Damian Beresford

Late night last night developing the first version of the 2009 Budget Calculator for Tax123.ie, you can run it from here:

https://tax123.ie/Budget2009Calc.php

Harsh budget this year, don’t expect to be better off!

We will be improving it over the coming days, the main omissions at the moment are the changes in Mortgage Interest Relief and also the Car Parking changes.

I attended the first Transition Town Tramore (t3.ie) event back in September and was very impressed by it, not having heard of the Transition Towns movement before. It was a very informative presentation from Dave Philips from the Cultivate Centre in Dublin and was quite well attended.

What impressed me most is that we hear a lot about how doomed the planet is, etc but very little about what we can do about it at a local practical level, and the Transition movement has plenty of ideas here. It’s also heavily based on the idea of community involvement and transition at a community level, and anything in my view that promotes community spirit and getting to know our neighbors better should be supported by everyone.

So the next event is on this Thursday, 8pm in the Grand Hotel Tramore, brief as follows (more information can be found at http://t3.ie/):

Transition Town Tramore Presents

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

In the second of a series of events to raise awareness about the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change, the Tramore Transition Town Initiative is showing the award winning film The Power of Community on October 16th at the Grand Hotel Tramore.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half ‐ and food by 80 percent ‐ people were desperate.

This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call “The Special Period.”

The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis ‐ the massive reduction of fossil fuels ‐ is an example of options and hope.

“Global Oil production has not grown since May 2005” says Stan Nangle, a member of Transition Town Tramore ”and we have been on a plateau of about 85 million barrels of oil a day since them. We know that sooner or later total daily production of oil will start to reduce ‐ as it has in individual oilfields such as the North Sea ‐ and this is going to have a major impact on how we live and how our economy works.”

The Power of Community offers an insight into how Cuban society adapted to meet the challenges posed by Peak Oil, often without support from the Authorities, and how the Cuban people turned the situation around by using their initiative and working together to achieve a common goal.

“We are constantly hearing and reading about the problems we will face from Climate Change and Peak Oil, but nobody in authority is telling us what we need to do to overcome these difficulties” says Edel Jennings of Transition Town Tramore. “This film shows very clearly how Communities can pull together to find solutions to the problems they face and it gives people a positive example of what can be achieved.”

Background:

The Tramore Transition Town Initiative is a community group which is actively working to find answers to the question: “ how can our community respond to the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”

The Tramore Initiative is based on the Transition Town model developed in Kinsale Co Cork by Rob Hopkins, and currently being implemented in more than 800 communities worldwide.

The Tramore steering committee is currently working to build awareness of the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change in our community by running a series of public events, and through direct contact with community groups, clubs and societies in Tramore. The series of awareness events will run on a monthly basis from September 2007 to February 2008 and will be followed in March 2008 by the setting up of working groups to look at how we might mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and Climate Change in the areas of food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods.

I have need of more storage space, I currently have two portable hard drives which contain a mix of movies, music, photos, etc and are filling up fast. They’re small (500G in total) also a few years old now at this stage. I’m not worried about data loss if they fail (anything important is backed up in multiple places, including the cloud) but it would be an inconvenience if one were to die.

So I’m looking for something:

1) big’ish (capable of storing a few years of data)

2) networked access (so we can access content from any machine in the house)

3) somewhat reliable

4) cheap

There’s a bewildering amount of choice when it comes to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for home use when you start looking into it. There’s the high end of the personal market there’s the likes of ReadyNAS and Drabo, both of which sound fab and have really good reputations (and have great expansion options), but are a bit outside of my budget. At the other end of the scale there’s the option of building your own, and I think long term it would be a great pet project to build a ZFS system (something similar to what Søren Ragsdale has built).

For now however, I’m going to go cheap and cheerful with a 1TB Western Digital MyBook, reasonably good reputation and very good value at €190 from Misco.ie.  Will see how it works out, should do for a few years and hopefully it won’t be a case of “at that price, they’re sure not to last long” (as the old adds for Quinsworth used to say!

Also, thanks to John & Aman (via twitter) and James & John (via lunch time chats) for guiding me through the selection process!