I thought it would be nice to make a list of “the plugins that I cannot do without”, In alphabetical order:

• Add Meta Tags; Adds the Description and Keywords XHTML META tags to your blog’s front page and to each one of the posts, static pages and category archives.
• Akismet; Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• cforms; cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator; Generates a fully customizable sitemap.
• Exec-PHP; Executes <?php ?> code in your posts and pages.
• Google XML Sitemaps; This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• Lightbox 2.04; Used to overlay images on the current page.
• NextGEN Gallery; A NextGENeration Photo gallery.
• Search Pages; This makes search queries look at pages and posts instead of only posts.
• Themed Login and Register; This plugin creates custom login and register pages to replace the wp-login and wp-register pages.
• Woopra; An ingenious on-and offline website traffic stats program. Brand new and gaining in popularity fast!
• Wordpress Database Backup; On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

A few plugins that I started to use for some websites lately, so I still can do without, but they are very useful

• Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro (paid); Translator Plugin Pro translates your blog dynamically to thirteen additional languages.
• Breadcrumb Navigation XT; Adds a breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.
• Per-Post CSS; This plugin allows you to specify a chunk of CSS, which will be included in the header only when viewing that post, or a page where that post appears.

So little time left to do things that I have postponed for a long time or that I just must do/see again before leaving.

One of the things that have been occupying my head lately is the Great Wall. Especially this year I have visited the wall so many times and at so many different places! I have made it my work to go there!

I have done a couple of exploration hikes with my friend James and we had planned quite a few more of those for later in the year.

Now I only have one month left, so we decided that we will do one last monster hike at Jiankou Great Wall at the end of the month.

Mia gave me a fantastic book about the unseen Great Wall for my birthday with a couple of hundred pages of gorgeous pictures of the Great Wall on all kinds of locations. All pictures are of “wild wall” locations and many are taken at places that I have visited myself, so that is really amazing!

I will definitely have that book very near me in times that I miss that part of my life in China!

Last week I heard that my residence visa cannot be extended.

During the last few days I have been drilling into my network for solutions, but during these Olympic times, with regulations tighter than ever before, there seems to be no solution.

OK, I could get a tourist visa and fly back and forth between Hong Kong and Beijing, but what is the point of that? Basically just a waste of money. And officially I cannot even work on a tourist visa.

Another implication of a tourist visa is that when the time comes to move my stuff out of China I cannot do that under “household goods” anymore and I will have to pay export and import tax (yup, over my own bloody stuff!!!). So I’d better choose “eggs for my money”, accept my situation, turn the page, look back at an incredible, amazing and fantastic 10 years of my life and….MOVE ON

Spain, here I come!!!

Another feature is that you can slide the posts up and down (hence the name; v stands for vertical). If you click on the tilted oval in the title bar of each of the posts, it moves up and only shows the title.

It comes standard with a header picture of the “Deltawerken“, funny.

Will work on it to tweak it here and there to my wishes during the next couple of days.

On Sunday, August 3, yup next week already, it’s my birthday.

There are a lot of changes for most of us coming up in the (near) future and probably this time next year we’re all spread out over the globe…

Therefore this year I decided that I would like to celebrate my birthday with my friends!

I have arranged the sun deck at Saddle Cantina in the new Nali Mall, just South of the 3.3 building. They also have other customers, but we can keep the sun deck till around 6pm, so I would like to ask you to please come on time otherwise I’ll be sitting on the sun deck by myself the whole afternoon…

There will be plenty of chilled white wine, snack platters and perhaps some cocktails to top it off, after that it’s every man and woman for him/herself

I would like to ask you to RSVP, to give me a good idea what to order. You can do this by using the form below the address details.

I look forward to see you on Sunday!

Piet

Where: Saddle Cantina’s Sundeck

Time: 3pm

Address: 81 Sanlitun North Rd., Nali Patio East, 2F, Sanlitun, Inside the New Nali Patio, South of 3.3 (三里屯北路81号北京那里花园内西侧二层小楼)

Telephone: 5208 6005

Well the name Piet in The Netherlands is pretty common and I think the surname Bos uses at least 100 pages in the Dutch telephone book, so if I ever wanted to have that domain, I figured that I should not wait buying it.

So here we are at PIETBOS dot ME.

What exactly I will do with the site I do not know yet, but that doesn’t matter too much. I will figure that out along the way. In the very near future I will divide my other website Senlin Online into two sites; I will use that one only for my website development biz and this one will become my personal site.

Obviously I will also change the WP-Theme of this site in due course, because currently it looks like, well uhm, crap! Via posts like this I will keep you updated. UPDATE

Take a look at a random page on a Dutch newspaper that I read on a daily basis:

Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR flash ads in the top half of the page!

And the smartest guy on the block? AKZO Nobel it is, hahaha!