This going cold turkey is a completely different approach than I had 20-odd years ago and as that period of abstinence lasted merely two years, chances are that this sticks better. I am very aware that obviously my current age helps a bit too.

Anyways, there are plenty of people that can/will tell you how wonderful life is after smoking. After a while your taste/smell senses improve, your skin will look healthy and not so grey, your general fitness improves and what not.

What they however don’t tell you about is that there are quite a few symptoms and withdrawal effects that can have a big impact on your life!

Right after my flu, my first week of not picking up smoking, I was constantly dizzy – as if stoned out of my head – just a lot less comfortable.
I have no explanation for it, although I think it has to do with the fact that your lungs all of a sudden have access to a lot more oxygen than before. That oxygen is absorbed by the blood and travels straight to the brain, hence dizziness.

Week two was mostly coughing my lungs out. My lungs were constantly irritated by dryness which resulted in a week long of uncomfortable coughing. Not a walk in the park at all!

Then came the days with the feeling like an elephant was standing on my chest. I actually still have some of these days. Absurd and it’s very easy to start panicking about this. I don’t have an explanation for this one, really no clue where it’s coming from, but would like to hear!

And during these days of discomfort I hardly had any feelings of missing my ciggies. As a matter of fact I had a full carton of them lying around and Mia also was still smoking. This was going to change though…

Looking at the relative ease with which I seemingly not needed to pick up smoking again, Mia decided that she was going to follow me in my footsteps. Her going cold turkey was not helped by a flu or something like that, so RESPECT for pulling through those first 3-4 days!

But it is weird. At first I just didn’t think of smoking, but when Mia has quit, it much easier became a topic in conversations. She also got some kind of metal cigarettes with a battery in there to deliver some kind of smoke and to give you the “nice smoking feeling”. Those are things, similar to patches, chewing gum and what not, that you just shouldn’t use! You shouldn’t even think about them to start with. After all it’s all between your ears!
So the third week there were some difficult moments.

And this last week has been quite ok, only every now and then the elephant on my chest. My skin looks nicer than before, I have a healthy appetite, but try not to snack too much and instead much on a carrot or cucumber stick.

We hardly have any problem with being around smokers and during the past week of Chinese New Year we were among plenty of those! Also we have said from day one to keep drinking wine/beer just like before. Lots of people use alcohol as the excuse to pick up a cigarette again, but of course that has nothing to do with it!

For me it is now one month ago since I had my last cigarette and I didn’t even know that after that one I would not pick it up again. Mia has just reached her third week. We have good hopes though that the side effects of not smoking anymore will soon wear off.

Not your every day citrus press, but a real “all-you-can-think-of-throwing-in-juicer” made by none less than Philips. Being Dutch that counts as a big plus!

Some juicy facts: Enjoy fast juicing with multiple speed controls for soft and hard fruits, get fresh juices at speed with the powerful 700 watt motor. Make more juice with continuous juicing thanks to extra large capacity, micro mesh-filter made of stainless steel.
Delicious and easy-to-make juice recipes with recipe booklet. No pre-cutting needed as the extra large tube swallows even bigger fruits and vegetables. All parts are dishwasher safe so this juicer is quick and easy to clean.

And after watching a few videos to see what can all be done with it, we decided to click the “buy now” button.
It’s now several weeks later and our juicer has only arrived two days ago. UPS informed us that it was some kind of delay at the China Custom. Anyways, it has been well worth the wait and we have been juicing away these past two days!

I went to the local fruit stall and bought a variety of fruits and veggies with the sole purpose to feed them through the “extra large tube” of the juicer. Oranges and mandarines (with or without the peel), lemons, apples, strawberries, melon, dragonfruit, peaches and nectarines, kiwis, spinach, celery and cucumber, all can be mixed in an endless stream of different combinations!

A few favorites so far:

• tastes like lemonade: 2 apples and 1 thick slice of lemon
• green monster: spinach, kiwi, carrot, cucumber, thick slice of lemon
• morning delight: strawberries, peeled orange, peach, nectarine, kiwi, carrot
• tropical cream: strawberries, quarter of pineapple, apple, peach, quarter lemon

And below some pictures of our Philips HR1861 Aluminium Whole Fruit Juicer, how it operates and the juices it can make. We’re going to have a Juicy Summer overhere!

Het redesign kwam nogal plotseling en werd slechts aangekondigd met een kort stukje op 13 december. Aan het aantal reacties op het nieuws, 1387 op het moment van schrijven, heeft het nieuwe design een groot shock effect! Wellicht is dit nodig om zo hits te genereren of misschien wel om bezoeken te krijgen van mensen die anders nooit op de website van NRC kwamen?

De achterliggende gedachte?

We stoppen met krantje spelen op het web

Of zoals Hans Nijenhuis, uitgever van het NRC, in de comments van de aankondiging nuanceert:

Mijn eigen verwachting is deze: we gaan aanvankelijk veel bezoekers kwijtraken, degenen die de krant op internet verwachten. (Zij zijn zoals gezegd van harte welkom bij de krant, de digitale krant of de app.) Vervolgens gaan wij veel nieuwe bezoekers winnen. Bezoekers die langskomen en ontdekken: he, dit even snel maar beter dan nu.nl! Bezoekers die we misschien wel voor het eerst in aanraking brengen met nrc. En die we vervolgens hopen te verwijzen naar, inderdaad, de krant, de digitale krant of de app. Ze zijn van harte welkom.

NRC heeft bij deze dus ingezet om veel bestaande bezoekers (abonnees) te gaan verliezen, maar tegelijkertijd veel meer nieuwe bezoekers (en daarmee abonnees) te kunnen werven.

Maar hoe werkt dat precies dan? Is een website van een bedrijf niet een online visite kaartje? Met andere woorden, geeft een website niet een bepaald verwachtingspatroon voor de rest van de producten/diensten van het bedrijf? Ik ken het NRC als een krant met veel tekst, veel achtergrond artikelen, veel opinie stukken en traditioneel weinig plaatjes. De huidige website spreekt volgens mij meer het Telegraaf/AD publiek aan dan het traditionele NRC publiek. Maar als de krant blijft zoals die is, denkt het NRC dan werkelijk dat het nieuwe web-publiek de krant ook daadwerkelijk gaat kopen?
Ik denk dat het NRC beter had kunnen besluiten om bepaalde content achter een “pay-wall” te zetten en wellicht een nieuw jasje voor de site, maar niet zo extreem als het huidige design!

Er is ook nieuws voor de mensen die in het buitenland zitten en al jaren trouwe bezoeker zijn van de website van het NRC.
Hans Nijenhuis wederom:

…de site vanuit het buitenland lezen om op de hoogte te blijven van de ontwikkelingen in Nederland. Daar stoppen we dus mee.

Nou, nou, daar zeg je dan nogal wat mee! Denk je werkelijk dat wanneer die mensen terugkeren in Nederland, zich weer fijn op het NRC gaan abonneren? En hun kinderen?

Heel erg jammer. Vanaf het moment dat ik een krant kon lezen heb ik het NRC Handelsblad gelezen. Sinds ik niet meer in Nederland woon en ik het weinig zinvol vind om 3 weken later oud Nederlands nieuws te lezen en daarom dus geen abonnement heb op de weekeditie, ben ik altijd een frequent bezoeker geweest van de NRC website. De huidige NRC site heb ik in elk geval niet nodig om op de hoogte te blijven van het nieuws. Waardeloze beslissing genomen door een waardeloos team die van het NRC een waardeloos online medium hebben gemaakt.
Kan iemand mij een goed alternatief aanraden?

Nu wil ik het graag ook nog even over de broncode van de nieuwe NRC website hebben. Net als andere kranten in het buitenland heeft het NRC gekozen voor WordPress. Op zich een fantastisch besluit omdat de WordPress software uitermate geschikt is voor een krant. Helaas hebben ze bij NRC niemand weten te vinden die ook maar iets van web-standaarden en/of WordPress weet en de code is een complete farce!
Een paar voorbeelden.

In het default.css file (een van de acht stylesheets die de NRC nodig heeft om te kunnen draaien) kwam ik classes tegen met namen als “watskeburt”, “watisnjouw” en “sjembek”. Buiten het feit dat wanneer je al ruim 12 jaar weg bent uit NL, je echt niet weet dat die woorden titels of teksten zijn van een NLs rap groepje, druist gebruik van dit soort classes in tegen alle web standaarden, zeker in HTML5, waar deze site gebruik van maakt.

Trouwens, nooit gehoord van het samenvoegen en/of minimaliseren van stylesheets? Voor elke pagina moeten die acht stylesheet files worden geladen, dat maakt de site er in elk geval niet sneller op! Ook had ik op z’n minst het gebruik van een CDN (Content Delivery Network) verwacht, maar ook dat heeft NRC niet nodig, alle media files worden gewoon vanuit de uploads folder in de wp-content directory geladen!

Het eerdergenoemde stylesheet maakt ook nog eens gebruik van “prachtige” comments, zoals:
“/* blog-blokjes hebben grotere groenere ganzenvoetjes */”
Stel dat de kwiebus die de huidige site op z’n zolderkamertje in elkaar heeft geknutseld wordt ontslagen, dan moet de volgende programmeur met dit soort bagger aan de slag! Lijkt me makkelijker om te beginnen met een child theme van Twenty Ten dan met deze zooi aan de slag te moeten!

Over comments gesproken: WordPress heeft standaard “threaded comments”: een comment systeem waar mensen die reageren niet alleen een reactie achter kunnen laten op het originele artikel, maar ook op wat iemand anders als reactie heeft achter gelaten. Niet alleen wordt een blog daarmee meer interactief, je krijgt ook een veel duidelijker overzicht van de discussie. Dit kan met 1 klikje in de WordPress settings ingesteld worden, maar zijn ze voor het gemak maar gewoon vergeten.

En dan de volgorde van de comments zelf: het meest recente comment staat onderaan, terwijl de chef internet juist de nieuwe stelregel van de website uitlegt met: “De enige hiërarchie is de actualiteit.”
Lijkt mij dat reacties van lezers dan toch ook van die hiërarchie deel uit moeten maken? Of zijn de reacties van lezers niet actueel?

Natuurlijk ben ik niet de enige die deze waardeloze code heeft opgemerkt, maar chef internet Ernst-Jan Pfauth doet dit op Twitter af als:

@jweshuis site heeft er twee keer uitgelegen idd. Die code, daar kan ik nou hartelijk om lachen. Maar ieder z'n smaak

December 17, 2010 06:59 via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@dutchproblogger

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Deze Ernst-Jan is een omhooggevallen knulletje van 24 die het allemaal zo goed weet dat hij zich niet hoeft te verdiepen in de vele onderzoeken naar de wensen van internetgebruikers voor papieren kranten (zie interview De Nieuwe Reporter). Zijn eigen blogje (ook WordPress) is qua code nog beter dan de NRC site! Zou je een website die gebouwd wordt voor het bedrijf waar je voor werkt en waar je verantwoordelijk bent voor de internet afdeling niet laten checken door wat mensen om je heen?

Kennelijk denkt NRC geen SEO nodig te hebben, want in de head sectie van de website is er werkelijk helemaal niets te vinden behalve een titel tag. Ook is er niets te vinden voor de robots en spiders van de zoek machines; het robots.txt file verwijst naar een sitemap.xml file en als je die link bezoekt kom je uit op een 404 (Error Not Found).

Ik ga het er maar eens bij laten, anders wordt deze rant nog een essay. Ik denk niet dat de hoge bonzen bij NRC ook maar enig idee hebben wat voor gevolgen deze verandering kan hebben voor de krant…

Today however has quite a bit different air quality.

I woke up to see Beijing covered in fog and once behind my desk I saw a tweet of BeijingAir retweeted by Kaiser Kuo telling me it was not only foggy, but also unhealthy.

Compare these two pictures (I edited the clear one a bit to make it match the other’s horizon).

Today I will show you the most recent results.

As you can see, my website has a Grade A and the overall performance score is 97, it suggests me to compress all (11 only) theme image files into a CSS Sprite, but it’s a royal pain in the butt to make and program such a thing!

Before I installed W3 Total Cache my website performed in the high Cs or low Bs, so this is a huge improvement! Thank you Frederick Townes!

For the people interested in the underlying technology, here follows a short explanation.
The site is made with a child theme I made for the default WordPress 3.0 theme Twenty Ten.

I took the RSS Feed of each of the social media I wanted to import into the stream. Most sites are set up that you can easily grab this feed, however for others it is more difficult and for some it even looks impossible at first sight, but after a bit of searching, I managed to get the right feed for all sites.

The feeds of Facebook and Twitter needed some filtering, because each entry is prefixed with your name. That is where Yahoo! Pipes comes in. At first sight Yahoo! Pipes looks quite intimidating, but fortunately there are plenty of samples and tutorials available, so eventually I managed to figure it out.

Before I had this live stream set up on Centipiet.com I automatically pulled my tweets, foursquare check ins and other status updates into Facebook. If I would continue to do so, then my Facebook feed would become very cluttered, so instead I cancelled all those. I wanted to push my Centipiet RSS Feed to Facebook instead.

However that posed one problem as I already was pulling Facebook into Centipiet; that would lead to an infinite loop. Again Yahoo! Pipes brought the solution by taking the Centipiet RSS Feed and filtering out all messages from the Facebook category.

Notes on Facebook turned out to be very unreliable, so I switched to RSS Graffiti, a Facebook app, and now it all works perfect!

Currently Centipiet.com gathers updates from eight different sites and pushes them all nicely to Facebook. I am still waiting for YouTube as they only have an RSS Feed for your favorites, but not for your likes. As soon as a feed for those becomes available I will add it too.

I actually have lost count how many times I have changed the URL and/or theme of this blog. Changing the theme keeps things afresh, but changing URLs is not my favorite thing to do, especially since I have one or two posts that people seem to find very interesting…

After yet another massive week-long blackout on the Namecheap Reseller Servers – which still hasn’t been solved as you can see when you click on the link – I finally managed to move the site to the Senlin Hosting Club. They are hosted on Bluehost which seems to have more up-time than Namecheap will ever have.

Anyway, I still need to change over a few more things such as photos (I have ditched the NextGen Gallery plugin and will start hosting my photos via Picasa and/or Flickr), but in general lines the blog and its content have moved over and are running smooth.

Lately I have been hearing a lot about a new-ish cache plugin for WordPress. It’s called W3 Total Cache and after I downloaded it a few days ago, it looked quite intimidating to even start configuring it. Mind you I actually never have found it really necessary to use any caching plugin. But this blog wasn’t one of the faster sites around and especially now that I am back in China and loading times take longer anyway, I thought it a good idea to start using one.
Fortunately 2 days ago I received a new message in my RSS inbox that contained an excellent tutorial on how to properly set up the W3 Total Cache plugin, so since this evening my entire website is cached.

Please let me know in the comments how this works for you!

We finally could see our new home for real, because so far we only had seen it from pictures. Apart from the fact that it was a lot dirtier than expected (some miss-communication between a friend and us) it is a lovely new home; very similar to our old apartment in this same compound, but with more walls and therefore easier to make cozy.
We both have our own office, something we have been longing for for a long time, and the walls are thick so we can listen to our own music while working. The apartment has a small hallway, a living room with dining table, a large long kitchen, 2 bathrooms and lots of storage space. To top it off it has a great balcony which actually is a lot bigger (10sqm) than we expected from looking at the pictures (2-3sqm)!
In the living room we immediately moved some furniture around to give it a cozier feel and more functionality.
Later in the week we visited IKEA, which is 15mins from our home, to buy desk chairs and other little stuff.

We got internet set up in the first two days and since I carried my iMac as luggage, I fortunately could start doing online stuff quite quickly. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to set up wifi and our VPN (to be able to visit all the sites that are blocked by the Great Fire Wall of China), but for now things work fine. I actually found out that my iMac can function as a wifi hub! My Android phone and Mia’s new Blackberry that we bought on Brussels airport cannot use this connection though, because it works only for other Mac products.

A lot of Mia’s friends have been around this week and I have been able to cook some nice meals, including my famous Coca Cola chicken wings (可乐鸡翅)!
My friend Thomas and his girlfriend also came by for dinner and it was great to see him again! We met each other early 1999 when we were both studying Chinese at Capital Normal University. Over the years Thomas has gone back home or on other assignments a few times, but it looks like he will now also be in Beijing for quite some time. He has set up the company 08|15 bags where he uses ordinary tarp to make cool bags that you can personalize according further if you wish.

We discovered that the previous tenants of this apartment have not been the cleanest people around: they have left us with a massive ant problem in the kitchen. Yesterday Mia found a company that has poison, so after they delivered the powder and gel (yup, on Sunday) we have been busy spreading the poison in the kitchen. I guess it works quite well as today our kitchen seems to be ants free!

Life in general has been fast, every day is packed with things to do and time flies! We have easily adjusted to “normal” (in comparison with Valencia) eating times and we totally appreciate that shops don’t close for 3 hours in the afternoon and also have regular opening times on weekends (that includes Sunday!).

We have had our real food splurge already during our trip to Beijing in June this year, but I still love all the options for good and different meals here!

Near our home a new flower market recently opened, the Dongfeng International Flower Market (东风国际花卉), a massive hall with loads of flowers, plants, pots and other “accessories”, such as fish and aquariums. Over the weekend I went to take a look and I bought some nice plants for our balcony.

Just ten minutes ago Mia’s new desk was delivered, so now we’re both have our own complete working place; bring on the action!

We’re only going to stay for a week and the main purpose of our visit is to secure an apartment, so we have an address to give to the moving company in August, which enables them to move our stuff faster to Beijing.

Both of us never had taken the airport express train to the city, so we decided to try that out and apart from the double security checks (they need to scan everything you have with you) it is super convenient. We took it to Sanyuanqiao where we changed to the number 10 subway to Hujialou, 4 stops to the South along the eastern 3rd Ring Road.

I think the subway system post-Olympics has made Beijing public transport way more convenient than it used to be and they still charge you only RMB 2 per ride; that is about €0.25! The airport express understandably is a bit more expensive at RMB 25 (€3) per person.

We have checked into a nice apartment-style hotel room, conveniently located just South of Sanlitun with a small kitchen and a desk and highspeed internet. For only RMB 298 per night a bargain I think.

Internet in China comes with the usual frustrations which are no access to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and what not. We didn’t bother to install a VPN on our laptop, so this time we just have to do without the social media, but obviously once we move back Witopia will have another happy client!
Apart from those little nuisances the connection speeds here are FAST and many places have free wifi.

One of the things that immediately caught my attention are that it seems that the general level of service has greatly improved. Service is professional and comes with a smile from the staff at subway stations to shop assistants to waiting staff in restaurants to real estate agents. To some extent these people even speak English if needed/wanted.
Only most taxi drivers are still morons, guess that will never change…

And apart from the fact that most taxi drivers are indeed morons, it is so great to be able to use them to go anywhere you want (as long as you know where you’re going)! There has been a tiny change in the standard taxi fees where an additional RMB 1 tax is charged once the destination is more than 3km from the pick-up point; it seems this surcharge is for gasoline, fair enough I think.

Beijing also seems to have cleaner air than before. Although we arrived in the typical Beijing fog (combination of humidity steam and pollution) the last two days we have woken up to clear blue skies and a temperature of – in my eyes lovely – 34 degrees Celsius.

The eternal gridlocks on the Beijing roads seem to have improved too. From our apartment window I have a clear view onto the East Third Ring Road and traffic on this Monday morning is going through at normal speeds in both directions, pretty amazing difference from 2 years ago!

Before we left for China I had been pretty worried about my Chinese. Small talk never has been a problem as I have “practiced” that enough with the Chinese shop owners and restaurant staff in Valencia, but an intelligent conversation is a different thing altogether! And you can imagine that I was amazed at how much immediately came back to me!
Most of Mia’s friends can speak some English, but my parents in law don’t speak a word, so you can understand my initial worries on our first visit immediately on Friday evening! Well those worries turned out to be not necessary at all. It was great seeing them again, we had a great home-cooked meal and great conversations throughout the evening.

Funny is that I noticed that Spanish and Chinese fill the same part of my brain and sometimes words like tambien and todo pop up instead of their Mandarin equivalents. Chinese clearly is taking up most part of this side of my brain and it seems very likely that I will quickly forget most of the Spanish I learned over the past two years (which is not an awful lot to begin with, hahaha!).

And then the gorgeous Chinese food! Needless to say that we have been on a splurge, eating all the beautiful things that we haven’t been able to eat for so long! Mia’s mum made jiaozi (dumplings) for our home-coming meal and they were delicious! Saturday night we went to Haidilao to have Sichuan style hotpot and it was yummie and spicy! This restaurant also boosts an exceptional high service level: while waiting for a table (yup, it’s a popular place) we were offered all kinds of snacks and women can even get a manicure while waiting for a table. Also the staff took care of our friend’s 3 year old in a special kids corner, so the adults could concentrate on their own food

Mia fixed her Xinjiang food craving by ordering some to our room for lunch, yesterday’s lunch with Mia’s parents we went to Xiaowangfu in Ritan Park and had some of their specialties including Beijing Duck and last night we went to my Cantonese favorite 24-hour restaurant Jindingxuan to have all kinds of dimsum and other delicacies I have been craving.

Prices of food in restaurants have gone up a bit since we left, but are still very reasonable and for what you get it is definitely way better value for money than the food anywhere in Valencia!

This afternoon we will start our hunt for a suitable apartment and although there is a limited choice in our price range, I am confident we will find something that suits our wishes!

What I saw in front of me, a few hundred meters to the West was a huge tower of black smoke billowing up from something in the distance, clearly a big fire!

I didn’t hear any sirens of firetrucks, which are pretty common here in Valencia any time of day, and as it was already around 3am I decided to give the firemen a heads up.

So I called 112 and explained to the guy on the phone in my best Spanish that what i saw from my terrace had to be a big fire! The guy asked some question about directions, but as I only have a bird’s eye view from the top and not very familiar with the street names around here, I could only give him compass directions from my location.

We eventually settled on a location where the fire must be and there were already fire engines being sent there, so not to worry. OK vale.

About a week or 10 days later I received a call from the police. At first I didn’t have a clue who was on the phone and what this person wanted, but after a while I understood the meaning. This guy wanted to know why I called the fire department 7-10 days ago.

“Uhuh, because there was a fire?!”

“Was the fire on this and that address?”

How the fuck would I know? So I explained (again) that I saw the fire from my terrace late at night and thought it a smart idea to call the fire department.

In the end the guy thanked me and hung up.

This evening Mia and I went for a smoke on the terrace and again, in approximately the same direction as last time, I saw an enormous amount of smoke rising up from whatever apartment building.

This time however, I just stood and watched, being my total ignorant self, as it is clear to me that calling the fire department in this country is not entirely appreciated…

As I write this I smell melting plastic and faintly I heard a siren in the distance. I guess they found it…