Phillip's 2015 Cairns to Cooktown Ride for the FNQ Hospital Foundation

News from the Cycling Yogis 2015 Team:

5/1/2016 The raffle results: Biannka B of Kuranda receives a shiraz, Ken McCormack of Mareeba receives some German beer, and Jan D from Cairns Sheridan St news receives a digital (homebrew) clock.

23/9/2015 The ride has been completed (some nasty cramps but no crashes this year). I won't draw the raffle for a few more weeks in the hope that some late sponsors might still join in the draw (crikey, surely everyone wants more microprocessor electronics or classy wine in their life...).

---

Cycling Yogi 2015

I am again riding in the 2015 Cairns to Cooktown Cardiac Challenge bicycle ride to raise funds for the FNQ Hospital Foundation. If you would like to sponsor my efforts, visit my official fund raising web site. All of my sponsors enter my raffle described below.
  
News from the 2014 raffle: Lynne received the first prize (Raspberry Pi choice, inedible) and Doris received the second prize of beer (for the second year running, and it matched her Bavarian origin)###.
  
The 2015 Cycling Yogis team has members Christal, Bob, and Phil. This also a family effort as my mother, an uncle & aunt, and their cousins are volunteering in the organisation team.

So not sure what all the fuss is about? We have: 
  - a range climb first thing in the morning (Kuranda), 
  - annoying head winds (Mareeba to Mt Molley),
  - very cold nights (Mt Carbine & Lakeland),
  - a very steep range climb (Desailly ... a cycling challenge),
  - BBQ and beer at Lakeland (a different kind of challenge),
  - there are cattle grids (which remove "optional" bike attachments),
  - there are also very large fury animals grazing along the way.
It is ≈330km from Cairns to Cooktown! Many bananas, many chocolate muesli bars, sometimes many tyres and tubes are consumed.

Raffle Prizes for Sponsors

The 1st prize is a Kellermeister Wild Witch Shiraz (yes, I did buy a few of these). Some red wines are a bit ho-hum but the thing about the Wild Witch is the really interesting avalanche of flavours cavorting in your mouth. And that is just from the first taste ... this is a very enjoyable wine. The 2nd prize is a 6-pack of German beer chosen by Annett (who has a lot of practical knowledge regarding the drinking of German beer). Annett would have loved to ride the bike again this year (so she says...) but will instead drive the Yeti and stay in luxurious hotels! The 3rd prize is a (slightly) geeky Arduino Pro Mini microcomputer with a small backlit LCD module and an I2C crystal locked time reference that allows it to be a very accurate clock. Everyone likes clocks (well I do) and this assembled system just needs a case***.

How the draw is conducted:
We use arc4random_uniform(), so familiar to *BSD and OS-X users e.g. see this C++ program which randomly select two winners. It all just works.


Q&(possible)A:
If anyone sends me a question, I'll append it and an answer to the comments section below.



### I still have the pre-loved copy of the MSDOS OS programmer's manual from sometime last century which was offered as a raffle prize last year (and the year before). I've now deduced that typical Cardiac Challenge supporters just do not go for this sort of reward. However, you're free (indeed encouraged) to try to persuade me otherwise if you win any of the above prizes.

*** The source code for the AVR processor to access the Dallas Semi RTC is yet to be written so I'm really hoping someone with decent coding skills gets this prize. Otherwise I will finish the clock code I guess.

Reference: 2014 ride blog with lots of supporter comments!