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By John, on March 2nd, 2011
 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.
By John, on March 2nd, 2011
 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.
By John, on February 27th, 2011
When our house in Xàtiva is finished, Ruth intends to carry on working for a time in Frankfurt. Which means we will be living partly in Germany and partly in Spain for a quite a time to come. Indeed, we expect to keep a foot in Germany for the foreseeable future. What I want to do is to ensure that our data – scanned documents, music, photos, spreadsheets, text documents etc. are equally available and up to date in both locations. Ruth will be using a Mac in Frankfurt, and in the house in Spain we plan to install most of the remaining computer equipment that we have here.
Today all our data resides on a Synology DiskStation DS210+ and can accessed from any of the Macs in the household. We don’t store data on the individual Mac local hard drives.
What I would like to do while we have two households is to be able to replicate data between two data servers – probably installing a DiskStation at each location and synchronising them regularly. Let’s say the main storage location is in Spain. My idea is to access the Frankfurt data server from Spain using WebDAV, mount the Frankfurt server as disk drive on my Mac’s desktop in the house in Spain and use a program such as Synchronize!Pro or Goodsync regularly to keep the contents of both servers identical. I think there is little chance of Ruth and I happening to edit the same file independently of each other between sync’s, so I expect the main sync activity to be adding or deleting files on two data stores.
I decided to set up WebDAV access via the internet for the existing DiskStation we have in Frankfurt and check whether the idea is feasible. To do this, I needed to set up an account with a dynamic DNS (or “DynDNS”) provider so that I can always access our systems in Frankfurt (Our ISP assigns us a dynamic IP address which changes every 24 hours). I needed to set up our FRITZ!Box 7270 to route traffic securely from the DynDNS provider to our DiskStation.
Here’s what I did:
Continue reading WebDAV access to a Synology DiskStation via an AVM FRITZ!Box
By John, on February 16th, 2011
I watched an interesting film on Arte last night, about planned obsolescence. I liked the title in French – Prêt à jeter (ready to throw away), a play on the phrase from the fashion industry, “prêt à porter” (ready to wear). The English title of the film is Pyramids of Waste or alternatively The Light Bulb Conspiracy. (You can read the project proposal for the film here (pdf document) – it’s also interesting.)
The film is an indictment of the modern consumer society which encourages us to throw away goods rather than repairing them, although the world’s resources are limited; largely driven by each manufacturer’s desire to sell more each year.
In particular it highlights planned product obsolescence. Planned obsolescence has been followed as a strategy for getting customers to buy more units of products by manufacturers since the 1920′s.
Some examples from the film:
If you get a chance – watch the film. Here’s a link to the Norwegian version you can watch on Vimeo (main language used is English, but some interviews filmed in Spanish, French and German are subtitled in Norwegian); and here is a link to the Facebook page for the film, where you might find information about where it is being shown in other languages.
You can find other examples where industry has followed its own agenda against the interests of consumers here, by the way.
By John, on February 11th, 2011
Most of the time, I will be visiting our building site on my own, over the next months. Ruth is still working, earning the money to pay for the house! So I will need to call home to discuss any issues that arise. Last time I was in Spain, we tried out the DCalling Service.
This seems to work. Well. I think we’ll be using it a lot in future.
You register with DCalling, which will get you a small credit on your DCalling account (25 cents, if I remember correctly), to allow you to try out the service. If you like it, you can top up your account in units of 20 Euro, which will be enough to keep you going for over 17 hours if you are making international mobile phone calls to land-lines within Europe.
Continue reading DCalling: cheap international mobile phone calls
By John, on February 10th, 2011
 The pool, with the hole for the pump in the background
Antonio sent us an update from his site visit on 8th February- since I was there a week ago, the pool has been excavated, and the concrete base for the house poured. The progress is very easy to follow at the moment! Clicking on the photo will take you to Picasa, where I have added Antonio’s photos.
By John, on February 3rd, 2011
 Concrete has just been poured around the steel column-cores
I was down in Valencia on Tuesday to see Antonio and we went out to the site as he had a regular site meeting scheduled with the subcontractors, builder, site foreman and the technical architect that morning. While we were there, the concrete foundations around the steel cores of the columns which support the roof were poured. The actual workers were completely outnumbered by the number of “bosses” present – I think I counted 3 people actually doing work, the rest were busy photographing details and discussing the progress and the plans for the next week!
By John, on January 30th, 2011
 Seen today, on our afternoon walk
By John, on January 27th, 2011
We had a surprise today – we received some photographs taken on Tuesday this week by Antonio, our architect, showing what has already happened in Xàtiva. I must say it was nice to see not a single sign of snow there; quite a contrast to here, where we have had some light snow again this week. The last lot had only just melted completely.
 Overall view of the building site on 25.01.2011
Click on this image to see the rest of the photos
Things are moving quickly at the moment. In fact we received the first invoice for a stage payment from the building company today too, which Antonio had signed off – that wasn’t actually due until the end of the month!
We have got quite an unconventional contract with the builder and also with the two biggest subcontractors, by the way. The “standard” way to contract building work in Spain is to agree to pay 90 days after receipt of an invoice which has been certified by the architect (that the work is complete); and penalty clauses for late delivery are not common. In our case we have agreed to pay within five days of receipt of the invoice, but on the other hand, we also have a penalty clause – every day after the agreed project end date (in this case, six and half months after the start of construction) costs the builder serious money in penalty payments. The same conditions apply for the subcontractors.
We had a similar contract when we built a house in Munich over 20 years ago, and we moved in over 4 months before any other family on the development (it was a 30-house development). So we are hopeful that the agreed end-date for the project will be met.
I’ll be able to take my own pictures in a few days time – I have a meeting set up with Antonio, which we will start at the building site before we adjoin back to his office in Valencia.
By John, on January 24th, 2011
The construction of our house in Xàtiva started a couple of weeks ago, so we are busy thinking about all the decisions we still need to take, before the builders take them for us by default. The sanitary ware, taps and showers in the bathrooms, the interior doors and their handles, the floor and wall tiles, and so on and so on… I plan to go to Valencia in a few days time and look at some samples with Antonio, the architect. And visit the building site, and convince myself that work really has started.
For light relief, it is good to take a break and also browse Unhappy Hipsters now and then!
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