Radio stations generally tend to entertain us, give us free stuff, and be our main source of pertinent information while on the road – namely traffic, weather and news. Our radio can also make us laugh, let us relax, or shock us.

But radio can also be a source of surprisingly deep friendship. Especially, a source of comfort in hard times when loneliness might otherwise prevail.

Take a look at this short and touching video uploaded recently by a listener to LightFM:

Renee found LightFM during one of the hardest times of her life – and it gave her hope to continue on.

Another listener, Rae, uploaded a video recently, in which she said after listening to LightFM after finding out about it on the Internet, she “was beginning to heal on the inside, and be motivated into a love of life with an overwhelming sense of happiness.” At the end of her video, she includes a photo collage of the LightFM on-air team – with the heading “My Awesome Cheer Squad”.

I’ve been involved in radio for just on three years now, and I still get touched by these stories that I get the privilege of hearing time and time again. Many of them have similar themes – but they are new every single time because they always involve another person who has found a new lease on life in a unique way.

As someone involved in making relational radio, it’s encouraging to hear these stories – and sharing these stories around mean that more and more people have the opportunity to hear about a source of hope – that they might otherwise never know existed.

Melbourne’s 89.9 LightFM is running the “My LightFM” promotion until 25th June, where listeners upload a 60 second video sharing what LightFM means to them. Find out more or view the videos uploaded so far.

Well what a, uh, three and a half months! I’m a bit of a workaholic so I need to be rather careful. When there’s enough work to literally keep me busy 72 hours a day, prioritising (something I’m not very good at) is important, to get that down to 8 hours. It usually ends up at 9 or 10, but sometimes more. And that’s not taking into account the fact that that 72 hours a day is based on a week of 21 days. I’m seriously not exaggerating.

It’s only that much because I’m passionate about what I do. Because I’ve so many great ideas about new ventures and new and better ways to do what we do, that I want to implement them all at once.

Now if you don’t know me, or you haven’t read far into this blog before, I’m the manager of 1WAY FM, Canberra’s Christian radio station. At the moment we’re planning for Share-a-thon – it’s our annual appeal for funds to our listener base. It runs over three days, and last year we received $55,555 from our listeners. This year, we’re going beyond $55,555, and asking our friends to partner with us for a stronger reach. We haven’t set a ceiling, because we want to see how far we can go. We want to reach out to Canberra in a bigger and better way than we are at the moment, and there is so much that needs to happen for that to happen.

Planning a Share-a-thon is a big job. Being new in this job, I knew very little, and have been learning as I go. I’ve learnt now that to plan an intensive three-day campaign, you need alot of time. More time than I gave myself and my team! But we are going to make it. We just need to ask our God to bless us and the weekend and move in the ways that only he can for us to receive the financial help we need.

We have recently dropped our advertising rate for new sponsors, to help attract those new sponsors, and we’re spending some time out visiting local businesses to outline the benefits of getting themselves on air. Once this new income comes in, oh boy are there plans to spend it (and to use it to make more as well). We need to grow to a size where everyone in Canberra actually knows we exist, and there’s a lot of changes to make to get there!

Suddenly moving to the helm of a radio station – especially at this time of year when a plan is needed for the year ahead, when a new board has recently been appointed that has only really had one meeting so far, and when you really haven’t got any experience managing a radio station yet – isn’t easy. I knew that. But when God decides to answer prayer instantly, it makes it so much easier – easier knowing that he really is in control of it all.

We were considering some program changes. The sort of changes that some people would appreciate, and that others would be ticked off by. But the sort of change that I, at least, thought was where we needed to head.

I started rethinking it when I was reminded that alot more thought needs to be put into these sort of things (I should mention there were time-related reasons why, if it was going to be done soon’ish, it should be done now) so that they can be more well thought through and that other people, if needed, can be consulted.

Then we were praying this morning. That God would show us how to move the radio station forward this year, and that we would remember to ‘check’ things with him first – rather than doing what we believed was right. And the phone rang. While we were praying. We took the call and told the caller we’d call them back afterwards – when that was done, they made a $1,100 donation. Now that on it’s own is huge. We don’t usually get donations of that size outside of our annual Shareathon appeal.

Then he said that he’d donate an extra $1,100 if we kept on air the program that we were thinking of dropping… just like that. No prompting – it just so happened that this listener enjoyed the program, and that he realised something was missing from his life while he was up in Sydney out of the reach of our broadcast. For some reason, he felt the need to let us know his appreciation!

How’s that for answered prayer? It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear – because I thought I was right to go the other way – but it was an answer that showed, without any possible doubt, that God had things in his control. And that’s reassuring.

So this happened last Thursday night, but I’ve been pretty much flat out so I hadn’t got around to posting it yet!

At a special board meeting on Thursday I was appointed as the Acting Station Manager of 1WAY FM, beginning from 1st January (or rather, from when I return on the 7th January from my break).

I’m looking forward to it. Really. It’s going to be an immense challenge – I haven’t done anything like it before. I know that I’m going to learn a lot about managing people, especially volunteers , and I’m looking forward to getting more aquainted with the Australian radio industry. I think I’ve finally crossed the line – I’m no longer interested in IT. I still know what I knew, but I’m no longer interested in keeping up to date with things. I’m now a media nut.

There are a lot of things that 1WAY FM can do this year. We’re not that well known in Canberra, and compared to commercial stations we have a long way to go with our on air sound. Our logo could do with a facelift. Our website needs a redesign! I could go on forever but it would be boring to anyone who isn’t into radio. The first couple of weeks of 2008 will be spent putting everything in order, deciding (and praying about!) what’s more important and what we can afford, and then going full steam ahead.

I have a busy year ahead of me.

I’ve decided that I’m missing writing on here enough to warrant venturing, slowly I might add, back into the world of dialup Internet.

I have discovered tonight that once Windows automatic updates start, I can’t actually stop them. And whilst I can try in vain to terminate wuauclt.exe, it can always just start up again seven seconds later (and it seems to make a habit of it). Furthermore, an audio file that I wanted to post here was actually left on my computer at work so I’m attempting to download it.

This all makes browsing a much more frustrating experience, but I guess it gives me more time during page loads to write! (And I’m writing this in Word, by the way, because my blog’s login screen hasn’t loaded yet).

Oh how I remember the world of broadband. I really had forgotten how slow dialup was. Luckily sharing is turned off now – three guys trying to use the one dialup connection wasn’t fun!

So it has been an interesting few weeks, even apart from the Internet not working. I went up to Sydney for the Heart 1032 open day and learnt a lot about how a capital city commercial-like community station is run, and gathered some ideas and inspiration for things I can do at 1WAY FM. I also met Guy Sebastian. I have a photo, but of course I’ll be here for years if I try to upload it, so I won’t do that right now. I also saw Wendy Mathews, Marcia Hines, and the woman who plays Irene Roberts on Home and Away (I can’t remember her name and Google will take too long to search for it).

I’m going up to Sydney again this weekend (I think it’s my second home… I must be up there at least fifteen or so times a year) for Open House’s Christmas party – yep, I can’t get enough of Heart 1032! Having many more resources, coming naturally from being in a bigger market, there is so much to learn from what they’ve done and are doing. So my brushes with fame continue – I will be meeting Jason Stevens, and probably Darlene Zschech as well (I decided to wait out the time for Google to load to check that I’d spelt that right – turns out I had!).

Back to Canberra, and to completely change topic, there has been some interesting news for the ACT Liberals this week. Leader Bill Stefaniak and his deputy Jacqui Burke both stepped down yesterday morning after a week of turmoil in which one party member launched an attack on the leadership of Mr Stefaniak and ended up being dumped – and became an independent. It’s probably good news all around though – Jacqui Burke told me yesterday that the calm that is evident now within the party has really not been seen for three years. That must mean that they’re in a better position now to win the next ACT election in October. I get the vibe that a lot of Canberra doesn’t like Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, and having young blood in place with Zed Seselja may make the Liberals a viable alternative!

Of course, if I had broadband working, I would post the interview that I did with Jacqui yesterday, but I’m really having too much trouble downloading it from work.

Hmm… if I had broadband working I would also be able to post some audio from the Carols by Candlelight in Jerrabomberra last Saturday evening – 1WAY FM broadcasted live from the event, and I managed to grab an interview with Santa of all people! He has really moderned up this year – he turned up in a fire truck (I think his reindeers were too busy getting ready for Christmas Eve), and he’s lost a lot of weight!! His trick, he told me, is to eat lots of vegetables.

I really could write a lot more but I’ve already spent collectively about an hour on the phone tonight to Internode trying to resolve our ongoing connection problems… and there’s other things I could be doing. So until I manage to brave dialup again, or until our Internet actually gets fixed, au revoir!

Joe Hockey, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, was interviewed on Hack, Triple J’s youth current affairs program, on Thursday (listen here). I’ve just been listening to the podcast of it – he was very down to earth, and made some very good points. I wrote a message on his Facebook wall to let him know what I thought.

Since I haven’t been contacted by the AEC yet, I’ll assume that my application for work for this election was unsuccessful, and thus I’m going to start making political comments again. Actually, they don’t really say anything on their site as far as time frames go, so maybe I should make my comments a bit more subliminally just in case they’re still organising themselves? I mean, I can always start refraining from it if I’m offered a position, right? Don’t vote Kevin Rudd.

So, Joe made some good points in the interview.

On unfair dismissal laws he said “we removed the unfair dismissal laws because we found small business was not prepared to take a punt, particularly on young people”. He goes on to say that small business wanted “only people with experience”, and didn’t want to employ people with a “chequered employment history”. Once the Coalition removed unfair dismissal laws for businesses employing less than 100 people, they found employment surge because small business said “we’re going to take a punt on these people; if it doesn’t work out we can get rid of them”! Whereas before… the chance to get into the job was never there!

Joe later said to a caller: “We didn’t remove the unfair dismissal laws from business to make it easier to sack people, we removed them to make it easier to hire people”. Labor obviously doesn’t think so though – by scrapping WorkChoices, they’re going to send the unemployment rate right back up…

Later in the show there was a caller who spoke about a promotion he was offered – to act as a supervisor for a period of time – without being given any real extra remuneration for the extra responsibility. To that, Joe said “if you’re given the chance at a promotion, run for it!” I completely agree – and I think it’s simply a case of attitudes. I cannot comprehend how someone in their right mind would turn down an opportunity to gain more experience and move further along in their career just because they’re not not offered enough money for it. Isn’t that making a mountain out of a molehill? Taking issue with a non issue? It’s asking for money because you believe you’re entitled to it, and when unsuccessful, stubbornly refusing to help the company when it’d be helping yourself too – and it’s simply out of spite!

I’d take the promotion, write down the experience on my resume, and if the company did take a turn for the worse and ended up leaving a sour taste in my mouth, I’d move on to somewhere else where my skills and experience would be appreciated (they’d be worth more if I’d done time in that new position than if I hadn’t).

This is one of the major problems I have with the Labor party – and with their supporters. It’s all about attitude. I know this is a generalisation, but I believe it’s generally true – Labor supporters have a “woe is me” attitude. They want all they’re entitled to, and will stop at nothing to get it – even missing out on a good opportunity for themselves just to “punish” the other side. This is why, at this stage, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to vote Labor. I don’t agree with the attitudes of the working class. Don’t vote Kevin Rudd.