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 State of play on 12th April After a 2-week pause, we have received some photos from Antonio showing the state of play at the building site. Ruth is pleased to see that the pool has now been concreted, and we hope they successfully removed the soil that had been washed into the pool by the heavy rain in March before they poured it! I have started a new album in Picasa, to keep the number of photos in one album to a reasonable number. Clicking on the photo will take you to the new album.  Typical Monday agoogleaday puzzle Google is running a series of puzzles at agoogleaday.com over the next months, which can be solved if you know how to use Google to help you. If you get stuck, you can click on “Show Answer” below the puzzle, and Google explains what you needed to search for. The questions are easiest on Mondays and get steadily more difficult as the week progresses. If you make your searches directly from the agoogleaday page, Google filters the results so you don’t see any websites which have posted the answer. Here the answer to the (easy, Monday) puzzle above:  Answer to the above puzzle  2011-03-22: View of the terrace and the lounge walls Last week, Antonio wrote to say there wouldn’t be any photos of progress on our house-project because it had been raining so much that no-one was working on site on the Tuesday, so the site meeting for that week had been cancelled. Also, that week was the end of the Fallas celebrations and he was fleeing Valencia and the noise until they finished on the 19th. (Antonio lives right in the center of Valencia where all the crowds gather, and it is impossible to drive in or out of the quarter in the last few days because the streets are packed with people and the police set up road blocks to keep the traffic and the pedestrians separate from each other). This week we got to see the progress of the last two weeks. As usual, clicking on the photograph above will take you to the complete set of photos showing the progress to date.  Realtime quake map of Japan Paul Nicholls in Christchurch, New Zealand, has produced a continuously updating map showing the location and depth of the quakes which have struck Japan since the magnitude 9.0 quake on the 11th March 2011. Today (17th March), there were 34 quakes, including one measuring over 6.0 on the Richter Scale. Bear in mind, that the Richter Scale is logarithmic, which means that a difference of 1.0 on the scale is a difference of 10 times the magnitude, and a difference of 2.0 is a factor of 100 times difference in magnitude. (The Christchurch quake this year was 6.3 on the Richter Scale). If you are interested in an informed view on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, and on background information about radiation and nuclear processes, try the well-written MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub, which is written and maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. While searching the internet for information on the current crisis in Japan, I stumbled across an interesting press release from Reuters – it seems that a US-led research team thinks it has found the lost city of Atlantis in southern Spain in the Doñana National Park, which is just north of Cádiz. Their theory is that it was overwhelmed by a tsunami. The theory was the subject of a new National Geographic Channel program called “Finding Atlantis” that was first aired today. Atlantis was written about 2600 years ago by the philosopher Plato, who placed it near the “Pillars of Hercules” as the Straits of Gibraltar were known to the ancient Greeks.  Recipe Search on Google I just noticed – Google has added a recipe search item to their home page. You can filter the results by ingredients, cooking time or by calories. To get included in the results, sites need to tag their recipes using rich snippets. Rich snippets can also be used to add information (e.g. geo-location, address, phone number) that Google uses in its search results for other types of data about (for example) events, product reviews, or businesses. It looks like it would be a good idea for businesses to add the necessary code to their sites and then tell Google that they have done so.  Microsoft: Encourage Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade Aggressive “dissing” of your own product. Microsoft has set a goal of getting the proportion of Internet Explorer 6 users reduced to 1% and is actively advising people to stop using it. Currently, around 12% of internet users, mostly in Asia, are still using MSIE6, which was incredibly buggy and caused headaches for web developers who had to add extra code to web sites to work around the bugs.  The new look for IHArchitects.com Having just reworked the content and given a mild update to the appearance of Richard and Simon’s web site in January, we decided to ask Caroline Archer, the graphic designer who did their logo and corporate image, to give it the once-over. This time we have kept the content the same (apart from adding the contact details to every page – previously some users had difficultly finding the contact page) and have completely revamped the appearance. (See above). We think Caroline’s done a great job!  The quarry our dry-stone walls are coming from We visited the plot yesterday morning with Antonio. As well as seeing the progress on the site, Antonio and Pepe (who is the builder) told us that one of Pepe’s men was at the local quarry, about 5 km from the site, breaking stones to the right size for building the dry-stone walls of the house. Not the old-fashioned way, with a sledge hammer or a pick-axe, but with high-tech (well, a JCB). Pepe told us that it is cheaper than buying the stones broken to size from the quarry, and the quality is better if you do it yourself. We got taken to the quarry, to see the work for ourselves, and also to see a sample of the stones built as a dry stone wall – very interesting as neither of us have visited a quarry before. I should add, that originally, we were going to buy a plot quite near to the road that the lorries leaving the quarry regularly use (it’s the main N-340 out of Xàtiva). Luckily, the owner decided he wanted more for the plot that he had told the estate agent, so the sale dropped through. We only realised later that there would have been quite a bit of noise from the heavily laden lorries going past the end of our land. The plot we did buy is a lot further from the N-340 and you can’t hear the traffic at all. A piece of good luck. Click on the photo above to see the latest photos from the building site and also the stones being broken up at the quarry.  La Mascletà - - Valencia 2011  La Mascletà - - Valencia 2011 We visited Antonio in Valencia yesterday and spent the morning at the building site. When we got back at just before two in the afternoon, the streets of Valencia were packed with people and Antonio needed to show his Spanish ID card to be allowed through a police checkpoint to get back to park at the office. The reason – every day in the fortnight before, and during, the Fallas (or “Falles” in the local language, Valenciano) start, there is a “Mascletá” (or “Mascletà”) at 2 p.m. in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. This is an incredibly popular (locally televised) event, that involves setting off huge amounts of rockets, and more importantly, explosions! The sky disappears in a cloud of gunpowder smoke for about 10 minutes and the noise is incredible. Antonio’s office overlooks the main post office, the roof of which is in the photos above. The post office is directly on the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, so we got a bird’s eye view of the spectacular, and an ear-full of the explosions. The final Mascletá on the last day of the Fallas (the 19th March) is – according to the people who work in Antonio’s office – the noisiest and most popular of the events. The Fallas themselves take place between the 15th and the 19th March and are well worth a visit, although Antonio asked us to avoid coming for a meeting with him in that week as it is almost impossible to travel around Valencia, due to the crowds of visitors. Here’s a short introduction to the Fallas and the Mascletas from Wikipedia. Update: I found a 7 minute clip of the Mescletá which we saw from Antonio’s office on YouTube, filmed from the square, which gives a good idea of what it was like. |
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