A great number of you managed to successfully navigate the maze of menus and questions to book your appointments, thank you for all of you that have emailed in with your appreciation and positive comments.

There were also a few people that had difficulties and this week I hope to help those of you that have had trouble using the website to book your appointments. There are too many emails to answer each of them individually so I shall try to take the more common problems that you have had and answer them here.

Most of the problems are related to the fact that the website uses a security certificate (a way of making your interaction with the site more secure) that is issued to a different website address – you are visiting the website www.san.gva.es and the certificate is issued to the main Spanish Health Service website www.tramita.gva.es. It doesn’t make the site, or your interaction with it, any less secure but it does confuse most web browsers – hence the problems that some of you have been experiencing.

If your Spanish is up to it, there is a help section on the website at www.san.gva.es/val/ciud/estadisticas.html however I can totally understand people having trouble reading it, not least as its in technical Spanish speak!
Here are the answers to the most common problems…

1. Content is blocked after clicking on “Cita Por Internet” with Internet Explorer

A number of you received the above message but were unable to locate the button on your browser for unblocking the content. If you are using Internet Explorer then the message should either appear at the top of the screen (if you are using Internet Explorer 6, 7 or IE 8 ) or at the bottom of the screen if you are using Internet Explorer 9, you should click the message and accept that you want to view the blocked content. The help page on the website, which is VERY out of date and doesn’t even have help for Internet Explorer 8 or 9 suggests reducing your Internet Security level, however I would be nervous about suggesting for anyone to do that as long as the “content is blocked” message can be seen and accepted.

Another reason for this error message appearing could simply be because the date and/or time on your computer is wrong, so check that it is set correctly.

2. Error 501 in Google Chrome after clicking on “Cita Por Internet”

A good deal of people are unable to use the website at all in Google Chrome, after some research it seems that the website is simply not designed to work with this browser so those of you that have Chrome as your main browser will either need to use Internet Explorer, which you should be able to find easy enough in your program files (click on the Windows start button and have a look for it) or you can go to www.mozilla.org and download Firefox which is another alternative website browser – it doesn’t have the same problem as Chrome with this website.

3. This Connection is Untrusted after clicking on “Cita Por Internet” with Mozilla Firefox

Although it looks very different, this is exactly the same error as that described in point 1, but this is the way that Firefox interprets the error. It’s a bit easier to resolve than Internet Explorer and the best bit is that Firefox will remember for the next time you visit the website. You simply have to click on the “I Understand the Risks” link and then click on the “Add Exception” button, you will be presented with a box allowing you to add the security exception, just click on the “Confirm Security Exception” button and you will be able to access the website

I don’t know about you but every time Liesl (‘er indoors) or I have need to go to the doctor the biggest frustration is the fact that we know that we will need to traipse to the medical centre and queue for up to an hour – and that is just to get the appointment to see the doctor!

Like many of the ex-pats here, I am quick to point out to others that the Spanish health system is far superior to that of good old Blighty, but also like most of my country folk, I have just “heard” that and don’t actually know whether it’s true.  So this month I decided, (being far from an expert in this topic) that I would look it up.  The best data that I could find was from that great online encyclopaedia – Wikipedia

Countries’ health services are ranked based on life expectancy, responsiveness (i.e. speed of service) and financial contribution.  I’m guessing that my little area of the Costa Blanca didn’t help in the responsiveness factor!

Anyway, overall Spain was ranked number 7 in the world, with the UK coming 18^th so it seems, in this case at least, the “jungle drums” were right; it still doesn’t change the fact, that, at least for my family, it’s a right royal pain the rear to get a simple appointment!

You can imagine my joy when I visited a customer, Graham in Gran Alacant, last week and he told me about a website he had found – www.san.gva.es  If you have a SIP then you can use this website to book appointments with your local GP.  This is all done over the Internet from the comfort of your own home so there is no need to stand for hours in dark, depressing, illness ridden reception halls in the local health centre!

I thought that I would share my wonderful discovery with you guys.  It’s a pretty big website and does so much more than allow you to book appointments, but today this is the area we are going to focus on.

So first, you will need your computer, an Internet connection and your SIP card.  Fire up your computer and get onto the Internet, once there navigate to www.san.gva.es, you will be shown a page with 3 options (Ciutadania, Professionals, Institucional), you need to click on the Ciutadania after which you will be shown a very busy website the same as (image 1)

As you will see there are only two languages for this site (Valencian or Castilliano), so no English I’m afraid.  Next you need to click on the second menu item down on the left hand side, titled “Sanitat24: Solicitud de Cita Previa en atención primaria” this will display some hidden options, one of which is “Cita por Internet”, this is the option you need, once you click it you may get a message from your web browser saying that the “content is blocked”, just click to accept that you want to view the blocked content and you will see the same as (image 2).

You are almost there now, just enter your SIP card number in the box under “Número SIP / Número SIP” and your date of birth under the box “Data de naixement / Fecha de nacimiento”.  Once done click on the button “Validar” to continue.

The website will then confirm the information that the health service have on record, i.e. your name etc. and it will then list any doctors that you are registered to.  Just choose the doctor that you want to see and click on the Seleccionar button to continue.

The next page (image 3) displays information about your particular health service (your doctor’s name etc) and allows you to type your requested appointment information.  In here just type the date that you would like your appointment on, using the format DD/MM/YYYY.  Then enter the time range that you would like to see the available appointments for, so if you want to see what appointments are available from 10am to 11am enter 10:00 in the first box and 11:00 in the second for example, then click on the “Demanar cita” button to view the available slots.

The final screen (image 4) displays the appointments that are available to you, just select the specific appointment time and click “Confirmar cita” to confirm the appointment.  If none of the appointments suit and you would like to check another time or date just click on the “Modificar criteris” to go back to the previous page and enter different information.

Once confirmed a page will be displayed that you can print to take with you to your appointment.

One thing that Kindle users complain about is that it comes without any companion software. There is, however some third party software that fills this gap. The best appears to be ‘Calibre’ which is marketed as the ‘one stop solution to all your ebook needs’ and it provides the Kindle with a feature-rich and more importantly FREE ebook management application.

Not only does Calibre allow you to search through and create a library of your books (for example it’s easy to see all of the books you have by a specific author), it enables you to automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds (these are automatically downloaded information feeds – the BBC has one for example). Calibre also lets you format the news into an ebook and upload it to your Kindle – so for example, it would enable you to download a daily copy of the Guardian onto your Kindle.

If you would like to know more then there are loads of tutorial videos on the Calibre website at http://calibre-ebook.com Another thing that many people are unaware of is that you can take screen shots with your Kindle. A screen shot is simply a photograph of whatever you have on the screen at the time you take it. To do this just press ALT + Shift + G together, the screen will flash momentarily and a copy of the screen will be saved to your Kindle’s memory. To retrieve the screen shots, browse the Kindle’s ‘documents’ folder where you will find all of your books together with the screen shots.

There are some games that you can play on your Kindle! The game that it comes with is called Minesweeper and you activate it by holding down ALT + Shift + M. The controls are shown at the start of the game, but the idea is to guess where all the mines are. Whilst in Minesweeper you can launch another game called GoMoku, which is a version of tick-tak-toe. If you want to launch this game, then just press the letter G whilst in Minesweeper. There are a few other games that you can download for free from Amazon, – ‘Shuffled’ and ‘Every Word’ are both word games but highly addictive according to my customers!

There is a growing community of Kindle users on the Internet so if you want to find out any more information about what you can do with yours, just Google it. I found a lot of useful information at the website http://maketecheasier.com/tips-and-tricksfor- your-shiney-new-Kindle/2010/09/16 and another good site for more information is http://kindlestuff.wordpress.com

This is a great resource for Kindle users! It describes how to do things like, how to play background audio whilst reading a book, and how to lend other people the books you have bought for your own Kindle. Finally for those of you that have not yet bought a Kindle but are thinking about it, – it may be worth holding off for a bit.

The new Kindle Fire was launched in the USA in November and, although we are still waiting for a launch date here in Europe, it is expected to be soon. It is said to be a great piece of kit – the screen is in full colour for a start, vastly improving the experience of reading magazines, and if that isn´t enough, it will also allow you to play films and TV shows, download music and gives you access to Amazon´s massive list of over 18 million films!

I was listening to some UB40 videos in you tube its brill now with sound and the printer, thanks a million.

This month we have had loads of questions relating to the Kindle, so I thought I would spend a little time answering some of the questions I am frequently asked on the subject. The Kindle is the electronic book reader sold by Amazon. It is a great little device and most of the books available for it are substantially cheaper than buying the paperback version. The most common question I am asked is whether the country can be changed on it so that the UK Amazon store can be used to purchase books. The answer is, of course, yes, although it’s not as easy as it could be. The “trick” is to change your Kindle’s settings from within your Amazon account on the amazon.co.uk website; it’s here that your Kindle’s country settings are stored.

Another common question is whether to buy the 3G Kindle or the cheaper WiFi Kindle. The answer depends on whether you will download books on the move or not. If you are happy to download new books just from your home then you should go for the cheaper WiFi Kindle, if however you want to be able to download your books from anywhere then it’s the 3G you need – remember this is only for actually downloading the books – you can always read them anywhere once they have been downloaded to your Kindle.

Also remember that you don’t need a Kindle to be able to buy cheaper books online from Amazon, you can also use your PC, Mac, iPad or Android device.

Nice to meet someone who genuinely cares.

It seems to be this year’s most popular gift judging by the number of people that have asked for help with setting it up, connecting it to WIFI, changing the default country etc. so this month I thought we would spend some time looking at this great little device.

The Kindle, for those you that don’t know what I am going on about, is a sleek graphite looking tablet device that is designed to enable you to carry around your library of books, letting you to read, pretty much whatever you like on the move. It’s certainly the easiest way to carry around 100’s of books if you like to read whilst you travel.

There are two ‘flavours’ of Kindle, the WIFI version or the more expensive 3G version, the WIFI version, as its name suggests, requires that you have an Internet connection with WIFI at the location that you want to download your books, most people have WIFI Internet at home so this version will suit most of us. For those that want instant access to books anywhere, the 3G option is a little more expensive but will allow you to download your books anywhere there is a 3G signal – this is what mobile phones use to connect to the Internet so it’s pretty much anywhere.

Some people wonder whether it’s necessary to be connected to the Internet permanently while you are reading a book using your Kindle, well there’s good news on that count, once you have downloaded a book or magazine, you don’t need to be connected to the Internet any longer, the download is stored permanently on your Kindle.

The Kindle uses an anti-glare 6” screen to display text from whichever book you have chosen to read, the words are displayed in the screen using ‘electronic ink’ that uses a contrast that makes it very easy on the eye to read – certainly nothing like reading from a computer screen. Due to the technology used the screen refresh rate is very slow, meaning the battery life is phenomenal – easily lasting days of book reading.

Something that many of my customers have trouble with is that their new Kindle is automatically registered to amazon.com and therefore when they try to purchase books they are automatically offered titles from the American store in dollars and although it’s perfectly fine to purchase books and magazines in this way, it is likely to incur currency conversion charges with the credit card used and given that most of us have a UK credit card linked to our Amazon account it is usually much easier to buy our products in UK Sterling.

It’s a reasonably simple a process to change the country that your Kindle is registered to – all you need to do is to go to your Amazon account page and update your Kindle profile to show your country as the UK – you will need to register a UK address in order to do this, however again most of us have an address back in good old blighty that we can use for this type of purpose.

It can take up to 10 minutes for this change to update on Amazon’s system so don’t be worried if the store on your Kindle doesn’t update straight away – after that when you browse for books on your Kindle you will be offered books from the UK store in Sterling rather than dollars.

We never really think too much about our backups until that fateful day we need to rely on them to get our data back.  Really we should test our backups on a regular basis to ensure that when we do need them we have some confidence that it’s going to be ok..

There are a number of backup programs out there that will help. There are even programs built into your operating system, but all of these tend to take your data and back it up into a single file or a single set of files. This means that when you want to get your data back, you first need to plug the data into your backup program and then rely on it to extract your actual data – I’ve never liked that.

I always prefer, where possible, to make a copy of my data, so that it’s the same in both the original location and the backed up location. I know this all sounds very complicated, but it’s not really! Just think of it like this, ‐ if you don’t have your data (documents, pictures, favourites etc.) in two different physical locations then you don’t have it at all! It’s no good backing up to another place on the same hard drive, because if that hard drive dies (as they tend to) then both sets of your data are gone.

Although it’s better to back up to another hard drive in the same computer, it won’t help if that computer is stolen as both sets of the data will be gone. The point is that your two data sets should be in different physical locations, so the first is on your computer and perhaps the second is on a memory stick (if you don’t have much to back up) or on an external hard drive if you have more data.

Also remember that once you have done your backup you should move the external hard drive or USB stick to somewhere else in the house (the safe perhaps?) or better still somewhere else entirely different, because anyone coming in to steal your computer won’t bother leaving your external hard drive – if they take both then all your data is gone! So, once we have decided how to store our backup, we can then look to use some software to help us make the job of copying it as easy as possible. There is a piece of software called Allway Sync and you can get hold of a free copy from www.allwaysync.com – just hit the download button in the top right hand corner, its free for non‐commercial use.

With this software you can instruct your computer to mirror two locations, the first being the place you store your data on your computer and the second being the location where you want to store your backup (your USB stick or your external hard drive etc).

Once done you can instruct Allway Sync to compare the two locations and to synchronise only those files that have changed since the last backup – this is great if you have lots of data to back up as Allway Sync will ignore the files that it has already backed up as it knows they are already safe.

I first met Richard by way of my computer giving me problems (which he sorted out for me, I´m glad to say).  When he became aware that I´d written my first book “12 Dead or Alive”, he was interested in my experiences with the Publishing world I told him I felt let down with my chosen publishers with the fact that if you didn´t pay out a great deal of money your pride and joy never gets advertised by the media.

When I disclosed to him that I´d written a second children’s book but was wary of going down the same path as before he offered me a solution, which I took.

Although books will never be replace, Ebooks and Kindle are our future, there are over 5,000 titles on it already.

A project near to his heart is to help writers publish their work on Kindle, – I’m proof he can do it – because he has.  From the moment I agreed it´s taken less than a few months.  He did all the work for me (I never felt a thing).

So what I´m saying to you is, if you have a book like me but haven’t a clue how to get it off the ground, speak to Richard, he´s made my dream come true.  “I think I´ll spend my first million on a round the world cruise”

Just to remind you my book is called “Enchanted Garden” By Sandra Knott – written for my granddaughter and “12 Dead or Alive” by Sandra Bernice. Written for my Grandson 10 to 12 years.

Thank you Richard

As BlueMoon advertise in our Gran Alacant Advertiser, we contacted Richard and he sorted out the problem for her over the Internet.

Modern technology!!!!!