Lavengro in Spain

Servicio Movistar ¡Hazlo tú mismo!

¿Qué hace Movistar cuando el servicio técnico por chat recibe un problema que no sabe resolver, como por ejemplo: No puedo accceder a mis cuentas de correo para eliminar una y añadir otra?

Hay más. Al ejecutar el programa …

No es posible añadir ninguna dirección a la configuración del firewall (Kaspersky). Y la instalación no me pide nada. Me dice que no tengo conexión a Internet. Pero sí tengo, y ¡precisamente con Movistar! Y funciona.

 

Acutaslización. Ahora, tras hora y media de chat, lo tengo funcionando.En primer lugar, Movistar funciona con Internet Exploorer, y no con Firefox.

Extracto del chat:

Analista>fIREFOX da problemas con nuestras páginas sería recomendable que accediera con el explorer o cualquier otro navegador

Yo>Lo intenté con nel analistab anterior. Y no es que Firefox tiene problemas con sus páginas. Es que sus páginas no son elaboradas para funcionar con Firefox

Analista>Eso es un tema aparte, de hecho firefox 4.0 tardo varios meses en ser compatible con nosotros y ahora con la versión 5.0 pasa lo mismo, y solo pasa con ese navegador. Solo necesito que acceda a donde le h pedido y siga los pasos indica

Yo>Me parece que Movistar deberá hacer un esfuerzo para ser compatible con Firefox. ¿Es Telefónica accionista de Microsoft? De todas formas parece que lo tengo funcionando en IE. A ver qué puedo hacer.

Analista>cORRECTO

Y en segundo lugar, rechaza mi contraseña por ser demasiado corta. Introduzco otra. Rechazada. No puede contener repeticiones o secuencias. BIen pero … no contiene ni una ni otra. La tercera vez, sí. Lo tengo.

Y ¿por qué necesito esta dirección adicional? Es para un Blackberry. MIs cuentas existentes quedan bloqueadas cuando se instalan en el BB. Será una cuenta solamente para probar en el BB. ¡Y todo este trabajo para poder resolver otro problema!

The dead waking

South Africa: 'Dead man' wakes up inside morgue

A 50-year-old South African man woke up inside a mortuary over the weekend and screamed to be let out - scaring away attendants who thought he was a ghost.

A grisly story from the BBC, but not unprecedented.

This is from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION, 1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me--by request.  One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement-- for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell.  I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons!  So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest.

The invisible hand

We are in the hands of the financial markets, and it is known that the hand of the market is invisible. But invisible is not the same as anonymous, and this blog can now reveal the owner of those hands.

 

Boycie: Where d’you get those aces from?
Del Boy: Same place you got those kings. I always knew you were cheating, Boycie.
Boycie: Yeah, how?
Del Boy: ’Cause that wasn't the hand that I dealt you.

(For those who don’t know, Wikipedia)

Would you buy a used newspaper off this man?

I wouldn't trust James Murdoch an inch but it is interesting to see that the Guardian has chosen this, of the hundreds of photos of him that it must have available, to illustrate an article entitled:

James Murdoch misled MPs, say former NoW editor and lawyer

Spanish newspapers

As the Economist looks at tabloids it is worth looking at this table (click to enlarge).

I sometimes say that Spain has no tabloid press. Sometimes I am believed and sometimes not, but I stand by what I say. In a country where El Periódico is regarded as a bit strong for some people, and where journalists are expected to report the facts reasonably honestly, British-style tabloids are quite beyond the pale.

So what's this table about? Marca is one of several Spanish dailies that report exclusively on sport; when I say that Spain has no tabloid press I mean the general press. El País is Spain’s biggest-selling newspaper with around 400,000 copies daily (add about 33% for proportional UK figures). It is boring. It makes no pretence to ‘entertain’. It reports facts and carries heavy op-ed pieces. Counting similar general papers, which range across the political spectrum, about 2,000,000 Spanish people buy such papers every day. That is not counting truly local papers.

To return to the Economist, I am not sure but I suspect that Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport also covers sport exclusively. I can say nothing about the two Japanese titles.

Spanish TV is another matter. There is no shortage of tacky tabloid-style TV programmes.

Met chief resigns

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson has resigned. I said as soon as he was appointed that he was heading for trouble.

He says, ‘my integrity is completely intact.’ Indeed, he is a proud man.

Pulling up the ladder

This letter appears in today’s Observer (my emphasis):

… A necessary condition for getting the chronically unemployed off benefits is a rise in the minimum wage. Simply curtail immigration and the market will up unskilled pay rates. Nothing less than the unthinkable, namely a UK opt out from the EU accord on the free movement of people, will do.

No outsider is going to worry about the social costs of our growing underclass or feel any sense of obligation to do something about it. This is our problem and it can only be resolved by ourselves. It follows that our citizens have priority over would-be immigrants. Home solidarity trumps both international solidarity and unbridled capitalism.

Yugo Kovach, Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

Now it may be the case that the Kovaches have been settled in Dorset since the days of Alfred the Great, or at the very least that one Guy de Kovach was a trusted lieutenant of William the Conqueror. But on the other hand, that may not be the case.

The crisis – as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. The greedy banks, aided and abetted  by their malevolent friends in the rating agencies, cause untold misery and mayhem in the world’s financial and economic system.
2. The democratic governments of the affected countries are left picking up the pieces. They have an idea. Maybe the banks could play a part in clearing up …
3. The greedy banks, aided and abetted  by their malevolent friends in the rating agencies, kick the democratic governments in the balls and scream, ‘Don’t even think of it or I’ll rip them off with my bare hands, make mincemeat of them, and force them down your throat for tomorrow’s breakfast.’

The return of Cataloniawatch

Candide has restarted his blog. Cataloniawatch is a useful corrective for those who start from the default position that Catalan Nationalism is obviously, necessarily, unarguably and inevitably right.

Along the gutter and down the drain

Seldom has the expression Good riddance to bad rubbish been more literally true than with the closure of the News of the World. It is too much to say that that newspaper itself was responsible for me leaving the country, but when I decided at the age of 25 that my destined career was to be an EFL teacher outside the UK (and there was no shortage of jobs for such people in the country), the smug superiority in morals (private and public) and the holier-than-thou prurience (private and public) that prevailed in the UK were most definitely things that I was extremely glad to get away from. And though it was 1978 when I finally left to live abroad permanently, the same applied in the pre-Murdoch days in which I grew up. This is about the Profumo scandal (1963).

04 Editor Of Sunday News