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!

(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.

The next leg of the VORG is a short one, to Boston and after that we cross the Atlantic again, on our way to Ireland.

In the previous Volvo Ocean Race that leg turned out to be disastrous for the ABN AMRO 2, when Hans Horrevoets, a Dutch sailor, washed overboard and drowned.

Hopefully this edition of the Volvo Ocean Race can stay without such disasters!

Another reason to write today is because I have an hour extra. Wintertime, not used to anymore, but a nice enough concept to make the shorter days seem longer…

On Monday I heard from the moving company that my shipment is due to arrive on November 29. This means I have to get my papers in order a week orso before, that is if I don’t want to pay import tax. On Tuesday I went with my lawyer to the town hall where she arranged the first step in the long “papeleo” process (red tape): the permiso residencia y trabajo, something like a temporary residence permit that allows for working too.
Next week we will go to the police office for foreigners to arrange for my NIE (without this paper you can hardly do anything here), step two and after that more steps have to follow to come to full legal status.

In the meantime Mia has arranged all her paperwork at the Spanish Embassy in Beijing and school has even called them to make sure everything is in order; hopefully that helped to push her file onto the right pile!

On Wednesday it was “Happy Miercoles” again and we went with a bunch of people to the Irish Pub. The CEO of Babylon Idiomas was also there, a fellow Dutchman and it was very nice meeting and talking with him! Afterwards we went for dinner and a couple of bars and discos. Ideal to have classes in the afternoon!

Talking of which, we are booking great progress. Next week we will move on to the past tense which brings us to the end of the first book and on to level A2! Basically that means that by the end of my 12 week course I should be at the start of level B2, enabling me to speak pretty good Spanish on a light conversational level, great!

Yesterday I went to Sala Parpall‚àö‚â•, a museum in my street where they have an exposition of a Chinese photographer He Chong Yue. He has taken pictures of the large tiled family planning propaganda signs you will find in the countryside of China. On each of the signs he has hung a mirror, so you can also see him taking the pictures. Nice enough to have a look around.

With the Volvo Ocean Race Game I was stuck in the Doldrums most of the week, but it seems that I finally have left them behind and I can make myself ready for the southern trade winds on my way to Cape Town. I managed to climb to a position around 8,500 but lost that again due to the lack of wind. Now on 12,539 of more than 41,000 competitors.

And today I had a nice stroll in the park enjoying the warmth of the sun.

I have been cooking a lot lately, all kinds of delicious stuff and tonight it will be ensalada de espinaca.

Dutch companies who want to invite staff or business partners to the Netherlands face now new barriers to get visas, business people in China and Hong Kong complain.

Well actually the article is about Dutch businesses in Hong Kong and China applying for visas for their employees or business partners and finding more obstacles on their path.

The writer is asking for some feed-back.

Do you have seen a tightening of the visa rules also in other European countries? Do let me know.

Yes Sir, we have!
OK Mia is not applying for a business visa and not being sent/invited by a company, but we do know that since August 15 this year the criteria for a student visa application to Spain have doubled.

First 500 hours of Spanish was enough, now it has to be 1,000 hours. That is like asking people that want to visit China for their studies to first speak Chinese fluently!
Before 3 months of regular income on a bank account was enough, now it is 6 months. The last regulation that has been doubled is the money that has to be present on an account during the time of application. That amount is kept secretively vague, but it was around EUR 10-15K and now it has indeed been upped (is that a word?) to EUR 20-30K.

The writer of the article also says that the new “regulations” are not impossible to comply with.

True, but it does bring a lot of extra headaches and other “mafan” (trouble)!

Bought a new phone (Nokia 6300) and a Dutch number so finally I was mobile again.

I booked my flight to Valencia, walked the dog and cooked Rene’s favourite dish from China: coca-cola chicken.

In the plane I sat next to Jerry Vroon of ATP, what a coincidence, before the Olympics we were in touch about a possible cooperation for homestays for the families of Dutch athletes. For the rest the flight was boring as hell and it took way too long, not used to long flights.

I was picked up from the airport by my old friend Sjoerd and we drove to his home where Ellie already had cooked a lovely pasta meal. Ilse and Freek were also at home so it was nice to see the whole family again!

I was pretty nagged from the flight, so went to bed pretty early and of course woke up at 4am so spent the rest of the morning reading newspapers.