Scargill

Here we are back in rainy, miserable, cold Britain and I have to say not voluntarily but the cottage needs work over the winter.

The first thing I had to do on returning to the UK was to update computers that had not had updated since July, the fridge was duff, Microwave had some damage, heating was acting up, the electrician I asked to fix the hot water something like a month or so ago hadn’t done the job…  in short, lots of work to do.

We’re just about to upgrade the cottage to high speed broadband – and when I say that we’re looking at up to 80 Mbps down and up to 20Mbps up – that should bring the place into the 21st century – well, for rural areas anyway!

Meanwhile shortly after returning from Spain we headed off to the USA for Thanksgiving – in Chicago. An interesting place, wealthy for the most part, people are super friendly but it is a little like being in a time-warp, nothing significant has changed since i first went there – the same music (80s rock and country and western) seems to dominate the radio, cars don’t seem to have changed much…  on the other hand neither has the price of fuel. Americans may gripe at the cost of “gas” but when it costs £20 to fill up the tank you really are in automotive heaven!

At one point we went down to an electronics store – specifically when they introduced the “Raspberry Pi ZERO” – the $5 computer on a board. Made in Ireland you’d think we’d get the best deals here in the UK – no chance. In the USA I picked the board up for $5.31 – here they are like gold-dust and people are selling them on Ebay for as much as £40 – or twice that with the magazine that was giving them away for free.

So, I’m back, Maureen is back soon and now the job of fixing up the house begins.

As our time in Spain draws to a close – we have only a short time left before returning for a while to miserable, sopping wet Britain – something I don’t at ALL do voluntarily, it is worth noting that in our time here this year, which started in July, I could easily count on both hands how many times we’ve seen rain.

Temperatures here in Andalusia are maybe hitting 22c in the afternoon with a few exceptions but a somewhat chilly 8c at night. we’ve had the heating on for 2 days this year up to now.  Down at the coast from where we’ve just returned from a short break with friends, we had one sunny day this weekend, equivalent to a typical British “better” summer’s day – and one cloudy day though in both cases the temperature rarely dipped below 18c and peaked I think around 24c.

Things I won’t miss include lazy good for nothing couriers and absence of B&Q but that’s about it. Oh and dogs – endless, pointless barking. I won’t miss that. Things I will miss are friends, cheap beer, even cheaper fuel, sunshine, swimming pools, great food and friendly Spanish people. Still, only a short time before we can start a 6 month Spanish trip in earnest. This one was cut short by the most amazing combination of bad luck and ropy workmanship last year, next time we’ll be better prepared. Maybe when we come back our new adopted external cat family will still be here.

Thankfully my cyber community I’ll be taking with me – at the time of writing, I’ve around 1000 visitors a day to the tech blog (http://tech.scargill.net) and I think approaching 800 followers on Twitter. Hopefully over the winter I can give them some useful write-ups.

UPS – the Worst Delivery Company in the World?

I bought a watch on Kickstarter some time ago – a smart watch, from America and it did well for a while but got some water damage. I was a little annoyed as the watch is supposed to be waterproof but the company (Pebble) were very good about it – they said no problem – we’ll ship you another straight away – you’ll have it in days.

And they chose… UPS. Too late to stop them (the LAST delivery from UPS was an utter and expensive disaster).

On time, Pebble sent me a tracking number – and the parcel would arrive here in Galera on Wednesday. I made sure they had the map link, that they sent the house map link to UPS and I sent a copy to the guy I’d previously spoken to at UPS in Spain. What could go wrong?  Eventually the tracking info updated itself and sure enough – LATE WEDNESDAY ARRIVAL. We were off to the coast for a couple of days (Thurs-Fri) so I let everyone involved know. Early Wednesday afternoon – the tracking information changed – “Incorrect address” – I could not believe my eyes.

I immediately wrote to everyone involved and ensured they knew that my address was correct and that I was ABSOLUTELY NOT going to be around on Thursday or Friday.

Sure enough nothing happened on Wednesday – I sent a stream of correspondence off and we went off on our trip to the coast, with a confirmation from UPS that they’d try again on Monday.

Friday, an email came in on my phone – UPS have DELIVERED YOUR PACKAGE. I was flabbergasted.  The address they delivered to according to the email, was nonsense – 2 letters – and the delivery was to “SOAN L” – not only was the address rubbish – but who on EARTH was “SOAN L” – didn’t really even sound Spanish and it certainly wasn’t English.

So after screwing up the Wednesday delivery, they sent the package on the WRONG day to the WRONG place to the WRONG person.

As it turns out – they’d just resorted to form – and delivered the package to …. Spanish Inland Properties – “SEAN L” a local business in the village – the very helpful chap there and on Saturday I picked up the replacement watch from him.  They simply could not give a SHIT about customer requirements. What if one of my friends had not suggested I contact Sean. What if Sean had said “sorry, I don’t have any parcel”.

All’s well that ends well, but now I feel it is my duty to warn everyone, everywhere – DO NOT USE UPS IN SPAIN AS THEY ARE COMPLETE RUBBISH – Two screwed deliveries in a row and a general feeling from the people here that they just don’t care and will take the easy option.

We’re currently spending our summer in Spain, having made some major changes to our lives. I’m no longer the National IT Chairman for the FSB – a role I held for 14 years without opposition. I decided in June that I’d spent enough time with the organisation and it was time to move on.

Maureen is no longer teaching and we made the somewhat bold decision to clear off to Spain for the summer. Our old home in Wark is on long-term rent and Hollyberry Cottage is fully booked until our return in the winter. In the meantime the ESCO work I was doing for the EU had drawn to a close (at least for now – I’m sure it won’t be long before I see Brussels again).

Hence instead of making excuses for the British summer that never comes, we’ve been here in Andalusia (Andalucia if you’re from mid-Spain) now since July and despite some of the disturbing weather forecasts you might have seen for parts of Spain, we’ve had I think 2 days of rain and maybe 5 or 6 days of gloomy clouds all summer – the rest has been glorious – yesterday for example was 30c and sunny (general photos in this album). The last rainfall did a power of good for the lakes which are a bit on the low side this year, but wonderfully warm for it.

I spent a short amount of time in Boston this summer, invited by a Chinese group to help out at MIT and met some great people there. Mind you, the airlines lost my bags in the process but that’s another matter.

If you want to get into the whole Spanish thing – I maintain the Spanish Bedrock website where I detail our travels in the hope it is of interest to others… and there is also Facebook etc., the social media links are in here somewhere. Meanwhile on the technical front, the additional time this long break has given us has been great, I’ve been able to devote more time to various projects and learning on my tech website, something that just doesn’t work when you are flitting back and forth from one meeting to another.

Accordingly I’ve been learning all about Linux thanks to the Raspberry Pi 2 which has kind of forced me to make the effort – so my new home control project – detailed at http://tech.scargill.net has given me ample opportunity to start broadening my Linux skills – still very much a work in progress.

I guess most importantly we’re having fun and relaxing, something I’ve not done for a long time. We miss our friends in the UK but then that’s what the technology is all about – Skype, Facebook and other toys have changed the way people communicate, generally for the better though I am looking forward to face to face meetings with our pals on our return in November.

This morning, we’re off to Huescar for coffee and some bits and pieces then I have a day of wiring up to do, I’ve been re-designing the lighting here outside our cave and am trying to make the wiring as neat as possible. For now most of my updates are on the Bedrock site.

My recent high tech trip to MIT in Boston, USA seems like a distant dream, mind you given the hassle I had with useless-as-shit Iberia Airlines it’s probably just as well. On 2nd of August I travelled from Alicante to Boston via Madrid. At the intermediate stop, Iberia Airlines managed to misplace my one and only bag. I put a claim in for the fact that I had to buy clothes thanks to them losing my gear.

Meanwhile all is well here in Spain – the weather is still hot as you like. We’ve had storms but they always seem to be somewhere else with one exception, Maureen and I went off to a bar in nearby Castillejar and the heavens opened up, flooding the streets for at least half an hour – mind you – it was still 22c at the WORST point and soon warmed up again. None of yer English freezing cold rain storms.

This week we’re likely to take a trip to Granada, some of our friends are off home to the UK (sadly) so it’ll be a little quieter from now on – still – that’s fine – there’s no shortage of things to do around here and I suspect more than one package from China will turn up this week to keep me occupied.

Back to my jobs. Today I’m putting new screens on windows – and a spot of cementing.

Update November 2015: In August I had immediately started a discussion with Iberia Airlines who gave me someone else’s lost baggage number just to make matters worse. Despite many conversations and a written acknowledgement that they had lost my baggage and would compensate me accordingly (I had to buy clothes) – mid-November I still have had nothing from the airline and have had to report them to the CAA. Why is it always this way with big companies…

All in all not a bad week – several days in Boston, Google have finally put Bedrock on the map and now I’m back in Spain and we’re currently enjoying Galera night celebrations. Another night of activity in the town – I managed to stop up until midnight when the fireworks went off – and very nice, too. Tomorrow we’re off to the market. Better updates on the Bedrock blog.

That was funny… We are currently deep within MIT in Boston preparing a talk and workshop on a microprocessor called the ESP8266 and what should turn up but a bug. No, a REAL one and what a monster.

We’re still working on the jokes…

A lot is said about UBER and what an evil monster it is. London taxi drivers like nothing more than to gripe about them (and I’m sure they do elsewhere, I just happen to have taken quite few London taxi rides in recent times – probably no more). And so it was that this Monday as I spent my first day in Boston, desperate for a ride, the taxi drivers spent (at least the morning) parading around the MIT buildings and no doubt everywhere else with anti-Uber stickers plastered over their taxis.

The problem is… they are taxis… And what do we do with taxis? Hail them, except we could not as they were too damned busy protesting.

So last night faced with a large purple bump under my foot due to walking miles with shoes not meant for walking (as my other shoes are in the bag which Iberia airlines misplaced) my colleague Swee An ordered an Uber taxi on his mobile. We got to watch a little map with his taxi superimposed as the driver firstly went the wrong way then as he tried to stop near us was harassed by an MIT police patrol which took him a block away before he managed to return for us. All good fun but I have to say everything worked smoothly and the real time monitoring feature of the app is great.

Instead of inconveniencing everyone with strikes maybe the traditional taxi companies should consider a move into the 21st century. If you can’t beat them…

Cost for me is not SO much of an issue but in a foreign country, convenience wins every time.

And so on my final day in Boston, I grabbed the app, signed up and gave them a shot. Despite the foot I’d decided I needed to get into Boston itself to take some pictures and I just walked and walked and.. by lunchtime I was fairly well beaten and after some attempts to get back to the riverside, standing in the middle of a street with no name, I gave up and opened up the app.

The app knew where I was, where the nearest car was and offered me a reasonably priced ride after requesting my destination. 2 minutes later, a nice looking car driven by an imposing black lady arrived and we headed off back – having a nice chat along the way. I packed my gear and got ready to go to the airport. Once again I contacted Uber.

Again all I had to enter was the destination and up came an approximate price. This time I had a benchmark as it had cost me $35 to get here in the first place. It cost me $31 to get back, in comfort with a very friendly driver who told me all about his experience with Uber. He’s been doing this for a while now and Uber take 20% cut of his fairs..

My web account has receipts, maps of my journeys and more – this at least on the surface is just SO much better than taking a traditional cab, I can see why the cab drivers are up in arms – maybe instead of getting together to protest they should be getting together to modernise.

Sadly it would appear they are currently banned from Spain where alternatives such as Mytaxi,  Hailo aand Cabify prevail. It seemed the Spanish government caved in to pressure from the taxi lobby. and of course you may know that in Spain you can’t just fit solar panels to your house – something to do with pressure from the electricity company… hmm.

The last time I wrote in here we lived in Wark, in Northumberland where we’d been for, what, 15 years? And then – all change. Today we’re in Andalusia as we have been for the last couple of weeks – and we plan to stay here at least until the end of October. Wark is long-term rent and we have a nice couple in there, Bellingham is fully booked from now until November and we’ll take that over a for a while in the winter to do some maintenance while waiting for Spain to warm up again!

We brought the car and the cats this time – they’re kind of settling in but it will take time. It’s amazing to think that we’ve had our place in Spain for 8 years now – so I guess it was the logical conclusion to start making proper trips – the car journey from Portsmouth really wasn’t that bad.

Over here in Spain it has rarely dropped below 35c in the afternoons for the past few weeks – all I can say is thank heavens for (cold) hot-tubs and pools. Maureen is working on improvements around the house and I’ve been struggling with everything from dodgy delivery companies to issues with the blog which I’m glad to say are all now resolved and I have a brand new fast “VPS” on which to run my various blogs including this one.

This coming week I’m off to Boston, USA for a few days. I’ve been invited to be involved in the FABFEST there by a company called Espressif – they make one of the very high-tech chips I talk about a lot in my tech blog.  It will be nice to be surrounded in a conference with enthusiastic younger people and to see what the latest ideas are – and of course to return a little knowledge to the community. I’ll blog about this on Facebook and elsewhere no doubt once I get settled in Boston with an Internet connection!

I note there is a small push to get the movie “Interstellar” into UK schools, the basis for this being that the special effects were science-driven and as it turns out, apparently represent some of the best visualisations of what it might be like near a black hole.

The basis of the movie is simple enough – a few years into the future, we are running out of resources and nature is fighting back (a popular theme, the idea that nature is right and we are wrong – something I find a little silly being as the best nature could manage for most of time was a bunch of rocks and until we started understand nature we rarely lived past 50).

In the movie, mankind is doomed, our only hope being to colonise other worlds and the only way to do that being to use a black hole as a stepping stone to get to these very far away places. The movie focuses on various aspects of relativity, so that compared to those on the ship approaching the black hole with it’s massive gravitational pull, those back home are ageing much more rapidly. They also attempt to show visually what might happen if you approach the event horizon of a black hole (though I was always led to believe that the first thing would be you were ripped to bits). The imagery is staggering but more importantly this is as near to accurate as we know how to make it, simplifying an otherwise complicated subject sufficiently for keep it both educational and VERY entertaining.

While this is to be applauded, frankly for those of us brought up in a science-friendly environment, the leap to understanding all of this is relatively straightforward and quite exciting. Indeed part of the fun is picking flaws in the movie.

However to someone who does not have that educational background (self-taught in my case – my parents and teachers did a good job of making me want to know more), it is likely that the movie represents a lot of flashing lights, decent acting and not a lot more.

One of the big problems of science versus religion is that the latter takes almost no effort whereas the former can take a lot of effort. Simple answers are “comforting” and science at the extremes rarely provides simple answers. Attempts to explain modern science to school-kids will ultimately fail unless the teachers involved actually understand the science AND are able to relay this to the layman enthusiastically – skills which don’t always go together. Once someone becomes a teenager, if their early up-bringing and schooling didn’t give them analytical skills, attempts then to teach modern concepts in science are almost guaranteed to be doomed to failure.

I was brought up in a world if Richard Attenborough, Tomorrow’s World and Science fiction which often turned to science fact, constantly learning something new. People on my watch list include Brian Cox, Elon Musk, Craig Venter… I’m interested in world-changing projects like Oneweb and the world at Cern. 

What of those who spent their youth reciting a book, over and over almost to the exclusion of everything else? How will their thoughts contribute?

Is I get older and hopefully wiser it is becoming increasingly obvious that organised religion today is bad, VERY bad. Children are like sponges – if you tell them that fighting for the fatherland is good – they’ll suck it up. If you tell them it will be ok if they blow themselves to bits, they’ll suck it up. In countless historical examples we see how easy it is to set children off on the wrong path. There is an unparalleled responsibility put on adults to ensure that children are presented (in as balanced a way as possible) with interesting facts and our best guesses as to how everything works and ensure they understand the difference between fact, theory and fiction – yet what actually happens? In most of the world, parents and society fall over backwards to imprint their brand of religion on their children and this is just PLAIN WRONG.

Here’s a heretical thought for the future: Scrap religious education as such and take another approach. Let’s called it “Origin studies” for the sake of argument. We all want to know where we came from and where we are going (yes even those who don’t believe in fairies). Was there a beginning? Will there be and end and where do we fit in the middle? How do we define “purpose”?

Such a scheme starts with government determination (which likely won’t happen) and suitable qualified teachers (which likely won’t happen)… begin with the simple stuff… explain that in early times, people with almost no knowledge of the world and absolutely no knowledge of the universe, in order to give meaning to lives and to try to explain the unexplainable, came up with the idea of god. Explain WHY we have a tendency to form competing groups at every opportunity and how useful that was for early survival and how absolutely destructive it is today. Are those views and lifestyles still relevant? Explain that hundreds if not thousands of gods which people used to believe in have fallen by the wayside – and that there are a few left which millions of people still believe in – mostly incompatible – explain also that by and large those world regions with the highest belief levels have the poorest education – study the relationships between physical and psychological well-being, belief and education.

Then go on firstly with very simply explanations and a heavy dose of imagery, how science is filling in the gaps, giving us the opportunity to look again at those belief systems with fresh eyes and actual knowledge. Explain that it is important to split science into two areas – information which started as theory and became fact, ideas that are still theory and simple observations. For example, evolution is not just a theory, it is a well proven fact. Black holes not so long ago were theory, today they have been observed but our PRACTICAL experience of them remains low. Explain that the idea of the multiverse is just one unproven theory among many and explain WHY we have these competing theories. Explain also that leaving new discoveries to others is no good – we are all capable of contributing ideas and should not be frightened to do so.

The universe is expanding and APPEARS, extrapolating backwards to have come from a point. Is that a fact or are there alternatives? If it is a fact, what of before the big bang – or indeed is that the wrong question?

When the child becomes an adult, the sky will be the limit for them – they can then choose what to believe in, create their own beliefs and likely contribute to our collective understanding. For myself I have a mental model of how most things work but thanks to my up-bringing that model can change with time – I’m quite happy to look at new information with a view to getting a fresh perspective. Those blighted by religion from youth often cannot and will not see beyond what they were originally taught and indeed many do not even have the ability to question or have been taught that there are things you should not question, to which my response is “Bollocks” yet those beliefs are so strong that in some parts of the world they will still kill to enforce those beliefs on others. See examples where atheists (or those with competing religions) are attacked or even killed for daring not to share the same invisible friends as others. The analytical skills of some people have been utterly crippled and perhaps they wish to inflict this on others.

If we owe anything to the future it is to provide the upcoming generations with the skills to evolve and expand and not to cripple them with our own inadequate visions of how everything works or even the widely held, pathetic belief that we should not or cannot understand because “we are not worthy”. Time is running out for us to understand the world well enough to preserve it – and “praying” just won’t save us.

Science has answers for many things – yet many of those answers are full of gaps merely due to lack of time and effort. Collectively we can reduce those gaps. When all the gaps in our knowledge are gone, if such a thing is possible, perhaps then we will become the gods some people believe exist. Or… we can go the way of the dinosaur.