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Posts Tagged ‘music’

My Love For Classical Music

April 18th, 2010 No comments

Somehow I was always attracted to classical music. I even inspired my parents to listen more carefully to it when I was a kid and in the end made them love the music as much as I did. I guess the haunted house in attraction park ‘De Efteling‘ has made such an impact, that the music they played during the show has sparked my interests in it, when I was a little boy. Dance Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns is a composition with a lot of emotion that’s even easy for the beginner to follow. Full with energy, tension, some dark moments. Listen below to understand why this is such a great composition.

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One other composition I just love is the Bolero by Ravel. Around the age of 10 I saw an orchestra playing this version on TV and the conductor made such an impact with me, I could never forget his face and body language. And now thanks to the Internet I found the exact same version as I saw 23 years ago. It appeared it was the version played by the national Danish Symphony Orchestra and orchestrated by the famous Sergiu Celibidache. During the almost 20 minute video you only see Sergiu doing his thing, but you won’t get bored at all! What an expression! Amazing. This composition is probably the most erotic and energized classical piece I’ve ever heard.

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So why this post today about classical music? Well, thanks to my sister who gave us the entry cards, we got to visit the Brabants Orchestra in the Frits Philips music hall, which is a piece of art by itself. The orchestra had organized a family concert where they would play the percussion concerto Veni Veni Emmanuel from the Scottish composer James MacMillan, which made a big impact on my son Rody. The second piece was the day and nightingale by Theo Loevendie where a story teller was telling the whole story to the children while being accompanied by the orchestra with the sounds. Amazing and very good musical translation of the fairy tale. Below a Dutch video about how Theo Loevendie created the music that goes with the story.

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Categories: Personal Tags: ,

Milestone 2: Self-Discipline

November 2nd, 2009 No comments

SelfDisciplineFor the coming 2 months, or 8,5 weeks, it’s time for my second milestone. During the last 8 weeks it was all about logging and scheduling my tasks and actions and slowly expanding it, to see what was possible. Now that I learned a great deal of stuff about about my inner workings, it’s time to do some big experiments. I’m not sure how it will end, but I’m sure I want to try these things out.

I’ve got several self-discipline topics that I want to train myself in:

  • Sleep
  • Eat
  • Read
  • Write
  • Some business-stuff I will talk later about
  • Sports
  • Music

This is just from the top of my hat. I’ve been thinking about some additional stuff. But for now, this list is long enough. It’s already a pretty long list. Let’s discuss the points listed.

Sleep

During the last milestone schedule my primary objective was to become an early riser again. This worked fine when I was still working from an office. Getting out of bed each morning at 6 and going to bed at midnight was not problem. Only thing was that I couldn’t cut back on the hours I slept like I used too.

I’m going to try for a sleeping hack to reduce the hours of sleep necessary and still stay highly energized and focused. I’ll write a separate post about this one tomorrow.  In short, I’m going to have 4 waking moments per day, and the rest of day will be schedule accordingly.

Eat

The paleo diet worked pretty well for me. At a minimum I weighted around 112 a few months back, but then I stopped with it. I don’t really remember why, but I think it was the amount of work that had to be done with preparing paleo food. Point is, that I’m now back at 122 kilo’s and didn’t even notice it. Purely by the fact of having a wrong eating pattern again.

In the coming week I’m going to do 2 things. In the first 4 weeks I’m going  to adapt myself to eating 4 times per day after my 4 sleeping moments. So each meal will be around 6 hours apart. At this phase it doesn’t matter what I eat, it’s just about the number of meals and no snacking or anything between them.

The second 4 weeks will be to bring back the Paleo food. Replacing a meal each week will probably do the trick. I all depends how it goes and I’ll take this from week to week, but maybe I’ll start sooner with implementing paleo meals again. We will see.

Read

Books and new information are important to me. I’m addicted to books and information. But this point is more about serious reading, concentrated reading, in-depth reading, maybe even called studying.

I scan a lot of online news articles with the use of Google Reader. I do this several times per day to keep up with all the latest developments, but in the end these are all articles shorter then 1000 words. Books tell a whole other story.

Book reading should be at least one hour per day.

Write

In the past I already set a goal of 1000 words per day. I’ll continue with this, but I want to make it  even more clear to myself. Because  I write for several different blogs with really different topics, I sometimes find myself in an IT writing mood and then in Sport writing mood. If I let this happen naturally I sometimes write no sport items for a few days and suddenly write 4 in one day to make up for the loss of the last days.

This way I’m always running behind. So I’m going to make a list of blogs and put behind it how many times a week I have to write for them. the blogs I write for everyday are most important and should be done first everyday. And of course there is my book, but I’ll cover that in more detail later.

  • iJorg – everyday
  • Shark Freediving – everyday
  • The Next Web / Appetite –  3 times a week
  • Jorg’s Brain log –  3 times a week
  • Life Skills – 2 times a week
  • Sharkbait –  1 time a week
  • Book – more detail on this later

Business Habits

I’m still working on defying some business habits that have to be made. Got a few, but because they are internal business stuff, it’s hard to put them out in the open like this. I will have to think how to share these, before writing them down. For now I just refer to it as Business Habit, because it consists for now out of 1 business habit.

Sports

Let’s make this simpler than it is. Everyday at least 30 minutes of sports. Got enough stuff to fill it with:

  • Running – 3 times a week
  • Stretching – 3 times a week
  • Track & Field – 1 time a week
  • Freediving pool – 1 time a week
  • Freediving dry – optional
  • Fitness – optional
  • Snowboarding – optional
  • Swimming – optional

Music

At the core of creativity for me is music. I’m not doing it enough on a regular basis. So again a simple rule. Make music for 30 minutes everyday. Again, enough instruments to choose from, especially now that my son has also started with keyboard. I’m going to pick up my keyboard, guitar and harmonica skills with this one.

Keeping track

The same as the last weeks I’ll keep track of these habits and how it goes. This time a little bit more detail and a day to day basis. Reviewing last week and planning the new week every Sunday evening should do the trick. Expect a post about this week pretty soon!