Jorg's Brain Log

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?

For the whole day I’ve been thinking about what to write for on my blog today. I promised myself to write a post today, so I have to do it. It’s hard to write something when creativity is low, and normally this would mean I would skip the day.

The whole thing about waiting for creativity is that it doesn’t come with regular waves. Sometimes it takes days before it happened by itself and I feel creative again.

But the same thing as with any other wave is that it doesn’t take a lot to create a big wave. A small wrinkle in the water is sometimes enough to start a big wave. Just like this post; After one sentence I didn’t have to think anymore about what to write. It just came by itself.

This applies to a lot of stuff. Just take a small step, just get in the car, just do 5 minutes of work, etc, etc. It’s that first step that counts. The moment you start something you’re more likely to finish it. Starting something is the most difficult part of it.

I’m glad I started writing the first sentence of this post today. Finishing was easy!

Interesting new year already! After so many years I’m still learning new stuff about myself. Just the way it should be.

Last year I did a lot of experiments with nutrition to see where my slow metabolism came from. And in the coming 4 weeks I’m going to prove to myself that it’s all in the grains, or in my case, the bread I eat.

During the Paleo Diet of last year it became already clear that it’s not about the calories, but what kind of food I eat. As soon as I cut back on the grains, the kilo’s literally flew off. But problem was that I didn’t only take it with one variable, I changed my whole way of eating.

So this time the only variable I will change is that I won’t eat bread anymore (which I normally took at breakfast, lunch and sometimes a late evening snack).

Curious where this will take me! For the rest I will stick to the same 4 eating moments per day, concentrating on getting some extra proteins by eating enough eggs, fish and chicken, but keeping  it the same and real as normally. Oh yeah, the soda light is standard nowadays. I can’t remember the last time I drank normal soda, so that’s a good thing now that I’m accustomed to it.

Good-bye mr. Bread!

On January 4th I started with some new sport goals and after a month of sports I can see I’m pretty happy how it went for the first four weeks. Learned a lot about working with schedules, sudden changes, children, people in general and how to overcome dissapointments when you can’t do what you’ve planned.

Below my complete list of what sport activities I’ve done in January (without the details);

It may seem a lot but when I break it down to the list below, you’ll see it’s pretty doable (for me that is)

• 11x sport moments
• 4x fitness (45 min x 4 = 3 hours)
• 3x running (40 min average x 3 = 2 hours)
• 2x snowboarding (60 min x 2 = 2 hours)
• 1x swimming (60 min = 1 hour)
• 1x freediving (60 min = 1 hour)
• Total: 9 hours per week
• Getting my bag, travel, etc): 6 hours
• Total time including preparation: 15 hours.

So on average it’s about 1 hour 20 minutes per day of sport and including changing into sport clothes, getting sport bag, travelling to swimmingpool, skicentre, etc it become around 2 hours per day. Pretty doable for a healthy, fun and andrenaline filled life.

What do you think about it? To much? Or can you imagine I even want to sport more?

As taken from the movie ‘The Bucket List’, below a nice list of 101 things you ”have to do before you die”. It is not my own list, but I’m working on my own personalized version. Inspirational stuff!

And another Shark Sports event in the pocket! Do I love organizing! Today was our first freediving competition of 2010 with some amazing results. Eric van Riet Paap did a 200 meter, Daan a 175 and Nanja a 155 .

For people who don’t know what freediving is all about, it is sometimes hard to understand how amazing the performance in the video below is.

More about the competition here.