Gas Prices

Just did an interesting calculation on MilesGallon.com. It shows that although gas prices in Spain are almost double those in Canada ($1.60 a litre compared to $0.95), the fuel efficiency of cars almost compensates, so that total driving costs for gas are just about 30% higher.

My 1998 Daewoo Lanos in Spain just did 820 km on 61 litres of gas (two fills), which is 7.4 litres per 100 km, and since the price here is 1.196 euros, or $1.60 per litre, the cost was about 12 cents Canadian per kilometre.

My 1998 Toyota Corolla in Canada does about 9 litres per 100 km, and since the average price of gas in Calgary is now around 95 cents, the cost is 8.5 Canadian cents per kilometre.

So it costs me 8.5 cents per kilometre in Canada and 12 cents per kilometre in Spain.

Newer small cars in Spain are much more efficient, commonly getting about 6 litres per 100 km, whereas in Canada, even my almost new Honda Fit, which is supposed to be super economical, only gets around 10 litres per 100 km. If you compare new cars, then, the cost of driving in the two countries is almost the same.

Le

So Lesotho means "Land of the people who speak Sesotho", does it? According to Wikipedia anyway. Amazing how much meaning you can cram into a couple of letters!

There but for...

Today I helped our friends Francisco and Dolores move out of the apartment from which they were evicted (because Francisco was taken advantage of by a big construction boss and lost a horrible amount of money and his apartment) to a new one they're renting. There were lots of helpers and we worked all day, from 8.30 in the morning till, in my case, 6 in the evening, with a short break for pizza. When you move out of an apartment in Spain (and many other European countries), you take everything with you: water heaters, air conditioning, sinks, ovens, light fixtures... so there was a lot to dismantle, as well as a lot of furniture and an incredible amount of stuff to put into boxes and bags.

At one point, everyone left in vans and cars to take the first load to the other apartment and I was left with the upstairs neighbour taking down curtain rails, which turned out to be very complicated, slow and tiring (because of the position you had to put yourself in). The neighbour's wife was helping and when we'd finished I said I needed a rest and a beer so we started talking and once again I started to remember how little we pampered middle-class Canadians really appreciate the sorts of lives such a lot of people have to lead, even those who seem to be living normal lives in so-called advanced economies.

I mentioned I was retired and she said I don't think we'll ever be able to retire. You have to work legally for thirty odd years to get your full state pension and she'd spent the first 13 years, from age 16 to age 29, working for someone who didn't declare her. So no social security contributions for all that time, nothing that would count towards a pension. And it's almost worse for older people, she said. If you get laid off at 55 like her neighbour just did, and you can't find a job, so you can't contribute for the last years, you don't get a pension at all. (If you're poor enough, you do actually get a special one, maximum about $450 a month, not much to live on.)

Her husband's firm just got rid of him under a new scheme in Spain (ERE) that lets a firm make you redundant without paying you any compensation because they promise to take you back if they can, so you get some unemployment pay, but not the full amount because the firm keeps paying your benefits, so you're kind of laid off but still attached to them. You don't get full unemployment until the firm goes bankrupt, which didn't take long in this case apparently, so he's been on full unemployment since February, no prospects of a job (he's in construction), and no one seems to know what happens to the normal compensation.

She's very happy though because she finally got a legal job cleaning schools. They can't give you more than a year's contract, of course, and then you have to go on unemployment for four months before you can start again, but by filling in for people who have taken leave for some reason, you can sometimes actually work during the four months that way and she's ended up working all the time for three years. Actually when you think about it, she said, we've been very lucky.

Altea

Some kind person has posted a set of beautiful photos of Altea, whither I'm off this week:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clickfotoblog/sets/72157606558288387/

Ah, Windows!

One of the things about Windows that really annoys me is that it talks too much. Of course, I don't like the fact that it's big and slow, or that it isn't very good at doing some of the things it's supposed to do, or that it often doesn't seem to know what's going on. But coming back, after three years living mostly with Ubuntu, has made me realize how much Windows just blathers on. I like terseness and efficiency: I have been spoiled, I suppose.

Let's take a simple example. A couple of years ago, when I plugged in my new HP printer for the first time, Ubuntu quietly did its stuff and after a few seconds (yes, a few seconds, on a run-of-the-mill laptop) it posted a nice little message: Your printer is now ready for use. That's all. Simple, perfect. It's all you need. But Windows doesn't understand this. No, no. When it's not ignoring you completely, so you wonder what on earth is going on, it has this compulsive need to chat: it can't resist informing you about all the important stuff it's doing, like an incompetent plumber substituting witless commentary for real expertise. So this is the story: I plug the printer into my new Windows 7 laptop and wait, but nothing happens, no message, no telltale swirling of the little circle to tell me something's going on. I try to print something, but the printer isn't among the devices I can choose to print on, which I assume means Windows hasn't got it ready yet. Finally, after a couple of minutes (it's true my little laptop is a bit slow), I click on Start, then on Devices and Printers, then on the HP Printer icon (3 clicks so far). Windows tells me the device isn't working properly and needs to be troubleshot. Would I like Windows to troubleshoot the device? (That's another thing: it talks to you like a two year old: Would you like Mummy to tie your shoelaces?) I click OK and a window comes up with little messages flitting across the top: Downloading Troubleshooter. Detecting Problems. Gathering Information about your Devices. Checking for Spooler Errors (and the list goes on, and I couldn't care less; doesn't it know normal people aren't interested in these things?). Finally it tells me there's no driver for the printer. Would I like Windows to find a driver? Again this need to engage in conversation: why on earth would any normal person not want Windows to find a driver at this point? I say sure, and go back to the document I want to print, but now suddenly everything's working: the printer icon is there in the print dialogue box, it's become the default, my document prints. Awesome! In my enthusiasm, I almost forget my frustration.

This sudden resolution of the problem, apparently without any connection to the steps you are chattily being guided through, is actually quite typical of Windows. Another time, it tells me a program is preventing Windows from shutting down and that I should click on Cancel to go back and close it, then when I click on Cancel, Windows shuts down anyway. Apparently, one process was working on closing the program, but neglected to tell Windows chatterbox, the part that's responsible for talking to the client. And that's the problem: Windows has MPD, multiple process disorder. Like the different personalities in multiple personality disorder in humans, the processes in MPD function independently and don't know about each other. Some of them are pretty good at doing their stuff, others less so, but they go about their business in their own little corner and don't consult each other most of the time. In addition, the Windows chatterbox not only doesn't know about the other processes, it doesn't really understand how Windows works. It's like the technical support person you get on the phone who's been told to ask certain questions and suggest certain solutions but who doesn't really understand your computer any more than you do. When the Windows chatterbox finds a problem, it suggests a series of steps which seem plausible, and are certainly very detailed and technical, but never manage to solve anything. And you know it's not very smart because it does things like telling you a program has stopped working, asking if you want it to see what happened and then telling you, after a long pause, that the program stopped working correctly. (I'm not sure of the English, but on my Spanish Vista it said "El programa dejó de funcionar correctamente.")

Of course, Windows does a lot of cool stuff too, much of it copied from others (but hey! who's suing?) What I don't understand is how so many just silly mistakes get left in. One example among many and then I'll shut up: I connect my beautiful new red Logitech cordless mouse to my old Ubuntu computer and it works: not after a few seconds, immediately. I connect it to Windows 7 and it doesn't work. After about five seconds, there's a muffled beep and up pops a message saying a device has been connected. I wait a little more and in the end the mouse works. OK, so not too bad, just a little slow. But wait, it gets funnier. Another day, I plug the mouse (actually you plug in a little stick that talks to the mouse) into a different USB port and it doesn't work. Soon there's a muffled beep and up pops a message saying a device has been connected. Neither the Windows chatterbox nor the process that checks ports apparently knows that this was the same mouse they installed the day before, connected to a different port, so we go through the install procedure all over again. It seems to be a little quicker this time, but Windows is definitely working on something. Amused, and remembering that my computer has three USB ports, I plug it into the third one. Again there's the muffled beep and the same message. I call my son and we laugh a lot. But then the next time I plug the mouse in (you unplug it every time you shut down to save the battery), I get a different message: "A storage device was connected. If this device is a port multiplier, only port 0 of the port multiplier will be active." How can Windows not recognize my mouse, which visits it so regularly and works so well with it? How can it now see it as a vulgar storage device? It's a mouse, not a squirrel! But every day now the same message appears as soon as I plug in the mouse. I am seriously thinking of buying a port multiplier to see what Windows thinks it is.

PS. Windows now comes up with the same message about a storage device whether I plug it in or not. And it changes my keyboard from US International (so I can do accents) to standard US and then to French Canadian all within a few minutes inside the same program. And I've told it to stop indexing because it slows the computer down in Thunderbird something wicked and it assures me indexing is stopped, but when I open Thunderbird it still says "Indexing message 1 of 12", actually indexing the new spam I can't delete until it's finished indexing it...