Since a few weeks the speed of my blog is a lot slower than it used to be. If you’re on a fast Internet connection you may not really notice it, but I now even got an email from a reader complaining about it.

Because I did not change any settings in WordPress and my hosting provider has not changed I had no idea what the problem was. But then UnitedStyles CTO Joop Dorresteijn noticed that the pictures cause the long loading time. It turns out that during my holiday I probably changed some settings in Flickr (where I host my pictures), and each time I now use a Flickr picture on my blog it does not load the 640 pixel version but the original high resolution picture – meaning normally 2-3 MB per picture. I will reverse the settings in my Flickr account, so from now pictures should be smaller again.

There is no quick fix to change the source file of the pictures in older blog posts, but maybe I will spend some time this weekend to manually change the links for the last couple of posts (there will be typhoon anyway, so I can’t go out).

Every year a couple of typhoons pass by Shanghai, but the last big one that exactly hit Shanghai was on the weekend of August 6-7, 2005. Exactly 6 years later another super typhoon will hit Shanghai on the same weekend, also on 6-7 August. Current predictions are that typhoon Muifa will blow into Shanghai from the East China Sea and make landfall here late Saturday night, with wind speeds of up to 130 mp/h (210 km/h). Its path can still change, but has been pretty stable for the past 24 hours.

That means a weekend full of rain and wind, with just 15 minutes of complete silence when the core of the storm is over Shanghai. I saw on my blog that the last big typhoon brought up to 300 mm of rain in 2 days. Today’s rainstorm was a lot less heavy than Muifa, but that already transformed some roads into canals. I took the picture below from my car window on Hongxu Lu, the water was so deep that most cars did not dare to drive through it!

Two days ago I needed to check a KLM reservation, but I could not log onto the KLM site with my frequent flyer number. So I tweeted about it and KLM later sent me a reply wishing me a good flight, which I retweeted to my followers. A few hours later while boarding for a flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam, I gave my boarding pass to one of the ground staff at the gate and instead of the usual green light a red light turned on… She didn’t know why but told me to go to the desk to find out what was wrong.

Before I could even walk over to the desk 2 KLM employees approached me and told me that they had a surprise for me, that’s why my boarding pass set off an ‘alarm’. They told me that because of my tweets they wanted to thank me with a gift, and they handed me a Nike paper bag containing an Nike iPod sensor! Because they followed me on Twitter they read I am a runner, so this was an excellent gift. The KLM social media reps also took a picture of me with the present for their site, I must have looked really surprised in the picture.

I just did a Google search and found that KLM does this more often, they even have a site for this: http://surprise.klm.com/ They describe the concept there as follows: “To see how happiness spreads, we committed little acts of kindness to brighten a passenger’s day. So next time you fly with us, we might just pop up somewhere unexpectedly.”

I really appreciate this KLM, especially considering our love-hate relationship on social media over the past years. Based on some tweets of mine Dutch newspaper Het Parool even wrote an article about among others KLM’s Twitter policy. At that time (over 2 years ago), KLM did not really have one yet, but that has changed since. KLM is since a few days 24 hours a day active on social media like Twitter – despite their Twitter profile still saying 8 AM- 11 PM.

Thanks a lot for the surprise KLM. I am impressed by your new social media strategy, lots of other companies (not only airlines) can learn from this. One of my personal social media slogans is “The more you give, the more you’ll get”, so I am sure for you this strategy will lead to more positive results as well.

One of the goals that I set myself for our summer holiday in Europe was to get into a much better running shape. I will run the New York Marathon in just over 3 months, and because I likely won’t have a lot of time for the necessary long training runs, I at least wanted to make sure my basic shape is in place now already. Next to that I wanted to run outside on my Vibram Five Fingers. In Shanghai I mainly run on the treadmill in my home gym, both because of the air pollution and because it’s just too hot to run outside. But in order to run 42 kilometers almost barefoot (the Vibram FF’s feel very similar to running barefoot) you need to do quite some training on the road, or at least on another surface than a treadmill, as well.

The runs worked out much better than I had imagined. Over the past 3 weeks I did at least 5 runs over 15 kilometers (incl. 2 half marathons), and I even did a 16 km and a 21 km run within 2 days of each other. Although I still feel a bit tired after the runs I do not have a lot of muscle ache anymore (after my first runs that was still the case), and the next day I feel good enough to run again. Happy to know this, it gives me a lot of confidence for the actual marathon.

During my vacation I ran on the island of Vlieland on the beach and through the dunes, I ran in France in the hills in the Provence close to St. Paul de Vence, and I ran several times in the woods around Ommen in The Netherlands. Running in the woods is great, you don’t meet any other people once you are more than a few hundred meters away from the closest road and nature is beatiful. I found a lot of new trails to explore in the future, and with my Nike GPS+ watch I was able to find them all back on Google Maps later. I didn’t take my phone or camera during my runs, but if I had I could have shot a lot of great pictures.

In a way I was lucky that for most of the time the weather was not very good in The Netherlands. It was way too cold for the time of year and it rained a lot. Perfect for running. I like to run in the rain, it makes long distance running easier and you don’t meet any other people – most prefer to stay dry indoors. The only downside is that the trails (I ran a lot on trails in the woods) can be slippery, and you have to watch out that you don’t fall.

And of course that’s what happened to me: during a 16 km trail run I slipped after about 10 km and hurt myself. I managed to get up again and finished the run without too much pain, and I thought things were fine. But when I arrived home it suddenly started to hurt a lot, I didn’t really feel it while running. I will spare you the details, but if you fall down while running at 12-13 km/h and there are some small stones on the ground you can imagine the result… Anyway, I am fine again now, and I started running again. But I will be even more careful in the future.

Today we will fly back to Shanghai, I am happy to go back but I am not too happy that I will have to run on the treadmill again from now on. As I have said several times before already on this blog, the thing I miss most in Shanghai is running outside in nature. You can’t have it all…

The last time I visited a real circus was probably when I was in primary school. At that time there were still a couple of local circuses traveling around The Netherlands, but I think most of them stopped operating many years ago already. I have seen other top circuses such as the DPRK State Circus in Pyongyang (amazing acts, but you can only see them if you manage to do a trip to North-Korea), some circuses in Shanghai and of course the Cirque Du Soleil. But they are different from what I call a ‘real circus’: a traveling group of entertainers with clowns, animals and of course a big tent, that stays in each town for just a few days.

After reading Water For Elephants a couple of months ago, a book that describes the life of people in a traveling circus in the US in the 1930s, I was looking forward to seeing a real circus again. So when I saw a circus tent being set up next to the Vecht river in Ommen I decided to go there. For some reason the local government in Ommen did not allow the circus to advertise in town (something I totally disagree with, this is a great event for kids and their parents and for the many tourists in Ommen that pay lots of tourist tax every day, and the government should support this – but I digress), so it was difficult to find out when the shows would take place.

So yesterday I just drove my car to the tent of Circus Sydney, asked the people there and immediately reserved tickets for the show this afternoon. The best tickets of course, when you only go to a real circus once every 20-30 years you might as well get the best seats! So this afternoon we woke up the kids a bit earlier than usual from their afternoon nap and we drove over to the circus to see the show.

Circus Sydney seems to be an Australian circus that is now traveling around Europe. They are not very big (about 20 entertainers in total during today’s show), but the show is fun, especially with kids. They have a clown that fills the intermezzos, acrobats, dancers, and of course several animals (horses, dogs, llamas, camels).

Because we were on the front seat we had an excellent view, but sometimes we were a bit too close to all the actions for our kids. At a certain point Scott was so scared of the horses that were a mere 50 centimeters away from him that he decided to move to the second row, where Elaine was already sitting. Later he came back, but he held onto me and my dad tightly when the camels or other animals came too close.

During his first act the clown needed an assistant and he asked me to join him in the ring. Always fun to do, so of course I participated. Scott was very happy to see me in the ring with the clown!

I liked the show. You can’t compare it to the big shows like you see in China or in North-Korea, or to big budget shows like Cirque Du Soleil, but it has a very friendly, family-like feeling. Some small things went wrong during the show, but that makes it actually more interesting to me. I enjoyed watching the 2 hour performance (incl. a 15 min break), and the kids also loved it. If you’re in Ommen over the next 3 days or if you see Circus Sydney (owned by Alexander Scholl) somewhere in your area, make sure you visit. Especially if you have kids it’s a wonderful afternoon or evening out.

Enovate, a Chinese research company focused on the Chinese youth, published an interesting infographic about the usage of mobile devices. Although I am not sure how scientifically valid their findings are, the results are worth sharing.
Some of their findings include:
– 18-22 year old people spend more time on their mobile phones than on a computer. The 23-30 year old group still uses the computer a bit more (35% vs. 31%) but when you also take tablets into account (14%), mobile also wins by far in that category.
– People would rather give up their computer than their phone
– Daily must-have content includes news, video and SNS

Conclusion: The future is mobile – now already in China, but soon also in the rest of the world!

A few kilometers from my parents house is a farm that sells its own cheese. My parents and I drove over to buy several kinds of cheese and took the kids with us. Right at the moment we were there the cows were herded back into their stables so they could be milked. Scott and Elaine had the time of their lives watching the huge animals fighting to go through the narrow door.

Scott was not afraid at all, but when we later walked through the stable Elaine held me very tight and only peeked occasionally at the big animals. Nice for them to see real cows, you don’t see them in Shanghai.

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s former star analyst who is now a partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins, created a report called USA Inc. back in February this year. The report explains the financial problems in the US and then compares the country to a company (USA Inc.) and how this corporation would solve its problems.

Because since then the fiscal problems in the US have grown a lot worse and the country could theoretically go bankrupt in a few weeks, she now created a 90-slide presentation with the main points of her report. It’s well worth the read, it takes about 10 minutes if you go through the main points quickly.

After reading the presentation you’ll better understand where the biggest problems come from in the US and how they can, and should, be solved. The US needs a turnaround strategy for which big spending cuts will be necessary soon (start with low hanging fruit like Medicare), however painful they may be. After that the country should look at growing its revenue base, through taxes and economic growth.

As usual her presentation contains tons of information, but it’s delivered in an informal and easy-to-understand way. I enjoyed going through the slides a few times over the past days. If you are interested, the full presentation including notes can be found here: http://www.kpcb.com/usainc/pdf.php