Bedrock

Archive for the ‘spain’ Category

Our little corner of heaven here in Spain is indeed a wonderful place – but not without it’s issues – the main one being USELESS COURIERS and in particular – DHL.

Until late 2015, presumably because of bureaucracy, our place here in Galera was not on the maps. This was never a problem for the local post lady who delivers most days with a smile,  but for some couriers it posed more of an issue. They would always want to get in touch (but only by a local Spanish number as they’re TIGHT) and convince locals to meet in town. It seems they don’t do things like “ask the post office” – that’s too easy.

And so it was that in July 2015 I was expecting a package from Europe for my trip to Boston. Well, it never turned up and today I received an email from the very apologetic sender.

I just received the shipment back to us. Without any explanation, all the shipping documents intact and unopened. I talked to our agent and they have no explanation to what has happened. My guess is that the Spanish forwarder just didn’t want the hassle of looking you up and just sent the package back after a while.
I don’t have to tell you that I won’t be using their service anymore

I should point out that the regular post office have no problem at all delivering goods on a daily basis from all over the world.

Meanwhile you may be aware from previous blogs of the absolute rip off organisation UPS – who, when charged with delivering a small package from China to Spain at reasonable cost of $25, then contacted the seller for another $19 and us for another $38 – which they called I believe a servicing charge –that’s after trying to deliver to the village (they eventually delivered direct to our home).

In order to improve matters I ensured that Google have a direct link to our address – I simply sent off the map with details – and a couple of weeks later, Google Maps was updated. WHEEEEEE.

But no, today, Dallas Semiconductors (USA) contacted me to say that DHL could not find our place and could I Please pick up the (free sample worth pennies) sample from Sevilla – which is well over three hours away from here. You can imagine that I declined the offer, instead sending them a simple link to Google Maps wherein lie directions from the main road. Perhaps DHL don’t have maps – you never know. Apparently the guy knew where number SIX was but not us – which is interesting because as far as I’m aware there IS no number 6 in our street.

Next, a pair of shoes from Amazon – similarly their courier wrote to say that courier MRW could not find the place – they too have a map and now they have a local phone number.

Update 29/08/2015 – the chips from Dallas turned up – the delivery driver, from a company I’ve never heard of before, indeed came trundling up our hill to deliver the goods – as it happens, just as we were leaving for our trip to Nerja – never the less, that’s one success story. The shoes of COURSE did not arrive as promised – this is now a familiar pattern with delivery companies here – but we did get MRW to agree to meet in the village – not to delivery the goods – but to have their driver follow us home so NEXT time there is even less excuse.

Update 12/09/2015 – Fedex have proven to be winners. When I ordered a package of floodlights, the same old story "address incorrect" so I wrote to Fedex Spain – not only did they come back to me quickly but corrected this and shortly thereafter the Fedex-authorised delivery van came trundling along to our house with a smile. Sadly I have another delivery due via UPS – I didn’t get to the supplier in time to ask them not to use UPS … not looking forward to this.

Update 18/09/2016 –I have now had several deliveries from Fedex and I recommend them to everyone – in the meantime we’ve made sure our address is on Google Maps..AND there is a very large 14 on our wall.  Simply punch the address in and it is there – accordingly even SEUR can now deliver to us. Success. Except… for DHL. Today a Chinese supplier informed me I have a parcel and to enjoy. The only problem is that I don’t have the parcel.  A quick check of the tracking number confirms that DHL delivered the parcel on FRIDAY (it is Monday) and managed to get an “illegible signature”.  So delivering to the wrong address and accepting an illegible signature seems to be ok for them! Well, it’s not ok for me. I have done my best since the last fiasco to encourage people NOT to use DHL but this one slipped through – no phone call, no message to say could not find address, nothing. Absolutely amazing.

I won’t say it hasn’t been a struggle but as of today I’ve just about cracked the TV thing with one exception.

If you’re not a frequent visitor to Spain you may not know that SKY and the BBC do not like you watching their stuff when you are abroad – this is indeed being fought as I understand by the EU as it is highly uncompetitive – and as someone who pays the TV licence and pays for a Sky subscription – I find the restrictions utterly unacceptable.

Right now the only thing I have not cracked is Sky on demand (well, sort of) – so if you have a SKY HD box they’re not about to let you record on-demand stuff as you did in the UK – I’m still working on that.

VPNs are a way around most of the issues – but you need a fast VPN to the UK and this tends to slow down access to other stuff – so I’m using a service recommended by a neighbour of ours called Unblock-Us. In UK terms it’s around £3 a month – and so the way it works is you make a minor update to your router (DNS settings) and those services that need it – iPlayer and Sky – go through that and are handled as if you were in the UK – other services go un-affected. No setup on individual PCs etc.

Also I have a Now-TV box here and that too works thanks to Unblock-Us. The good part about that is that it is relatively easy to unlock that box into what it really is – a Roku media server – so with the addition of PLEX on my PC and on the Now TV box not only can we access our media here – but also on the phone anywhere – remembering that THREE now include data with roaming accounts – such as Spain and the USA. Now I have PLEX operating – I’m looking to see what other goodies the Roku system has to offer.

Sky Go also works using this system and so with a decent tablet, SKY options are now much wider. I’d still like to crack getting the Sky broadband downloading working – it’s likely on a Port that the American company doing Unblock-US are unaware of. 

So all in all a step change from where we were weeks ago. All we need now is a decent TV a

We’ve been here now for a couple of weeks and regular readers may well be wondering why there’s been nothing in here. I referred in my last blog to issues with UPS.. well, that turned into a nightmare, meanwhile my ability to add images to any of my blogs suddenly disappeared.

The UPS affair can only be described as a disaster. They really DO NOT like finishing the job off here and actually delivering to people’s homes – made worse by Google maps which actually points to the wrong place when you try to get to our place (update August 2016 – that has since long been fixed). Many, many emails later, I got my delivery and I got it to my home. However.. the supplier put the wrong amount on the goods, leading UPS to charge too much for the VAT and DUTY on that (despite the inescapable fact that throughout Europe, deliveries of low-value goods from China almost always escape VAT and DUTY when sent through the postal system.  UPS in addition have a range of extras they can charge – handling charges etc. and the long and short of it is – I would recommend STRONGLY against using that company for any kind of overseas purchase.

Meanwhile a supplier in Sweden was shipping some parts to me to take to Boston with me on my forthcoming trip this weekend. He ordered 3 day delivery and…. they let him down – not only that but when he tried to follow this up after they claimed they’d tried to deliver the goods (they had not) the Spanish end of their operation stopped answering phone calls or responding to emails. So all in all not too good on the postal front but at least I proved they’ll deliver to the door.   My normal mail via our friendly postman has been going without a hitch.

And so to the blog – for reasons that foxed me and eventually foxed the service provider, I could not longer send images to any of my blogs. This has been going on for 2 weeks now and only today has it been resolved. I guess in compensation for the time it has taken, they’ve built a managed VPS (virtual Private Server) for me and all my stuff is now in there and up to now, running like a rocket! So up to now we’ve had a good time, done a bit of work on the house, been to the lake, down to Mojacar, Velez Rubio and other places with friend who’ve sadly now gone back to the UK for a while – and we’ve replaced the battery on the car, which it turns out was way over a decade old!!

The weather here has been excellent, rarely dropping below the mid-thirties in the afternoon. Next week I’m off to Boston where it is only marginally cooler, to participate in the Boston FABFEST – if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you’ll see what I get up to there.  Expect lots of pictures of tech stuff.

This is hopefully to be our longest stay in Galera as we plan to be here until November. We arrived in the early hours of last Thursday morning to a great and unexpected reception and we’ve been very busy since. Much is yet to be unpacked.

Thanks to organising cats, catching up with jobs, fixing stuff and un-packing, packing we’ve not been out and about a lot – Friday we had a great night with friends at their cave and then Saturday, we visited the Pizza Cave in Huescar with friends and that was really nice – not least for the scenery.

Spanish don’t do the best pizzas in the world and so it’s always nice to find some place that does a really good job. The Pizza Cave has good, friendly service and great pizzas.

I’ve been working on a little project for a pal of mine to control some industrial machinery – that’s just about done so the next thing is to get the watering system up and running and of course I have to prepare for my Boston trip.

I’ve made so many changes to the home controller since this was originally put together that it is going to take some planning. I think I’ll be running old and new together for some time.

Our new Zafira Tourer is working extremely well and we’ve only now just spotted the automatic headlight dipping!! The older car gave up the other day but it had been out of use for some time so I give it an overnight charge and the battery off charge next morning was sitting at 13,4v which seems perfectly fine to me. Fingers crossed we won’t have any more trouble with it. In this weather I can see a considerable number of trips to the various pools coming along.

Sunday night in with our neighbours and by Monday I could handle no more and had a quiet day in working on code and watched the program on the Pluto mission on TV – thanks to the iPlayer as Sky no longer does BBC and ITV. Maureen went down for the blues night in the village while I listened to dogs barking. Wednesday we went off to Baza for essentials then took a trip to the lake. Today we’re off to Mojacar for a spot of shopping. Hopefully in the next couple of days so I’ll get down into town to say hello to everyone. Honestly – not ignoring you!

And so it begins – I’m busy packing gear into the car for our trip to Spain – the last thing to go in there will be the cats!  We’ve a brief stopover then we’re on our way, this time for the entire summer. So looking forward to the end of crap British weather.

7am here in Bedrock as we start our second full day here in May. It’s been a challenge organising this holiday break,between turmoil in our professional lives and the new cottage extensions, which took a detour last week when the new bathroom plumbing burst, soaking the place and requiring professional de-humidifiers running around the clock to fix.

Thankfully as I sit here the builders are correcting that issue and in a couple of weeks we expect to be able to get on with the job of converting Hollyberry Cottage into not only a fantastically improved holiday rental cottage but also a great place for us to shack up in the winter.

Missed the all important G7 drinking session last night. Between overdoing it when we arrived here on Wednesday and just so much to do, we decided to give the first session a miss – no doubt we’ll make up for it over the weekend.

We arrived mid-Wednesday at Alicante airport and for the first time managed to find our way to Brico-Depot in Crevillent just a short hop on the way here from Alicante. The place is great, all the major stores are there including Carrefour and Aldi etc. When we arrived Wednesday night the weeds had taken over (it’s hot here but it hasn’t been hot for long enough to kill them off yet) so as well as readying the place we’ve been clearing the path. It’s starting to look good already and this morning Maureen is of with some of the women to have fun while I sort out some tech work I have to complete via Skype with my friend Aidan in the UK.

My other jobs for this weekend include getting the watering system back up and tested. I’ve brought much more meaty power supplies with me to Spain this time to handle the rather unpredictable power here – though I suspect I’ve not brought enough.  As an experiment I brought another solar regulator along with an alarm 12v battery and panel –I want to see if I can run the router and new Raspberry Pi controller off the sun entirely. I suspect that’ll have to wait for our June/July run in which we’re bringing the car from the UK as I just could not fit the second large solar panel into the travel case!!

I’ve recently started to work on my tech blog which now regularly achieves around 750 users a day and the new tech Facebook page just tipped 1000 likes – all of which imposes a slight responsibility to keep them up to date but first, we need to get into that lake and enjoy the fine weather Spain is having right now, it’s a little misty but typically sailing past 30c in the afternoon with peaks around 40c which might sound a bit much to Brits starved of sunshine but trust me – you get used to it and it beats the pants off the UK, in particular because that means you can sit outside at night without a jumper on!

Thankfully as you see in the graph (my systems have been logging temperature and humidity for a couple of years now) the humidity is finally dropping rapidly – we picked a good time to arrive.

So looking forward to a couple of weeks at least of fine weather before any more painting. We’re off to Baza this afternoon so that Maureen can pick up some supplies at the garden centre after we’ve had a soak in the lake.