsheet. That made it easy to keep track of which ones I had identified and which ones I hadn't.

6. After every 10 or so pens that I matched, I moved those images out of the folder and reopened the remaining ones with Preview. By trimming the set down this way, it saved time scrolling through all the photo images when I was looking for a match to the SOYP threads.

As a bit of a strategy, I tried to start with User IDs that I don't see very often. Some of the folks whose pens were included in the contest only had a very few postings during 2014 -- that made it a lot easier to find their pens at the start. I saved those users who post frequently until my image folder was down to the last 10 or so photos.

At the start, there was only one pen photo that I was absolutely sure who had made it. There were several photos where I thought I knew the penmaker, but wasn't confident enough to just guess, so I had to search for 48 photos (one I knew & the last one was known by default).

I arranged the Preview, browser, Excel & Word windows on my screen as best I could for rapid switching between apps & even simultaneous viewing of some windows. This was all done on my 13" Apple AirBook screen, so the windows were a little small at time. The large dual-screen setup that I have at work would have been a lot easier.

I hope this is of some help if we have a similar contest next year.

Edgar
 

rholiday

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I did not recognize any of the pen / maker combinations. So, I did an advanced search, searching only the show off your pens forum and using the username function of who started the thread. I started with members names that had not posted a lot of pens. Also , kept a list on paper of the ones I found so I could narrow it down. The last two I did not find explicitly, but one picture had an item, (a stone that the pen rested on that was used in other pics by the one maker), so I decided that was a match.
 

mbroberg

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When I prepared this contest someone told me that it would be too easy. Was it? If we do it again maybe there should be more choices (100+) and/or not specify a time period in which the photo was originally posted. I wanted to make it challenging, but not impossible or overly frustrating.

How about 100 pictures of pens but no list of names. They could have been made by anyone!:eek:
 

edicehouse

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Suffolk, VA
mbroberg, I don't see anything wrong with how you did it. The only thing I might change is it be a random drawing for prizes. The second day if you enter you just about know the top 3 are all ready claimed, and you are just doing it for fun. But then there again that also keeps the number of entrants down.
 
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