Anyway, yester-eve we had a meeting of the Apple AM committee and agreed most of the final details of the Apple AM Lottery, a fund raising lottery with a high chance of winning the top prize.

The top prize is 50% of the week’s ticket sales, and ticket sales are limited to 2,000. This means that at worst you would stand a 1 in 2000 chance of winning, and if we sell all the tickets, the prize each week will be £1,000!

The reason for us doing this is to help fund our bid to become Taunton’s Community Radio Station, not restricted to Hospital Radio. That will allow us to move to FM broadcasting, and to reach out to members of our community who currently don’t get a lot of inclusion – people like lone carers, people with visual impairment, and older people who do not seem to get a fair proportion of radio programme coverage.

So, if you want to take part in, or find out more about the new Apple AM Community Lottery drop me an email to lottery@appleam.com and I will add you to the list of people who want to know more.

There are some major differences, however.

• Ours will be by annual subscription at just £13 a quarter
• It will be limited to just 2,000 tickets
• Half the payment fund will be paid out in a single prize each week
• The rest will go to support, run and expand your favourite local radio station

So, if you buy a ticket it will be by standing order or four post-dated cheques for just £13 each. If we sell all 2000, then each week you will stand a 1-in-2000 chance of winning £1,000

Check back on the Apple AM web site for more detail in the coming weeks. If you are interested in being one of the first to sign up, fill in our contact form and we will add you to the list of interested people

If you have just stumbled upon this by accident, you might want to know a little about me. Well, I am a Forty-something (just) presenter on Apple AM : Taunton Hospital Radio, with a wife, three daughters, and as if that wasn’t enough, one grand-daughter!

I am a linux-loving geek type who tries to use FOSS in almost everything IT-based which I do, although I am often stymied by systems which “only work with Windows” or people who evangelize one system over another and won’t consider that there are alternatives.

The blog will most likely contain several categories, including Hospital and Community radio, software, hardware, family and anything else I choose to witter on about.

So, if you check back periodically you may find new stuff here, alternatively you just may find that like so many other blogs, this one has led a short, but fascinating life and is now a corpse – testament to the difficulty of keeping such things going. (If I had a pound for every Internet-based system I have visited which died before 6 months had elapsed, I would be extremely rich!)