Shanghai Tech Writer

After six years of living in Shanghai, I still can’t get used to the winters here. While the temperature drops only to or around freezing temperature (rarely below), the wind chill factor is what makes the weather here unbearable. Also, the lack of central heating systems in most homes makes it even more difficult to keep warm. It is especially hard to get out of the bed in the morning and step out into the cold.

This week has been especially harsh. I still bike to work every morning although I’m very tempted to start taking the taxi to work. It used to take me about 8-10 minutes to bike to work, but now, it takes me twice as long. Part of the reason is because it is so cold that my muscles cramp up, so I bike at a slower pace. The other reason is that the wind seems to always blow the opposite direction, so while I’m biking at 15mph, the wind slows me down to about 5mph. By the time I get to work, there’d be tiny icicles around my eyelids and my throat would be completely dry. I hate this weather. And the biking too. I wear more layers than eskimos and put on the most hideous but warm beanie to cover my ears, otherwise, my ears might freeze and fall off and I wouldn’t even know. I don’t wear my helmet anymore because I can’t fit both the beanie and the helmet.

Well, somewhere between the unpleasant biking condition and the stolen blanket in the middle of the night, my immune system decided to quit on me and I came down with a nasty cold and a bad stomach ache. My body is just not cut out for this weather. I’m a Californian! I took a sick leave today and stayed home to rest. I am so thankful NI is very generous in providing sick days. I get one sick day per month and they accumulate but never expire!

So how did I spend my day? Not much different than if I were working. I can’t pry myself away from the keyboard! True nerd.

Anyway, I finally have a chance to revamp this blog site and change the theme/layout. The previous theme was too boxy and I was getting tired of the layout. The 3-columns theme was too “noisy” so I cut down to two columns. It’s hard to find the “perfect” theme, so I installed a simple 2-column theme and did a lot of tweaking with the CSS stylesheet and templates, thanks to my newly acquired skills in HTML/CSS/XML. Half a year ago, I didn’t even know what a CSS stylesheet was and now, I’m on my way to becoming a professional web developer!

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