I just created this little currency converter for my Rails 4 app:

```
module Currency

  def self.get_exchange_rate(from_curr = "EUR", to_curr = "USD")   
    if from_curr == to_curr
      result = 1
    else
      begin
        amount = 1
        url = "http://www.google.com/finance/converter?a=#{amount}&from=#{from_curr}&to=#{to_curr}"
        doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))
        result_span = doc.css('span.bld').text    
        result = result_span.tr('^0-9.', '')
      rescue => e
        puts e
        result = 1
      end
    end
    result
  end

end

```

I haven't done this a lot, so my question would be: How can I deal with the (unlikely) event that Google Currency times out or is not available for some reason?

In that case I would like my `result` to be `1`. How can this be achieved?

Thanks for any suggestions.