What do you actually know about how money works? With the current state of the economy you might find this informative, animated film by Canadian artist Paul Grignon of interest.

I came across the film a few months ago and was really impressed - as have been a lot of other people on the net (but not the bankers I suspect!). “Is it worth putting on the blog?” I asked my 18yr old son - “Definitely!” was the reply, so here it is. The film’s 47minutes long, but certainly worth watching.

Do you want something for nothing, no strings attached?

Or are you trying to get rid of something that’s cluttering up your house, but is just too good to throw away? Why not give it to someone who could use it - much more environmentally friendly than taking a trip down to the dump.

That’s the idea behind Freecycle. I first came across this when a neighbour asked me to help him collect a nearly new bed settee from Taunton. (It was damn heavy to carry up 3 flights of stairs!).

Freecycle is a not for profit organisation first started in the US in 2003 and has since expanded somewhat. For example the Taunton group, which was founded in 2005, currently has nearly 5,000 members and the Bridgwater group, founded in 2006, nearly 3,000 members. People are giving away all sorts of things from furniture and clothing through to paving slabs and plants. As their web site says:

The Freecycle concept has since spread to over 85 countries, where there are thousands of local groups representing millions of of members — people helping people and “changing the world one gift at a time.” As a result, we are currently keeping over 500 tons a day out of landfills!

To join a group all you have to do is visit the Freecycle web site and search for a location near you. Then just click to join that group (free). Groups are hosted on the Yahoo! network which means, if you haven’t got one, you will have to sign up for a free Yahoo! account, which is quite straightforward.

You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently. Well, it all comes down to computers - you see, like cars they go wrong and, like cars, there is never a good time for it to happen.

I had a week off over half term. Feeling relaxed and full of good intentions on Monday morning I set about sorting out a few things on the server, something that had been on the ‘to do’ list for a while. As usual all data is safely backed up to another disk, so I confidently set about the job. Next thing I know and a message pops up informing me that one of the hard drives is failing. Still, that’s no problem we’ve got a mirrored RAID array (which means that there are two disks in the computer that acts as a server, both holding identical copies of everything, including the operating system).

But…I had forgotten about the law of sod, which decided to choose that moment to come into play (and he even had one more trick up his sleeve!). To cut a long story short everything on the server was lost - but remember the data was all backed up safely on yet another disk so there was still a get-out clause. Quantock Online is safely tucked away on an Internet server, so that was quite safe - but several years worth of family photos, correspondence etc. I do not want to lose.

Wait two days for new disks to arrive. Put disks in computer. Re-install operating system. Replace data on system from backup files. Sort out connections to other computers (thanks Chaff, the help was really appreciated - especially as it went on into the small hours!). Everything back to normal. Well, not quite. You see the server also has other software on it that is used for testing out the web site - which means (if you’re really that interested), Apache, PHP and MySQL still has to be re-configured to how I’d set it up before. Ho,hum, there go a few more hours…

Sod. Remember him? Well the sting in his tail was this. My other job that week was to talk myself into parting with cash for some clever software that could have saved hours of work in re-configuring everything in the event of serious failure…

Still, looking on the bright side, at least all the data was safe. I hope your data is. Maybe that should be the subject of another posting.