Jorg's Brain Log

Yesterday I took up the promise to take my son to the snowy mountains. We decided to go to Winterberg so that he could do some snowboarding on real snow for the first time.

We left pretty early in the morning at 5:45 and we arrived 278 kilometers later in Winterberg (Germany) at around 8:30. Pretty uneventful ride and only snow on the road in the last 5 kilometers or so.

It almost appeared that we still were in the Netherlands. There were more dutch cars then German on the road here. So after a quick McDonald’s breakfast we changed into our gear and headed to the first ski-lift.

My son was pertty excited to see ‘mountains’ with snow like this for the first time when we went up the hill. Arrived at the top it was clear the snow was not in its best condition anymore, after all the melting during day time and light freezing at night.

Still we managed to make the best of it and after 3 hours of  snowboarding my son really had enough of it. It was fun to be  together with this trip and to see him enjoy the few real snowy downhills and struggle with the icy downhills for the rest. I guess he learned a lot, and maybe next year it is time to introduce him to the famous alps!

Damn, it has been 1,5 week since my hard hit on my left shoulder while snowboarding and it still feels weak. I tried to do some back training today, but that wasn’t a great success.

While doing some pull downs I was sure the machine was broken. The first two sets went perfect but the next set felt like the left arm of the machine wasn’t oiled anymore. I needed to put in a lot more effort on the left side then on the right!

After some checking on the machine without weights and noticing that there was no friction it came to mind that it could still be my shoulder. After some searching in my anatomy book I think I might have hurt my Glenohumeral Joint, so that when I put some real force on it  I feel the power leaking away, so to speak.

It has no use in continuing my powerlifting cycle for now, so next week will be a week of rest and then there is still two weeks to go before the snowboard vacation and I will do a trusted colgan cycle for those two weeks. Working on range of motion and doing some interval workouts.

After some hard work it’s great to take a day off. Just relaxing and no computer. Mobile phone turned off and no distraction.

Sitting at home and doing nothing doesn’t work. So we decided to visit the sauna and enjoy a good relaxing massage in the end. This together with some good food and a visit to tanning salon made it a good day.

And of course I couldn’t resist  to turn on my computer, but instead of doing some work, I wrote this post. So another day well spent!

If you’ve never been to the sauna, read here about the benefits.

The fall of last Monday has some more impact then expected. When I’m following schedules it is sometimes hard to listen to your self. As I’ve planned my whole sport-week in advance, it gives me a big feeling of guilt when I don’t execute it exactly.

So, it took me some time to accept that I have to take rest to recover. The fitness schedule on Thursday was already hard on the left shoulder and on Friday evening I noticed a pretty big pain in my left quad muscle during snowboarding.

Normally I set myself over these pains, but this time something was different so I had to stop. And instead of doing fitness and some good tricks on the snowboard, I decided to put down the intensity and take it easy from now on and get some rest till Monday.

First there was guilt, but today after a day of no sports and rest, I accepted it! Sometimes you have to accept the facts and work around them. It’s the trick to recognize the facts as soon as possible, so you don’t loose a lot of time.

Again, wise lesson learned and one I can use more in my personal and professional life. It was a good week!

Yikes! That hurt! Did a big jump today on my snowboard. Fault was that I didn’t check the ramp first and just hit it full speed, presuming it was still the same angle as the day before. I was wrong…

The photo shows what happens when 125 kilos lands on a left shoulder and a head.

Tricky thing was that I have never used a helmet before and this was actually the first time I used my new helmet. Thanks Casco for saving my head! (Can I now get a new helmet from you guys? )

It’s carnival time here in the Netherlands. Everybody not living in the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany then thinks about the Brazilian version of those women in g-strings and big feather on their heads, but the Dutch version is a little bit different.

From Saturday till Tuesday, the complete south of the Netherlands is intoxicated with way to much alcohol and to have an excuse to be drunk they dress like chickens, nuns, farmers and other strange persons. The music they put on is of the worst kind you can imagine, but I guess that if you only listen to it when completely drunk, it is just bearable.

As you can imagine I’m more of a fan to the Brazilian version then the Dutch version, but then again it’s a lot of fun for  the kids as well. So we decided to dress up the family and go visit some kids festivals.

Two afternoons of fun for the kids was pretty nice to do. They had a lot of fun and enjoyed themselves being a pirate and a cowgirl/princess. As parents we couldn’t go in our normal clothes, so we ended up in some pretty good matching costumes for ourselves.

To get yourself an impression about Carnival in the Netherlands you can visit this link to see the most popular song during this carnival and watch here to get a general impression of Carnival over here.

Next time we visit Rio…

As yet another Terra-byte hard-disk is full here at home, I was wondering where this is going. And after looking trough all my files and information I have it is interesting to think how I will deal with all these digital stuff 20 years from now.

First of all, I divide everything digital in two things; original content and collected content. For me the most important part of my digital life is the original content. These are photos that I’ve made or my friends or family. Documents I made for my businesses, being accounting excel sheets or business propositions. Blogs I wrote on my personal websites. My email conversations with 1000′s of people. Everything that is created and unique to and for me.

Collected content is an whole different story; it’s interesting to have some movies on my harddisk and gigabytes of MP3′s. To have shared a Youtube video or an interesting tweet or Google Reader item. To like an item or to favorite a website. It’s all not original content. It’s just a pointer to what I find interesting. And while it’s interesting to have this information, it’s not crucial. If I loose my harddisk (and the mirrored harddisk and the synchronisation of all my documents to Google Documents) I would be sad to loose my films or music, but it would be devastating to loose my photo’s or documents.

So, focus back to original content. While there are a lot of different categories, I will take a few clear ones to make my point.

Photos

I’ve got a total of 36 gigabytes of original content photos. 19.695 photos in total. I started with digital photography in 2002 when the megapixels where still around 3 megapixels and the photo sizes small. Today I’m shooting with 8 megapixels and every picture is much bigger in size.

In 2009 alone I already shot 5,4 gigabytes /2.943 of photos. So when you think about it. In 20 years time I’ll add at least 100 gigabytes and 60.000 photos to my collection. And this is just a small number, taken the fact that resolutions will get higher and cameras will be much more present then now in my life.

Videos

This is even worse then photos. Video’s are already much bigger then a photo and then you have the nice HD revolution, making the video’s even bigger. I already have 700 megabytes here at on my disk from mini-dv copies and video’s shot with my photocamera.

Documents & The Rest

And so the story continues. More email, more documents. With 61,415  emails and mailing since ’91, but really mailing a lot since 2000. I’ve got around 6000 emails last year in my archive. 6000 emails per year over 20 years: makes a total of 180.000 emails.

Conclusion

I see 3 problems that need to be solved to handle this:

1. Storage
2. Organizing
3. Search

All three problems are being worked on by different companies. So I’ve faith that it will all be solved before it really gets crazy. It would be nice that the day came that I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about backups, where to store content so that I can find it again easily and that I just could type in a seach box:

“Video of Rody and Indy horseback riding at the beach in Australia”

Last week I finished week 5 of my schedule. It was a strange week, mostly because of the snow and ice, so I couldn’t do my runs, which made me feel bad. But I overcompensated by doing some extra snowboarding.

Week 5 was also a strange week because it was actually some sort of rest week. In the first 4 weeks I increased intensity and volume of the different sports. But as I’ve learned in the past, it’s just mentally and also physically impossible to keep growing all the time. Sometimes you need a rest.

For fitness I always took a week off, after 6 weeks of training. But this seemed to be counterproductive, because of two reasons; I lost strength, but also motivation to start again. So this time I’m doing it differently.

This time I keep to my normal schedule. So the volume will not differ that much. But the intensity in the week is going down for a notch or two. This way I can still workout and keep my rhythm, but I’m not as afraid as normally when I have leg-day in the weight room.

I must say it worked out perfectly. I did my hours of sports, but definitely on a different level, which leaves me fresh to start week 6 today again with some more intensity and the will to improve once again.

Once again I’m a proud dad. Today my son got  hit silver snowboarding certification and after some struggling in the last lessons with his s-turns, he’s now able to do them with no problem anymore. Furthermore he’s able to jump and do some grinding over boxes.

I promised that when he could make these s-turns we would do a small snowboarding trip again. Hopefully there is still some snow in Winterberg in the coming weeks.

Snowboarding has really got me and my son addicted in the last months. The weekly sessions on the slope are fun and make it a good body workout as well. It’s fun to try new tricks and not being scared to fall on your face a couple of times.

All in all in feels good to be flowing in the snow. Gets me in a real zen-state when a trick works out. Maybe that’s the reason why so many freedivers are also into snowboarding?