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…

That the rules of the EU and the process of getting married in Spain would be so ridiculous and tedious we did not realize and now, 11 months after we set the process in motion there is still no light at the end of the black hole!

This morning I had to make another trip to Alfafar, the town where we have registered to get married (people told us it would be easier there than in Valencia).

As it turned out it was my documents that were a problem.

In general to get married you need your birth certificate and a document that proves that you’re single. According to the Convention of Vienna signed by most European countries including Spain on September 8th, 1976, you ask for the international version of the document in your country of birth and that’s that.

Two months after handing in those documents, I was told that my papers were not in order: they needed the original document with an Apostille (The Convention of Vienna replaced the earlier Apostille rule of the Convention of The Hague from October 5th, 1961) on it! Now that alone goes directly against the European Law and many people suggested us to start a legal procedure against the local Government of Alfafar!
We would probably win such a procedure, however it is highly unlikely that such a procedure takes under five years! That alone is the reason that they get away with imposing such ridiculous rules.

Anyways, after we finally delivered all correct papers sometime at the end of September last year, we could go into the next step of the procedure: the interview.
It seems that many people who get married for economical reasons “fall through the basket” during the interview; of course for us, it was more like a joke.

After the interview our “case” went to Torrent’s Police Station, one establishment higher than in Alfafar. Like real criminals our finger- and palm-prints were taken and again they checked if we were both legal in Spain. This was end of December 2009. An hour later our papers were on its way to the “Carta Roja”, some kind of High Court Institution that checks if the entire procedure is followed correctly.

Well, someone forgot something along the way, or they just changed the rules again, they now need a “traduccion jurado” an official legal translation of my birth certificate and proof of being single document!!!

THIS IS COMPLETELY INSANE!!!!!!!

They have the original documents.
The original documents both have an Apostille.
They have the official international version of both documents.

And now they need an official translation?!?!?! Mind you, the international document has Spanish on it for crying out loud!

And there is nothing you can do, but obey to this insanity and hope that by the time they finally approve our wedding plans we haven’t left this country already…

Just downloaded WordPress for Android app from the Android market.

This makes the wpToGo app redundant and “development will be discontinued in favor of the official WordPress app”.

The app is suitable for self hosted sites as well as WordPress.com sites.

If you’re on android and WordPress then you can scan this code to download the app yourself.

More info on the official WordPress for Android page.

There are numerous apps available via the marketplace and one of them is wpToGo, as the name suggests, WordPress on your phone.

As you can imagine, this little post is written on the HTC Magic.

Off now to cook, Mia after all has to put up with my geek behaviour, so I’d better show that I do care…

We had a fantastic time, Madrid is a real city and we both felt right at home there.

The hotel Mia booked was located near the city center, 3 minutes walking from Puerta de Toledo.

On the first day we just wandered around and Mia had arranged dinner in a restaurant that serves typical Madridleña food. Since we had only a few days we decided that taking the city tours by bus would be a good option to see what Madrid all has to offer, so we did that on day two. In the afternoon we visited the Thyssen Museum and we had a lovely evening at several wine/tapa bars in La Latina area.
Our last day was reserved for the Prado where we spent quite some time to take in all the art. I could have spent hours looking at the truly amazing Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch!

Yesterday evening we came home and we promised each other that we will visit Madrid again soon!

(Google Chrome) Bookmarks

Since around October 2008 I have been using Google’s browser Chrome as my default browser. Upon installing I imported my Firefox bookmarks into it and you can imagine that by now I have collected quite a bunch of other bookmarks.

I think that the Google Chrome browser is a reasonably good browser, but what they don’t tell you is that exporting your bookmarks is a general pain in the butt. Oh yeah, you can export a list of your bookmarks as an html file, but the entire structure you have worked on to organise your bookmarks to be able to find them in the first place is then completely gone!

On top of that, Chrome is not available for Mac.
Anyways, this post is about a solution, not about making more problems.

At first I thought that it would be an idea to export add all my bookmarks to delicious, but after 20 orso and almost 500 to go I decided that that would become my last resort.

When I started my search on how to solve this annoying problem, I stumbled upon a solution from someone who experienced the same and actually had made a little program for it: ChromeDump by Mark Clouden. As described in the program:

This program was created to provide a few simple maintenance tasks for the Google Chrome browser that are not yet available through that application itself.

With one mouse-click ChromeDump creates an HTML file that shows all your bookmarks in the right categories and order. Chrome itself seems to be doing the same only Chrome’s HTML file is useless and ChromeDump’s file is valuable! Just look at the difference in filesize!

Then I set to organise bookmarks in Firefox on my PC and imported my ChromeDump file. For that to work you need to go into the Organize Bookmarks menu of Firefox (ctrl shift B) and then click Import and Backup. From the dropdown menu choose import HTML, select the file and your import will be complete.

Then I exported this file into an html file, moved to my iMac and imported it there in Firefox. On some old forums they say that to import Firefox bookmarks into Safari is just a matter of drag and drop, but I do not recommend that. It is much better to import the HTML file you also used for the Firefox import, as the structure of your bookmarks remains.

delicious to Firefox

Since I’m talking about bookmark migration, I also want to add something else. It can happen that you want to synchronise your delicious bookmarks with your Firefox bookmarks. The recommended way to do that is not to export your Firefox bookmarks, but instead to backup them. Firefox will then create a file with a JSON extension, something that sounds pretty incompatible with anything else. Fortunately there is a free tool available which is called del.icio.us to Firefox by fellow Dutch-man E-Accent and Jackfruit Design.
Here you can upload your delicious html file and your Firefox json file and the online tool merges these two together and outputs an html file that you can import back into Firefox.

OK enough on bookmarks now, in my next post I will describe what alternatives I am using now for programs that are not available (for free) to the Mac user.

Outlook

For exporting Outlook uses .pst files whereas Apple uses .mbox files for email, .vcf files for contacts and .ics files for calendar items. Unfortunately the different Microsoft and Apple file types are not interchangeable.

Browsing the net for a solution I quickly discovered that a free AND smooth conversion from Outlook to Apple Mail is not possible.

Probably the cheapest solution is to download O2M from Little Machines; it costs only 10 bucks. There are other options out there, but they’re all more expensive, so why bother if the end result is the same?

For now O2M only supports U.S./English versions of Windows and Outlook, so that is something to keep in mind. You can select which folders to add and for your calendar you can select a certain date range.

Before I set O2M to use, I decided that now was the time to clean up my email and I archived everything from before January this year.

Then I let the program do its job and copied the results to an external HD to be able to move it all to my new iMac.

Easier than making Apple pie!

[screenshot courtesy littlemachines.com]