Chris Betcher

If you're in Australia I'm sure you're aware that there are large parts of the country in serious flood at the moment. If you're overseas you may have heard about it but not been aware of the degree of devastation.  It's shocking and quite unbelievable. The flooding is enormously extensive (covering an area larger in size than France and Germany combined!) and has decimated many rural towns, crops, property and lives. Many people in the flood affected areas have lost everything. It makes me so sad to see it. I got sent an email today with this mobile phone footage shot from a building yesterday as the floodwaters raced through the town of Toowoomba, just outside Brisbane.  The devastation and destruction is mind boggling (although I think a few of those cars could have been saved if the guy filming was a little more concerned with notifying people of the obviously impending disaster rather than just capturing it all on video!) It is interesting to see just how much...

A while back, I went geocaching with my daughter Kate.  We spent quite a while hunting for an elusive cache not far from where we live but we thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being outdoors in the sunshine, using GPS technology to have a bit of real world fun. In fact we enjoyed it so much that after we signed the cache's logbook and returned to the car to drive home, Kate asked if we could place our own cache some time for other people to find. What a great idea.  I've been wanting to place a cache of my own for a while, but Katie was the impetus I needed to actually do it.  So, no time like the present, we took a detour on the way home and went via the local Dollar Store, picked out a suitable plastic container, a handful of inexpensive trinkets to include inside it, and a small notebook to use as the logbook... all this for less that $20 (and it could have been much less if we weren't being extravagant with the trinkets) We went home, printed out the official geoc...

One of the new year's resolutions that Linda and I made for 2008 is to try and be a little kinder to the planet; whether that be to walk and cycle more instead of driving, to buy products that are more environmentally friendly, or to make an effort to generate less waste... even small changes may help the planet. If we can encourage a few others to do the same, it may help even more. There are plenty of great stories about the Power of One... the effect that one person can have if the ripples from their actions spread far enough to influence others. One of the great Power of One stories is that of Earth Hour . Earth Day started in Sydney last year with an idea that if we simply turned our lights off for one hour the overall effects could be substantial. Of course, it was a symbolic gesture more than anything else, but on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. During this single hour, the collective effort o...