State of Alarm - day Fifty Seven

After breakfast Solveig arrived to take me on a 10km hike to the summit of St Josep sa Talaia, the 475m peak which overlooks the whole island. The 'Talaia' part is a contraction of 'Tailaissa', a Catalan word for a watchtower, applied to tallest peaks in a region. Not only is this one the highest in Ibiza, but also in the Balearics. Another warm sunny day with superb visibility for the climb. 

Relaxation of restrictions now allows two of us to ride in the same car, both wearing mascarillas, windows open, the passenger sitting in the back. The road leading up to the mountainside track starts about a kilometer from the village. After a kilometer on a metalled side road, an unmetalled road climbs upwards, then goes along the ridge at the top where the big telecoms towers for the island are located. The views in each direction are stunning. I can see why church folk love to climb up here on Ascension Day to pray for the people of Ibiza. My photos are here

The only off road traffic was a couple of telecoms vans. I think there were six of them up there, carrying the work-team installing new equipment up there, probably high capacity kit to serve the purposes of fibre-optic broadband which is now being rolled out, even in rural areas. Solveig's husband Fabian was saying on Monday how this could make a big difference to the island economy in future, with the inevitable collapse of mass tourism. The hospitality industry will find a way to re-invent itself, and more people will want to work from home digitally in a very congenial setting. If people need to commute less by car, this will have a positive impact on the environment.

Just as we passed under the tall twin towers at the highest point, I had a phone call from Kath. She said she'd been conversing with BAe helpline staff during the morning on my behalf, complaining the web re-booking page failure, and getting fobbed off with excuses that they could only deal with me as ticket holder, although she had gave them information provided by me for the purpose. She persisted in pestering them as a way of drawing public attention to their service to clients. Another traveller spotted her tweets, saying they'd experienced exactly the same problem with this flight re-booking. So no equipment fault could be attributed to our digital devices.

She rang again just after we returned to the house for lunch, announcing triumphantly that finally she had re-tried the booking page and gained access. There was still a June 1st flight, but to London City Airport in the evening, so she booked that. Will it run? We shall see. I daresay the complaints about the rogue page had pushed the back office staff into investigating and troubleshooting in between our mountain top phone call and our lunchtime call. 

My darling Kath loves a challenge of this kind and doesn't take no for an answer. It's a great relief to have had her do that much for me. I'm not sure that I could take that level of stress, as I have so little confidence left in the way an corporate giant of the aviation industry deals with people in moments of crisis. Owain has pointed out that in his experience smaller airlines are better at customer relations, not simply because they have fewer clients, but that they are motivated to hold on to them and let their good reputation grow. Well, we always used to say 'Small is beautiful'.

The rest of the day just slipped away with updating people and catching up on the craziness of the past twenty four hours. Tomorrow I'll be catching up on preparations for Sunday. So on it goes!

   

Radio theatre, news channels and newsfeeds

Having completed the purchase of Christmas cards and stamps, and printing copies of our annual round robin letter last week, I finally summoned the energy to finish the job with several hours of assembly production line labour. It was made more onerous than usual by having envelopes of an anomalous size and shape, which required the letter be folded four times in order to fit instead of the usual two. It takes that little extra time to do four tidy folds, so the job took longer than usual. Note to self: check envelope sizes against letter page size next year!

After lunch I drove to Newport for my osteo appointment with Kay. It did me a world of good, and taught me a thing or to about how a minor knee injury had also given me hip joint problems as well. Niggling pains I've had lately in my pelvis and hip joint have been related to stress caused down in the knee joint by collisions with furniture. I'm walking more normally now, and the knee joint inflammation is subsiding. I need to be careful for a few days, a little more mindful long term of how I walk, and strive to be less clumsy moving about in enclosed spaces! I'm still trying to change habits of a lifetime.

The weather was miserably wet for the drive there and back, and traffic heavy. This deterred me from doing any shopping or social visits on the way home, and I was just lucky enough to get one of the last available parking spaces in the street at five o'clock. Demand for spaces is far greater than supply for much of the time, and this is noticeable particularly in poor weather, for reasons I don't understand.

I spent the evening listening to several different audio dramas on Radio Four iPlayer. In one way it's less demanding than watching TV or iPlayer video, which I often do these days, as much if not more than watching live TV. Radio drama requires careful listening and stimulates the imagination, and that demands a different kind of attentiveness, which I find enjoyable and quite relaxing. Entire evenings can pass by without there being anything worth watching on TV, not even the news, if I've heard it a few times during the day. 

Often morning news is a reprise of thing learned from Twitter posts the night before. There may be added interviews and comment, but these tend to pad out content more often than they add content. So called 24 hour news channels repeat large batches of content around the clock, but on-line news feeds stream fresh content, adding comment to existing content in a way that evolves as a story evolves in real time. How news delivery has changed with the evolution of digital media! And we've changed with it. The world has changed too, but not necessarily for the better, when the farewell messages of besieged Aleppo residents are broadcast on social media, and then on news channels, as they await extermination in the final onslaught to secure Syrian military control of that doomed city. And the wider world seems helpless to intervene and bring an end to this brutal show of force. These events, and their broadcast to the world will return to haunt us all in times to come.

  

Street view navigation

Today's Bible Sunday service took me again to Llanos where there were over thirty people for the Eucharist. Many regulars are away at this time, I understand. The weather was comfortably mild, even with a wind, much to the relief of many present, as it was unnecessary to use fans to keep cool. We began the service, in consequence, with a few minutes of delicious silence. I told a little of the story of the Bible Society's world wide work, and afterwards found there were some who are familiar with it. I felt a little like I did back in to eighties when I was often out and about preaching 'world mission' sermons and telling stories about the work of church agencies at home and abroad.

While I was just about to eat lunch on returning, I had the exchange of calls about the funeral on Wednesday which I'd been expecting last night, and then made arrangements to visit the widow, who lives just up the valley from Arboleas. She gave me clear instructions, which I tried to follow on Google maps with little success. Putting the address into the search bar produced nothing. So I tried using Microsoft's Bing map search engine. That produced no result and the area map was far inferior. Using Google Street View again, as I did yesterday, I followed the main road towards the house to the point at which there was meant to be a right turn. Indeed there was, but there was no view of a street, only a view of tarmac'd stretch of road without houses. This convinced me that neither map nor Street View have been recently updated.

It's not uncommon here for streets in new housing developments to remain un-named for several years after houses are built and occupied - they are simply known by the original developer's plot numbers. Keeping street maps up to date is by no means an easy task when there are so many new developments to cover all over the world. 

When Street View was first came to Cardiff city centre, it showed pictures of the redevelopment work well in progress, from late 2008. Earlier still, Google Earth had shown aerial photos of the city centre dated October 2006, the week when demolition began. You could even see a huge yellow machine that eats old buildings parked on a flattened site. It would be another five years before this aerial view was updated. I lost track of when Street View caught up with the place transformed, but do know it was a year or so after the work was completed in summer 2009. I pitied foreign visitors using these services, having heard about the wonders of the new shopping centre and finding images of a building site instead. Not good for tourism! My protests yielded nothing, but that was in the days before I could complain publicly on Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago, I broke my HSBC code generating device, used for CBS business internet banking. I didn't feel I could throw it away intact, so I reduced it to pieces to throw away, and extracted the tiny lithium battery for safe disposal. It's always a challenge to find a battery disposal unit at home and abroad. Here in Mojacar however, there's a collection point facility I've not seen elsewhere. There are tall advertising panels at certain points along the street, and built in to the base of some is a safe disposal unit. Ingenious. I must have walked past one nearest to the apartment a dozen times without remembering to drop off the battery. Tonight, on my evening paseo, I finally remembered, musing to myself that sometimes you can overlook doing the right thing, even when it's possible and right in front of you.
       

Decorative surprise

As I arrived at St Andrews to celebrate the mid-week Eucharist on this overcast grey morning, I was very surprised to see the eight spherical concrete bollards flanking the nearby pedestrian crossing were no longer grey, but brightly coloured, bedecked with knitted or crocheted covers. 

There were some special knitted decorations on one of the municipal iron street benches, also a knitted bicycle next to a real one chained to a handrail nearby, 

What a feat! I tweeted a couple of the photos, and soon started getting Spanish re-tweets, a first for me. In the background of the photo above is the entrance to the local Finnish language school. Nobody knows for sure but the speculation in church was that the street knitware originated with staff and students there. Given the Scandinavian enthusiasm for knitting arts, it's not an reasonable conjecture.

I was delighted to read today in Archbishop Barry's monthly Ad Clerum, that several colleagues have been honoured by being made Cathedral Canons, including Fr Mark, our Team Rector in Canton. This comes just at the same time as his colleague Fr Martin announces his departure for pastures new. I hope he won't be left on his own for too long. It's such a big and busy parish to run.

Belated upgrade

This morning a parcel for me arrived by courier from PC World. On Saturday I ordered a disc copy of Windows 7 in order to upgrade my work Windows Vista laptop. It's a well specified machine, but the flaws of  Vista betrays its potential, and connectivity is often a problem. An operating system refresh is preferable to replacing a reliable serviceable machine with many more years of life in it. 

So, after making a funeral preparation visit in Danescourt for a service the day before New Year's Eve, before lunch, I went to the office mid-afternoon just to do the installation, and was amazed that it should take four hours to complete.

Admittedly, the outcome was satisfactory, with all existing programs, settings and data preserved. It did however, wipe the machine's master boot record, depriving me of access to the secure partition with  an install of KDE Linux on it. That problem shouldn't be too difficult to fix when I have a spare hour. It will inevitably take a while to draw down all the security patches and modifications to Windows 7 that have arrived over the past few years, but never mind. It's worth being patient with because it works well, and is familiar. No need to waste time on learning how to use yet another user interface with the most recent upgrades, Windows 8 and 8.1.

While I waited for the machine to finish the upgrade, Ashley went over the documents we need to send in preparation for the next meeting we have with Council officers on Jan 2nd. The office was quiet with the effective abandonment of inessential regular duties as the festive season takes hold, and it meant we could work without distraction for a change.  Even so, the calm was punctuated by the arrival of a series of Twitter notifications advising that one of mine regarding William Dalrymple's 'Point of View' programme has been re-tweeted half a dozen times. It never happened to me before! 

I didn't get home for supper, until nine o'clock. Just as well I don't have any early duties tomorrow.

Troubleshooting by Twitter

Pope Francis is inspiring others and being inspired by his visit to Assisi today, home and last resting place of his inspirational namesake. The whole world is a better place for the light and joy he brings to sharing the Gospel. I spent the morning in Pontcanna's Coffee #1 learning about how one of my St Mike's students from last year packed his summer with really interesting things to do. I found that inspirational too.

This morning I woke up to find that my internet router/modem was dead, and tweeted about it to service providor TalkTalk Care. Within an hour, I received an email to tell me that a new router/modem was being dispatched to me. Great, you may think, but the story started yesterday afternoon. The internet connection was very intermittent, as it has been intermittently several times of late. It was annoying as I had some office work to get done before the weekend. I tweeted a moan about poor connectivity, and my growing curiosity about changing service providor. Within an hour I had a response from TalkTalk Care asking me to explain the problem. This was the first of nine exchanges via Twitter during the rest of the day.

First I was asked to log into my TalkTalk account page and request a line test, which I was only able to do because I had an internet enable Blackberry, of course. But at least I was spared the telephone queue, the multi-option menus and technical support people with accents difficult to comprehend. The TalkTalkCare tweeter(s) were under the impression this would restore service, having not taken in the fact that the device under test was not lighting up, even with the power on. 

I rummaged about among my spare pieces of kit for a redundant modem of bygone years to use, and came to the conclusion it was somewhere in the office. TalkTalkCare suggested I register a support request with the help desk via their internet page. The page link sent to me with the best intentions was unreadable, as it was not intended for a device as small as a Blackberry. After supper, I went off to my Tai Chi class, discussing this by tweets when an opportunity to stop arose.  On my way back from class I went into the office, rummaged around there for the spare modem without success, logged into the TalkTalk website on a desktop PC and registered my request.

When I got home late, I dug out an old multi-voltage transformer to test with the modem, just in case it was only the transformer that was dead. Sure enough the transformer powered up the modem after fiddling with the on-off switch. This got me back on-line and I was able to tweet a message from my laptop describing the outcome to the TalkTalk Care team. I left the device running and went to bed. When I got up, I found the old transformer was dead, so evidently it wasn't up to meeting regular demand, or the modem had a fault that was taking more than it could possibly give. I tweeted this to the TalkTalk Care team and very soon after had a message to say that a modem had been ordered for despatch to me. It should arrive in three working days - I make that Tuesday. Meanwhile my work Blackberry and BT mobile dongle are proving invaluable, and my jobs are getting done.

At tea-time I collected our friend Andrea from the train. She's come from Scarborough for the weekend to go to a Sunday afternoon opera with us. This weekend I have no locum duties, so it'll be good to share extra free time with her. Just as we were saying goodnight, the phone rang. It was Father Graham Francis in need of a little tech support as a consequence of a suspicious email that had set of alarm bells as it carried a file attachment which refused to open. All sorts of straightforward reasons for this, but better safe than sorry, so I talked him through starting a full security check on both his machines, just in case. I bet his namesake Pope Francis doesn't get calls like that just before bedtime.

  

Tweet a friend

I painted the the front garden wall coping stone, the porch and its surrounds yesterday. There's only the bay window to do a second time now and the job is complete. A fledgling seagull from one of the street chimney nests is roaming the street while its parents patrol often noisily above. Some years they die, other years they grow until they can fly, and the street goes quiet again, until next breeding season.

My complaints on Twitter about poor EE reception locally in Pontcanna have elicited a response from someone who manages their on-line public relations, via the Twitter instant messaging channel. I was at first suspicious of someone asking for my name and mobile number, as my name is published on Twitter, and my Gmail address available for them to send me an email also, so there was an amusing exchange of banter about this punctuating the routine. It seems as if work is being done on the relay system in the local cell of the network. Whether improvement will mean eventual improvement of reception remains to be seen. It's always been poor in the houses around here, no matter how good the advertised service is meant to be.

In this hot weather, the relay linking our office monitoring system with that down County Hall has briefly and confusingly done down a couple of times. Normally this is very robust, but feeling microscopic changes in alignment of the dishes, or changes in atmospheric conditions near ground level are capable of interrupting the flow, requiring system re-starts. Just like with the mobile phone. The helpline mantra for people having trouble with their reception is: "First try switching it off and on again." Heaven preserve us all from solar flares, as they too can have a much more disruptive impact on networks.

Not long after finally touching base with EE's eager to help people, I had a text message asking me to participate in a cost-free survey about the quality of service received from the help people. Here's a record of the exchange. I couldn't resist a bit of childish mischief.

RX: "Thank you for using Orange Internet Service on your phone. We'll text you shortly for some feedback about your experience (All texts are free) How likely are you to recommend us based on your experiences of using the internet on your phone recently? From 0 (Not at all) to 10 (Extremely).

TX: Internet for me is best a big screen experience. Emergency use only on a phone, as too hard to read with old eyes.

RX: Sorry, your answer needs to be between 0-10 How likely are you to recommend us based on your experiences of using the internet on your phone recently?

TX: I don't do robot polls, so stop harassing me.


RX: Sorry, your answer needs to be between 0-10 How likely are you to recommend us based on your experiences of using the internet on your phone recently?

The rubric assumes everybody knows you can only enter numbers. The robot survey monkey doesn't instruct you to. Duh! Bad design.

Earlier I'd asked the EE help line people for reassurance that I wouldn't get spam texts. This was what I got. So I complained:

TX: How come the robotic survey monkey is suddenly in touch with my phone? I only talk to humans. Sometimes.

To which I got the reply 

RX: Hi Keith, most of us here are humans, we are not able to catch the robot monkey though!

So nice to know there are humans out there not just some geek's idea of artificial intelligence to solve all our problems. Humans do stupid things, but remain smarter than machines whenever they stop, observe, and reason clearly with facts rather than suppositions, and talk to you in language you can grasp.


Enough hassle for one week, I thought, doing their best with all this technology which is never as good as we think it ought to be - although my sister June complains that it was better once upon a time, but improvements (we are talking Google stuff here) are making it impossible, as there's new things to learn and get used to when the old stuff worked just fine.