Warm and cosy

One of our classmates was asking about the central heating system in our house. She lives in an apartment in nearby Jacarilla with air conditioning in the bedroom and a log fire in the living/dining room. Yesterday she told us that it was warmer in the street than it was in her house and asked us what it was like for us with central heating. We told her that we’d left the heating on and so would be going back to a lovely warm house.

In fact, very few houses in Bigastro have central heating because very few have a connection to a gas supply. I suppose it is possible that some of the larger houses may have oil fired central heating – I really can’t say.

When Star Sol built our estate, they installed large gas tanks to hold propane (as far as I know, there is no natural gas pipeline to the town). We therefore had the option to have central heating installed with radiators in each of the rooms. Those buyers who chose not to have heating installed, still had the pipe work plumbed in case they changed their minds at a later date (many have).

Originally, our boiler was fuelled by two gas bottles outside the kitchen. Sods law, one or other of the bottles would run out at the weekend when we couldn’t get a replacement. After we were connected to the large tanks the supply was fine and apart from when the engineers turned it off to pressure test the pipe work, it has been consistent.

Every four or five years, the system in our house has to be tested for leaks – that is the law! And every year, the boiler has to be serviced – again that is the law.

Originally, our boiler lost pressure and needed to be topped up with water on a fortnightly basis. Now though it works fine and I am pleased to say that the service reports show that it is working perfectly.

One small gripe; in England we used to have a programmer that turned the system on an off at preset times. What we have here is a thermostat to turn the boiler on and off.

I know we could have a programmer installed but to be honest, we have got used to using the thermostat to control the boiler and it is no longer an issue for us.

We escaped this time

The forecast for Tuesday night promised strong winds but thankfully they seemed to have missed us.

The Northern Costa Blanca got hit though by winds of up to 98kph which felled trees and caused widespread damage.

This report is from the Round Town News

BOATS
Fishing boats in Denia, Javea, Calp and La Vila were unable to negotiate the three metre waves off the coast so sensibly stayed in port.  And the port of Denia was eventually closed.  In Javea and Denia flooding caused several roads to be closed and schools were closed in Javea, Denia and Moraira.
In the Marina Baixa, fire fighters responded to more than 20 emergency calls for help and were forced to chop away fallen trees to enable traffic and pedestrian access:  a roof was torn from a building in Callosa and part of an abandoned factory in Alcoy collapsed: luckily no one was injured.
ALTEA
In Altea, one of the areas most affected by heavy rainfall, schools were closed: a tree fell near the schoolyard of Altea la Vella.  Violent gusts of wind also broke the large window of the local police checkpoint.  The road between Altea and Callosa remained cut off for two hours by a fallen palm tree and the Altea boardwalk was flooded.  The fishing fleet remained at anchor as did La Vila’s.
BENIDORM
In Benidorm, the wind affected numerous trees and awnings and caused a window to detach on the 13th floor of the Europa Centre causing the traffic below to be cut for 20 minutes.  In Callosa d’en Sarria an entire roof of a house was ripped clean off.
Beniarrés has increased its reserves by more than three hectometres from 14.32 hectometres on Sunday to 17.36 on Wednesday.   
FURTHER SOUTH
Further south, strong wind caused the most damage with trees falling in San Miguel and in the garden of the social centre at Ibi where some roof cornices also came loose and fell.
The Costa Calida escaped relatively unharmed but municipal workers were nonetheless busy removing fallen trees and flying waste bins that caused damage to urban and also private property.  The torrential rain that lashed the Northern Costa Blanca did not reach the Murcia region where a steady downpour was inconvenient but caused few floods.
The Meteorological Agency announced that an orange alert would remain in place until the weekend.

Talk is cheap, the pharmacists want money

From the Costa Blanca News

Talks between regional health councillor Luis Rosado, the regional treasury and representatives of the region's three provincial pharmacists' colleges started on Tuesday with health officials saying that they hoped to reach a solution on how outstanding payments were to be made.

By close of play no agreement had been reached and the chances of getting the strike called off faded.

The president of the pharmacists' college in Alicante, Jaime Carbonell said that there was no solution to the problem because there was no money.

I don’t blame the chemists one bit because they have been fobbed off too many times with false promises. What they want is payment for the prescriptions they have dispensed and until they get that, they intend to hold out.

Incredible work

In the entrance to the Auditorium is an exhibition of work by Teresa García Belmonte. Even if you have no interest in embroidery and lace making, this is well worth going to see. The intricacy of the pieces, the fine detail and the evenness of every stitch just amazes me.

A very talented and patient lady! 

Two sides of the coin

The unions in Spain have hailed the general strike yesterday as a great success.  They quote figures of millions of workers who took part; the police however, claim far fewer participants. Those who were in favour of the strike tell us that it was largely peaceful but there were reports of widespread violence in cities like Madrid with police firing rubber bullets at the crowds.

The bottom line though is that the President, Mariano Rajoy, has already said that, whilst he respects the views of the strikers, the policies will not change. He fully believes that the only way out of the current situation is to continue to impose increasingly severe austerity measures. Many believe that he is preparing to seek a bailout from Europe and that the measures taken will ensure that this can happen.

To be fair, it wasn’t the government that got Spain into the mess. My understanding is that it was a combination of the banks lending more and more money at cheap interest rates, people demanding wage increases that meant they were no longer competitive, regions and towns spending money like it was going out of fashion and underlying corruption at all levels.

Is it just us?

It seems that Iberdrola are finding it impossible to maintain constant voltage in our supply which fluctuates between 220 and 250 volts. The first symptoms are the lights that dim momentarily and then return to normal brightness. At the same time my Smart UPS signals the low voltage. Yesterday, it was going mad and eventually sent me a message warning me of the problem.

My question is, “does everyone on our estate suffer the same problem or is this something peculiar to our house?”.

A mini me

Our little Molly is turning out to be a real mixture of all of her relatives. She has many of her mother’s qualities and a lot of her father’s. Then again, she also has bits of her aunty, her uncle's sense of humour and probably a dose of her grandparents as well.

Whenever you took Jemma to a park or a wood, our eldest daughter would find the biggest stick she could and drag it around with her. When we were ready to leave, she’d ask to put in into the car to take home. I doubt whether you’d get Molly’s stick into the boot though. 

A bad, bad system

In a country where one in four people are out of work, there are many who cannot make their mortgage payments. These people live in constant fear of eviction. When that happens, they still owe the bank the balance of the mortgage even though the banks have applied for aid to cover the debt.

So far, 400,000 have lost their homes since the crisis began in 2008. The terms and conditions imposed by banks in Spain are totally in favour of the lender, giving them rights way beyond those allowed in other European countries.

When a 53 year old lady committed suicide by leaping from her fourth floor flat, the government finally sat up and took note. It was the second suicide in a month.

The proposals on the table for a moratorium do not include those who are already on the list for foreclosure and so will be no help to those who live in daily threat of not being able to return to their homes. In fact, this is a problem that the government should have sorted out three years ago when the crisis started to bite hard.

More on the weather

We needed rain and we got it.

After the bad weather of last week, Saturday looked promising. One of our neighbours remarked about it as she passed our house with her dogs. The lady was not best pleased though when I told her that the return to sunshine would not last.

By yesterday afternoon, the rain started and became torrential as the night drew on. Since our houses don’t have guttering, the water runs off the roof and down the gulleys from where you can hear it lashing down onto the pavement below.  You don’t need to go outside to know when it is raining hard!

By the time Pam and I were ready for bed, it had eased off but was still raining heavily. This morning, although the clouds are broken and it is dry, there is still the threat of rain in the sky. However, whatever rain we get over the next day or so should not compare with that of yesterday. What we will get tomorrow though are strong winds which will ease off by Wednesday.

I remember our first neighbours, who had arrived six months before us, said they had abandoned their winter coats when they came to Spain. They imagined that the weather here would be mild all year round and so were neither prepared for the cold of winter nor the heat of summer. Although there is little chance of us seeing snow in Bigastro, we have experienced frost and we certainly need heating in winter to keep warm.

Although our houses are not built in the same way as those in Britain with a cavity between a brick outer wall and a breeze block inner, they do have two skins of hollow brick with a waterproof thermal barrier between them. Those that have windows facing south get the benefit of the warming sun through them - even in winter. And in summer, there are shutters to keep the heat out.

Pam and I may have been fortunate (or circumspect)  in choosing a house with the right aspect because we find it comfortable to be in all year round. The only issue we have is that we pay for our open view when the wind blows hard from the west.

Email hoaxes

The Internet can be a scary place. Few of us understand exactly how it works but we do know that it is a playground for crooks, thieves and those that just want to propagate maliciousness. That is why, we install anti-virus programs which we keep up to date and sit behind a firewall to protect our computers from harm. That is why we ignore emails that tell us our bank account will be closed unless we follow a link and enter our confidential details.

We know that the bad guys (and gals) are clever and will try every which way to penetrate our defences. They send us emails that contain viruses in the hope we will install them. However, any half decent anti-virus program will spot these and remove the viruses before they do us  any harm. Almost daily, Avira spots these potential threats to my Windows computer and places them safely away in the quarantine bin. Sophos does the same on my MacBook Pro.

Sadly here are people out there who get a kick our of praying on our insecurity.  They send out hoax messages warning us of viruses that either don’t exist or have long since become defunct. These messages advise us to forward them on to everyone in our address book and of course, like the caring people we are we do just that.

Forwarding every email that asks you to is necessarily a good idea

In fact I never send on emails that ask me to as a matter of principle. Even if they are heart tugging stories about how our brave soldiers are suffering for us in Afghanistan – they are deleted. There is enough junk out there clogging up the bandwidth of the Internet without me adding to it. And, as a matter of routine, I check out any email that advises me of the threat of a virus. A few minutes on Google is enough to reassure me that these threats are not real.

Advice from Sophos – a well respected provider of anti virus software

Please don't forward an email to all your friends just because it asks you to.

You shouldn't forward chain letters even if they're true. You definitely shouldn't forward them if they're false.

The latest false warning doing the rounds is a perennial hoax - the so-called Invitation FACEBOOK/Olympic Torch virus warning.

The opening of the 2012 Olympics in London seems to have given this one a new lease of life (it has been seen intermittently for more than six years):

PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS NOTICE TO YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY, CONTACTS!

In the coming days, you should be aware.....Do not open any message with an attachment called: Invitation FACEBOOK, regardless of who sent it. It is a virus that opens an OlympIc torch that burns the whole hard disc C of your computer.

This virus will be received from someone you had in your address book. That's why you should send this message to all your contacts. It is better to receive this email 25 times than to receive the virus and open it.

If you receive an email called: Invitation FACEBOOK, though sent by a friend, do not open it and delete it immediately. It is the worst virus announced by CNN.

A new virus has been discovered recently that has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever. It is a Trojan Horse that asks you to install an adobe flash plug-in. Once you install it, it's all over. And there is no repair yet for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information of their function is saved.

SNOPES SAYS THIS IS TRUE

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/facebook.asp

There are some tiny grains of truth in this chain letter that might make you think that it's better to forward it than to delete it.

A lot of malware, for example, asks you to install a bogus Adobe Flash plugin. And malware does exist which writes to the zero sector, also known as the Master Boot Record. (Such malware can be trickier than usual to remove, but doesn't automatically mean "it's all over", as claimed.)

This chain letter as a whole, however, is a load of rot.

Ironically, the biggest piece of rot in the email is the claim that SNOPES SAYS THIS IS TRUE.

The link to Snopes - a well-known source of anti-hoax information - is legitimate, but says exactly the opposite, confirming that the email is false:

Forwarding this hoax does more harm than good

Sophos say they received a copy of this hoax that had been forwarded seven times, counting the last hop to them. It included nearly 100 names and email addresses in the many To: and Cc: fields it had accumulated along the way.

That means that those 100 email addresses are now lying around on 100 PCs where they might be scooped up by real malware, sent off to cybercrooks, and sold on to spammers and scammers.

In short, by distributing this hoax widely, you may end up helping the bad guys - the very opposite of what you intended.

So, please, think before you click. And if you're not sure, click "delete", not "forward".

If you want to learn about the real threats on Facebook, why not join the Sophos Facebook page, where you will be kept up-to-date on the latest rogue applications, scams and malware attacks threatening social network users.

Tidying up the old quarter

The old quarter of Orihuela has some dilapidated properties which make it less attractive than it ought to be. Now the council has singled out 62 properties that they say are in need of urgent repairs.

The hope is that by making the area more attractive, people will be persuaded to return and live there rather than move out to the outskirts.

The biggest problem that the council face though is making contact with the owners. Some are deceased and it is proving difficult to trace their heirs.

UPS to the rescue

We regularly have brief power cuts which trigger my uninterrupted power supply into action. The UPS either keeps my computer and monitor working until power is restored or it shuts the computer down properly if the delay is beyond the capacity of the battery.

This morning however my UPS kicked into action three times within a few minutes. When I investigated, it seems we hadn’t suffered a power cut, this time the voltage had dropped so low that the UPS changed to battery backup to prevent any problems. Looking at the graph, the voltage had dropped from its nominal 235 to below 220.

Remember that when we came back from England, the voltage had been peeking at 250 volts, a level at which certain circuit boards can fry. Now it is running at 235 volts and dipping down to 220 volts. Maybe it was a coincidence that many of the residents got up just at that point and put the kettle on for a morning cuppa, no lo se!

A bad situation

The strike by pharmacies, now in its fourth day, is starting to bite hard. Yesterday, we went down to pick up my prescription and then called at the chemist’s to try and collect both my tablets and Pamela’s. Neither were available but they did say they might be later on in the day. We called back later only to find that they were still not available.

The lady explained that Pamela’s tablets were most important and advised her to phone 900 10 10 81. This service will either tell her where there is a chemist who has stocks or advise her to go to the hospital where they will have what she needs.

Valencia insists that nobody will be without the medication they need but that they may need to visit a hospital to pick them up. Now that is OK for us but for those without transport, do not have a telephone or are too infirm to travel it spells disaster.

The president of the apothecaries in Valencia warns that the emergency phone system is already overloaded with calls. In any case, if everyone has to start collecting their medicine from the hospitals, a) the queues are going to be horrendous an b) how are they going to cope with dispensing stocks of medicines needed.

After the rain

I don’t need to tell those who live here that it rained all day yesterday. The good news is that it was clean rain and not that Sahara stuff that leaves a brown film over everything.

Looking at the forecast, we could have a bit more rain especially tomorrow but then things should clear up and we will see business as usual for the weekend.

The key to Obama’s success

The demographics of America are shifting, just as they are in Britain. This year is set to be the first time in recent history when the majority of babies born in the US will be to families of ethnic minority. That means that in the future, the so called minority will become the majority. It is the same pattern in Britain where it is predicted that the Muslim population will double in 20 years to 5.5 millions, 8% of the total.

Obama’s share of the white voters may have declined but that was more than made up for by the increasing hispanic vote. Romney, on the other hand took a hard line on immigrants by saying that they should leave the country. That may have pleased some of the white voters but clearly not the 24 million Hispanic voters. 

Be careful what drugs you give him

Bradley Wiggins was out on his mountain bike; meeting up with some of his mates to go for a ride near his home in Eccleston, Lancashire. As he passed a garage forecourt on the A5209 near to junction 27 of the M6, a white Astra van hit him.

Wiggins was taken to hospital in Preston where he was kept in overnight for observation. According to his team Sky, he is expected to make a full and speedy recovery. I hope so, this was the start of his winter training in preparation for the Giro d'Italia in May.

Now there is a bit of an incentive

When Pam and I visited La Zenia Boulevard, the incentive for me was Media Markt. It is about the only shop in the mall that is of interest to blokes like me.

OK, there is Leyroy Merlin for tools and stuff but then that signals DIY which means work. Media Mark is potentially far more interesting. Actually I say that but I have never visited one of their stores. I am imagining that it is like PC World, if it isn’t then I am in for a big disappointment.

Media Markt hadn’t opened when Pam and I were there, it has opened this week though. Time to go back and have a look.

PS Apparently there were 4,000 applications for the 60 jobs on offer at the store – that shows you the state of the employment market here in Spain.

At La Terraza

Following on from the 40s night, Darren and Hazel are holding a country and western night this Friday at La Terraza (8.30pm start). Alan White will be playing CD's and explaining things. Later on, Pete Rafferty will be singing C&W songs. Folks who come along dressed the part or wearing just cowboy hats etc will get a free shot of whiskey.

Then on Saturday 17th November, there will be a 60's night in aid of the British Legion – entrance free.

Four more years with Obama

The American voting system is such that the popular vote does not always win the election. Under the US constitution, each state is given a number of electoral votes in rough proportion to its population. The candidate who wins 270 electoral votes - by prevailing in the mostly winner-takes-all state contests - becomes president. California, for example has 55 electoral college votes which are all awarded to the candidate who gets the majority of votes. There are a few states (don’t ask me which) that operate proportional representation i.e. they split their votes according to the number of  actual votes each candidate receives.

The predictions were that it would be a close call, in the end Barack Obama won 303 electoral college votes against Mitt Romney’s 206 with Florida's 29 electoral votes still undecided. The president held the White House by assembling solid Democratic states and a number of important swing states such as Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia and Wisconsin. His narrow victory in Ohio, a critical Mid-Western swing state, sealed the victory.

Meanwhile, Republicans have maintained their control of the House of Representatives whist it looks like the Democrats will retain control in the Senate.

Is this the start of a fan club?

My pictures of Don Tomás Rodríguez Gómez taken during the concert for Corpus Christi in 2010 are attracting attention. In the last few weeks they have racked up quite a few visits on Flickr. Could it be there is a growing interest in our musical director? Certainly, he is a good looking young man with a very flamboyant style of conducting.

I’ll likely get some more photos of him in action at the forthcoming concert in honour of Santa Cecilia. Let’s see then if, two years on, he is just as popular!