Jorg's Brain Log

Again too long of inactivity on my blog. Only 150 days until my birthday and I must say the future looks very different than only a week ago.

Questions I’ve been asking myself for years seem to have clearer answers at the moment. Even some of them transformed from bad to good answers so that’s positive.

The last 1,5 years really changed my life, as well in my personal life as in my professional life. And just when you think that this is it, this is what I was counting down for, something else happens that put everything else in perspective and make me look at the countdown at a whole different way.

As you can see in my friendfeed I still have been very busy with a lot of stuff. I’m especially glad that I’ve found the time again, thanks of the support from my girlfriend and friends, to do some serious sporting again. In a later update I’ll post my progress with that.

Oh and before I forget: Happy Birthday to my sister who turns 26 today! Cheers!

From now on I publish my schedule each week, so I can look back at it and see how it went. Short summarizing of what I will do this week:

Mon: rest
Tue: Fitness Shoulders
Wed: Fitness Arms/Abs
Thu: Cardio 20 min
Fri: Cardio Swimming 20 min / Freediving / Fitness Chest/Back
Sat: Fitness Legs
Sun: Cardio 20 min

For nutrition I’m not doing a real schedule, just eating healthy. No supplementation yet and no calorie counting or writing down exactly what I eat. My first priorities are at eating healthy and doing four fitness routines and 3 cardio routines for the first 4 weeks. If that goes as planned I make the next step.

Same with stretching, this will be incorporated into the schedule after the first 4 weeks are successfully done.

2009 already. Time flies when I’m busy. Got some exciting stuff lined up for this year, as well in my professional life as in my personal life (which are interconnected to max at the same time).

I never made any new years resolutions, but this year I’ve written some down. And the first I want to share and put online is my mission to a healthy body. In short: in the next 84 days (12 weeks), I’m going to change my eating and sporting behavior. This in order to get back into my healthy lifestyle I was used to until something got lost somewhere.

My last post here I already talked about good habits, but unfortunately due to mainly personal stuff I didn’t have a change to really commit myself to the plan. This time I completely made the plan, looked if it would fit, and the committed myself to it.

To not make this post too long, I just give a summary of what I’m going to do, and get back on the different aspects each week as the progress continues:

1. Weight training: creating an athlete body by increasing strength and muscle mass and thereby increasing my rate of metabolism.
2. Cardiovascular training: for improvement of blood and the transport of it
3. Stretching: specific stretching excersises to increase flexibility and therefore strength and cardiovascular system.
4. Sport specific training: this will create the real fun part: snowboarding, freediving, athletics, etc. Also for improvement of balance and control.
5. Nutrition: you are what you eat. Because it’s stupid to be a pizza, it’s time to re-energize my body by eating like a caveman and following a paleolithic diet.
6. Rest: sometimes I forget to take rest, so I have to figure some stuff out first and this will be the most unexplored area for me personally. But it’s time to make some change to my 4-5 hours per night sleeping sessions.

It takes 3 times as long to turn a bad habit into a good one, as it does to develop a bad habit. With that in mind, I’ve got to start on transforming some bad habits, because there are only 309 days left.

Last friday I subscribed myself to a new gym, which is suited for my life style at the moment. Because I’m living a pretty mobile lifestyle at the moment, traveling a lot, and sleeping at different places through the week, it would be best to have a gym with several locations through the Netherlands. Fit For Free has many gym’s in the Netherlands and now that I’m a member I can go to 24 different locations for some intense fitness and cardio workouts!

Now that the physical is covered and I can go work with the weights again, it’s time to look at another bad habit; my eating habits! As I’ve got a very slow metabolism and that I’m pretty sensitive to sugar, it’s time to really start with changing the way I eat. In the past I always changed my eating pattern by turning 180 degrees. Too many times this has been a failure. So now it’s time to approach it another way. 

1. Only light soft drinks! 

2. No more bread!

In the last few weeks I’ve been busy reconstructing the way I work. In the past I probably was too much volume oriented. Working more and more hours to get my pile of tasks finished in time, and it became harder and harder to accomplish this.

How to change such a line upwards? I looked at how tasks were born and were they came from, and it was an interesting experience to see how tasks develop and how you put them on your pile. All in all, I learned a lot about myself and the way I work (professional, private, family wise). And in the coming time I try to write some posts about this new way of thinking and working. But first let’s start with the first part. Where do tasks come from?

First of all, let’s define a task:

Any piece of work that is undertaken or attempted

That’s pretty clear! I wake up in the morning and tell myself to get up. Sometimes this task is done successfully, sometimes not and I need to attempt it several times before this task is complete. Noticing that I’m thirsty, I give myself the task to walk to the refrigerator and get myself a drink. Calling a new customer to ask about our last ICT work done at his place. Planning a new appointment with a colleague to discuss the latest problems and setbacks in his project. All are tasks, and of course the focus is on the last two.

Many tasks are done without really thinking of them as a regular task as you know them from work. But in the end everything we do is a task; a reaction to information input. Not all information input results in a reaction (task). You can do 2 things with information you get; archive and react.

Some people will argue with me that you can also forget (delete) information you receive. As I’m a firm believer of the fact that every piece of information your body receives is stored forever in your memory, the information you get is archived maybe in a way so you may remember it easily in the conscious brain or maybe somewhat deeper in the unconscious brain. Easily meaning the name of your (girl)friend (I hope!), or very deep stored  in the unconscious brain there is also one of the number plates you saw on the highway while driving.

We can blame information input partly (more on this later) as the main source of our busy task lists, we need to filter out the noise to make sure we don’t get an information overload. Before we can filter out the noise we need to know where information input is coming from. In short, we get our information from our senses; everybody remembers and knows the list of five senses we were learned at school:
- Sight
- Hearing
- Touch
- Smell
- Taste

If you want to get technical we can continue to talk about senses more scientifically like: chemoreception, photoreception, mechanoreception and thermoception. Or also include on the already 5 mentioned senses, the less known list of additional six interoceptive senses: pain, balance, joint motion and acceleration, sense of time, temperature differences and direction. But that’s not the really the scope of this post.

In a next post I’ll tell you which of the senses matter most to our information overload and we go into more detail where the information overload is coming from.

313 is the number of days until my 33th birthday. For years I already set some goals to reach at the age of 32. So let´s see how far we can come with these goals before I get 33. I already talked about this stuff at the beginning when I setup my blog for the first time.

It´s been quiet on my blog for a long time for self written and new articles. Too much going on and to busy with some other important stuff that had to be dealt with. Finally I found the structure and time again to write.

First thing I wanted to do, was to make blogging easier as it already was. My old website ran on wordpress and a self hosted website that took time to maintain. Because of the many hours you had to put in wordpress to maintain it and keep it up to date technically, I finally decided to get back to blogger. Blogger catched up my needs for blogging, so why not use this nice free Google service to get ahead. Only thing to manage is importing my old posts into blogger. But that is not as important as starting again.

As I´m still very active on the internet, I know mostly use Friend feed to aggregate all my interests and web work. I already put them on my old website as some badges, but on my new blogger website it even got a more primary role, besides the blog posts from me themselves.

So much to talk about and to catch up, but as it´s already way past midnight it´s now time to say goodnight!

Well, everything is a lot, but for sure it’s very important in my live! For the last few days I’ve seen the video below several times and every time I see it it gives me tears in my eyes because I’m laughing so hard. Best medicine ever! Take a look for yourself and wait for 30 seconds…

Nice interesting title he? Well, this is the first time I make a post to boost my own ego. Let’s try it, maybe I like it.

For years there already exists a website that every internet surfer has at least visited once . It’s called hot or not and consists of the simple idea of placing your picture online and to let it be rated by other people. Years ago I visited it, and it was fun to rate people for a while, but after some votes the boredom already set it and I forgot about the site.

Until last week, when a friend of mine sent me an email with a link to rate her at this website. I was curious after seeing her high score, how high a male would score. To refine, most of the photos you see are from girls taking special poses so they look sexy and hot, so they get high ratings. I thought I could do that as well and I put on my most sexy face I could and even try to do my zoolander imitation, but that didn’t work out. So in the end I got the most normal picture, made it black and white and voila, I put it online at hot or not.

I forgot to check it for a few days and today it popped back in my head and I checked my score. I got 46 votes and my rating is 8.7 which means I’m hotter then 86% of all men on that site. Well, that’s a good ego boost for me! Whoo hoo! Let’s see how my rating develops as it gets more votes. Click on the picture to rate me! And if I see my rating suddenly drop I know who did it, my dear readers!

In the mean time I put my standards somewhat higher and from now on I only will be dating playboy bunnies or rich good looking women!

Amazing stuff if you look at the video below! Who remembers the beach landing scene from “Saving Private Ryan”? One of the most busiest and intense scenes I’ve ever seen in a video. Richard Hammond and some friends are going to recreate that scene on a very low budget and the results is fantastic!

I just like these kind of video’s full with statistics, numbers and other knowledgeable stuff. Got a few more in my collection that I want to share, but I put them online later on. This way you get a small idea what my brain is busy with.