Freecycle

A few weeks ago I was given four beds by three different people - all complete strangers.  They wanted to get rid of them, and I happened to need them - so they gave them to me.  

I've recently been clearing out my loft and had a lot of stuff I've accumulated over the years.  None of it was rubbish, so I wanted to give it away - so I did.  I gave it to people I didn't know who said they wanted it.  There was a cot, a couple of turntables, a slide projector, a negative ionizer, a couple of children's bicycles, some ADSL microfilters - and several other things.

My heating recently broke down.  As I'm replacing the boiler I didn't want to get it fixed, so I asked some complete strangers if they had some electric heaters they could spare.  Two different people came up with six dimplex heaters to tide me over till the new boiler was fitted.

A few years ago, this kind of transaction would have been the stuff of dreams.  Stuff went to the tip if you didn't know someone who wanted it.  You would never go round asking strangers for things you needed.  But the internet has changed all that.  The internet and a rather clever idea called Freecycle.  You can read all about it here, and find your nearest branch.

Freecycle is billed as a way to "keep stuff out of landfill".  I think it is far more than that.  In fact the issue of filling up landfill is a bit over-done and Freecycle probably doesn't even scratch the surface.  What Freecycle is, is a real community.  We hear about "online communities", which often means a group of people who communicate on-line but never meet.  Freecycle goes much further than this.  It's about local people being able to contact each other, know each others' needs and support each other.  That's far more valuable than any environmental ideal or any chatroom you can find anywhere else on the internet.

O2 Broadband

Today I went live with O2 Broadband. They are about the only broadband provider that people actually recommend and don't complain about - them and Sky, and I can't get Sky unless I subscribe to their telly services at a minimum of £16 per month. O2 only put my exchange live last week, and it's taken them 8 days to migrate my line from Twang.net. Today at 08:50 I plugged in the modem, went through the O2 set-up procedure, and without any kind of drama I was live with a download speed of over 12 mbps and an upload speed of 1.1. The cost for this service is £15 per month and you get unlimited downloads as long as you don't abuse it. It helps that I'm only just over 1000 m from the exchange - not everyone will be so lucky, but if you can't get more than 8 mbps then they'll only charge you £12.50 a month. Better still, if you have a mobile contract with O2 they'll knock £5 per month off your bill, and if you don't, then you just get a free pay as you go SIM and use at least £10 per quarter you get the same discount. After 2 hours experience I'm happy to recommend O2 as a broadband provider. Let's hope the don't get bought by Carphone Warehouse!

Christian Aid 2008

Next week is Christian Aid Week – the week when Christians from all the churches in the country will be knocking on doors and asking people to donate to this very worthy charity. I was recently speaking to some people from my church who have been collecting for this cause for many years. I was surprised to find that few of them enjoy the job of walking round the parish, knocking on doors and begging for donations to help the poorest people in the world. Most of them, it seems, do the job because it’s a job worth doing, and not because they enjoy it. One person commented that door-to-door collecting is a very old fashioned way of raising money. Christian Aid is one of very few charities who still fund themselves in this way.

So this year they've decided to use some new technology to support this very worthy cause. If you would like to make a donation to Christian Aid without someone having to come out to knock on your door and ask you to fill an envelope with cash, then use our fund raising page to make a donation with your credit- or debit card. It’s a simple transaction – just click the “Donate” button on the widget above to visit the virtual door-to-door collection page. They don't guarantee that you won’t also get a call from a collector; but if you tell them you’ve already donated on-line I'm sure they’ll be delighted to leave without the traditional envelope full of cash.

Smallcreep and the internet

When I was very young – just a baby – my father wrote a novel and was successful in getting it published. The book is not really the subject of this post, but here’s a brief summary of it: The book is called Smallcreep’s Day, and follows the exploits of a factory worker, Pinquean Smallcreep during a very unusual day in his life. Mr Smallcreep, having become obsessed by an idea, leaves his machine and goes exploring through the strange world of his factory. On a quest to find meaning in his monotonous existence, Smallcreep experiences many surreal and disturbing situations. Each scene explores some of the author’s ideas about human relationships, freedom and the value of human life. Some of the scenes are hilarious, some depressing and some macabre. The final two pages are taken up with a powerful vision of the futility of factory work and a passionate cry for the lost dignity of the craftsman. (It is not hard to guess, reading this conclusion that the author very soon left his life as a factory worker and became a craftsman potter.)

The book was originally published by Gollancz, and later issued in paperback by Picador and Panther. Many years ago it was discontinued and can now only be found occasionally on ebay, paperback copies often fetching a tenner or more. Needless to say, this book has become the stuff of family legend. I cannot remember a time when there was no Smallcreep, and my three siblings and I have always been enormously proud of our father’s work. You sometimes meet people who have read it, and they always turn out to be interesting people who were very impressed by the book. Mike Rutherford, the guitarist, used the story as the inspiration for a concept album in the 1980s (though he sold out the true meaning of the book and gave it a happy ending). Having been out of print for so many years, it’s becoming less and less frequent that I meet anyone who’s heard of Smallcreep.

One morning this year I received a phone call at work from a number I didn’t recognise. The caller ran a small publishing house in London, specialising in out-of-print works by authors with interesting views on life, and wanted to know if I was related of the author of Smallcreep’s day. He was interested in contacting him with a view to re-issuing the work. I was delighted to put him in touch with my father. I was also delighted to learn today that the book will be re-published by Pinter and Martin in May 2008. Order your copy now

You might expect that this would be the end of the story, but it gets stranger yet. A couple of months later I got a message through Friends Reunited, from someone interested in … contacting my father with a view to writing a screen play for Smallcreep’s Day. Luckily Friends Reunited had not managed to remove her email address from the message, so I was able to make contact without having to shell out to join their service (which I wouldn’t have done).

So the interesting thing is that there is enough information on the internet to track down the children of the author of a work which was published over 40 years ago. (My father does have his own web-site, but it would have been impossible to find him, as he now goes by a stage-name.) I asked the 2nd caller how she had reached me, and how she knew it was me, from the thousands of David Browns on the Friends Reunited site. She had apparently heard of the connection through an old school friend of mine who writes a blog – Random Burblings. He mentions me and the town where we grew up, so it was then easy to find the right Brown family from that information.

I’m very pleased that I can be traced via stuff that people put on the internet. Arguably the first caller did a better job, as he found the switchboard of my company and asked for me by name. Despite there being about 20 David Browns in our Global Address List, he still managed to get through to the right one. However, if you have any reason not to want to be contacted by strangers - skeletons in the cupboard perhaps, or worse – be very wary about posting information on Friends Reunited or other sites. It might pay to Google your own name and town of birth from time to time, just to see what’s out there. Don’t think of it as vanity; it’s identity protection.

No such word as “blog”.

I did a Google search for “no such word as blog”. I was expecting to find many people writing treatises on the decline of the English language and where on earth have all these new words come from. I was disappointed! One poet complained it was such an ugly word, and couldn’t we use a word with more syllables (though he didn’t propose one), but mainly it was people speaking in the past tense about how “when I started this blog there was no such word as blog” etc. So how exactly did the word get into the language – and in the language it jolly well is, whether or not it’s in any particular dictionary or spell checker.

When new things are invented, we need to give them names so that we can talk about them without having to describe them each time. In the “good-old-days” inventions were made by inventors, or at least by companies, who then had the privilege of inventing a new name for their new article. This could be new word – like “television”, a combination of existing words (e.g. “Compact Disk”), or a new use for an existing word (“record”, to stick with the recording media example). But since the web era, things (like blogs) have been happening without being invented as such. And people start using words to name these things, and those words are then part of the language. But for a word to mean something, the speaker and the listener both have to know what it means. So how does a new word get into common usage? Well the answer has to be the media. Unless we’re really on the cutting edge of technology, we hear these new terms used in the news. Then we go and look them up and find out what they’re all about. And when we tell people about them, we use the term we heard in the media.

So why are so many of the new internet age words so dreadful; for example “phishing” to describe trying to get someone to reveal their password. Who thought of that and why on earth would anyone journalist give it the dignity of actually passing it on. Well I suppose the answer is that journalists are not very creative people. They just read a press-release, or someone else’s news story, and they repeat it parrot fashion to their readers/listeners/viewers, and so the words get passed on and used, whether they deserve it or not. But it doesn’t always happen that way. The decade between 2001 and 2010 still needs a name, and we’re already more than half way through. Several different names have been proposed for this decade, including the unbelievably crass “noughties”. Why on earth would anyone think of that, let alone use it? We don’t say “two thousand nought seven” do we? For two digit dates it’s more likely “oh seven”. And there’s nothing particularly naughty (which I assume is the allusion they were looking for) about this decade compared with any other. So I’m pleased to say that while I’ve heard a few people in the media attempt to create this term, I’ve yet to hear anyone use it seriously.

So where does that leave my blog. Actually I hate the word. It’s a rubbish word with a rubbish etymology and only one letter away from “bog”, the English slang for a lavatory. But it’s undeniably the word that we use to describe this kind of internet journal. (I checked the meaning of “journal” in the Oxford Dictionary, and apparently you have to update it every day to qualify as a journal.) So “blog” it is – it could have been worse!