Life in Culebrón

When we first got to Spain we had a dial up Internet connection. By the time we got to Culebrón we had Internet that came down the power cables; 1mb as I remember. I have no idea why but Iberdrola, the electricity retailer, dropped that service and left us in the lurch. At the time there was only one other reliable option, the old state telecoms company now branded as Movistar. They gave us 1mb too. Over the years, that increased to 3mb but that was as fast as they could go with the infrastructure they have. Meanwhile a local company, Conecta3, had been cabling up Pinoso. After a while, they offered a service to the outlying villages too. The speed was better, 8mb, and their all in package for land line, Internet and mobile, was less than I was paying Movistar. I hesitated for a while because of the potential problems of switching but, in the end, it all went smoothly. The firm has been good. They increased the speed out here in the sticks to 12mb  without increasing the pric...

I had a bit of a problem with an email group the other day. I'd never seen one before and it took me a few minutes to work it out. The person who'd set up the email also put together a group on WhatsApp before mistakenly deleting themself from the group. I bacame the group administrator by random asignation. Again it took me a few minutes to work out what was going on and reinstate him. Crikey I thought. I'm getting old. Losing touch with the technology. We have a general Election on 20 December. I was listening to some pundit, presumably from a party that hadn't done well out of a newspaper poll, saying that polls were no longer a fair reflection of the voting population. His argument was that, because the pollsters telephoned people randomly on fixed phones, the sample was self selecting as only old people have fixed phones now. I bristled. That's not true I thought defensively. It's true that even I access the Internet more often from a tablet or my p...