It's time to close our raffle and determine a winner. I am proposing to send out the following as an email to all of the forum members. Let me know if you have any concerns. Otherwise it will go out tomorrow morning.

We have now decided on a closing date for the L100 raffle. I want to thank everyone that has participated to date to make our raffle a resounding success. To date, we have raised a gross amount of $2700 with the sale of 540 tickets. This is just $300 short of our initial target. Therefore, we have decided to close the raffle at 12:00 noon on Saturday, January 29, 2005 with the hope that we can reach our target in this time. Even if we don't, the drawing will be held regardless.

This is the last call to get in on this raffle. As stated previously, a minimum of 15% of what we raise will be donated to tsunami disaster relief. We have already made a $500 contribution to Sarvodaya USA. If for some reason your payment arrives after the closing date and time, we will donate it to this charity and continue to do so for all donations received for the following week.

We’re going to try something novel for the actual drawing to ensure that it is transparent. We’re going to use a publicly drawn lottery number to determine our winner. The lottery is the one local to me, the Western Canada Lottery, for which the results are published here:

http://www.wclc.com/

The winner will be determined from the Sunday, January 30, 2005 Pick Three game using the following formula:

Winning Ticket Number = round ((pickthree / 1000) X numbersold) + 2005

Where:

round = the round function as implemented in Microsoft Excel 2003 to result in a whole number

pickthree = the three digit number drawn for the Western Canada Lottery Pick Three game on January 30, 2005

numbersold = the number of raffle tickets sold as of 12:00 noon, January 29, 2005

The pickthree number is divided by 1000 because the range of possible numbers is 0-999 and we will have sold less than 1000 tickets.

2005 is added to this result because the ticket numbers started at 2005 and are incremented by 1 for every ticket issued.

As I said, this is the last chance to get your tickets. These can be purchased from the following link:

http://www.audioheritage.org/html/projectmay/raffle/rules.htm

Thank you again for participating in our fundraising raffle.