Alpha Core

Here’s me playing “Walking in the Air” (composed by Howard Blake) on my Casio Privia PX-830 digital piano. This one is dedicated to Doro. The song was composed for the 1982 animated film of Raymond Briggs‘ 1978 children’s book The Snowman. I hope you like it!

High quality audio track of this video is available for download at SoundCloud. Read more

Here’s me playing “River Flows in You” (composed by Yiruma) on my Casio PX-830 digital piano. I hope you like it!

High quality audio track of this video is available for download at SoundCloud. Read more

This picture was taken during our stable fest at the beginning of August 2008. In the course of this the riders, and amongst them Noli and me, sported a short show for the audience.  I’m carrying the German flag, representing the dressage riding, whereas the riders in the background, riding western, are carrying the American flag. The audience was thrilled by our performance and Noli, me and the other riders and horses had a lot of fun as well.

Vanaf april 2008 tot juli 2008 nam ik deel aan een gevorderdencursus Nederlands aan de universiteit van Hamburg. In juli hebben we daar een examen geschreven, om ons voor de volgende cursus te kwalificeren. Op de dag voor het examen, heeft een van de andere cursusten aan iedereen deze link gestuurd, zodat we allen nog vlug ons ‘innerlijk midden’ kunnen vinden, voordat we het examen schrijven. Op die pagina kan je grappige filmpjes bekijken over het klussen en verder informatie krijgen over de veiligheid bij het klussen. Mijn favoriete film is die over ‘de kunst van het hout bewerken’.

Het blijkt alsof ik mijn innerlijk midden nog juist op tijd gevonden heb, want ik ben geslaagd!

I’m taking a swimming technique course for a few weeks now, in which I plan to learn how to properly swim the crawl and the dolphin butterfly stroke. The breast stroke I knew already… or that’s at least what I thought until last lesson.

Well, I already improved a bit. Meaning: I’m not half drowning anymore immediately when I try to swim the crawl. Until now we didn’t try the dolphin butterfly stroke yet, but I’m very optimistic about this one… *cough*

During my drowning swimming lessons I need some additional motivation in order to keep on trying and Dory from the movie Finding Nemo supports me like this:

Yesterday was Energy Wasting Day!

Or was it now?

Ok, I’ll help you with it: check the date of the post …

Notice anything?

Right, it was All Fools’ Day!

Gotcha …

After a break of about one and a half years, I decided to continue learning Japanese again. For some inexplicable reason I’m immensely drawn towards this language. Maybe because of its complexity, maybe because it’s so completely different than any other language I know.

In Belgium, I did 2 years at the Centrum voor Levende Talen (CLT) in Leuven, thereby completing level A1 (Breakthrough). During my third year, I moved to Germany and put my language study on hold until now. Yesterday, I enrolled for an A2 (Waystage) course at the Volkshochschule (VHS) here in Hamburg. I’m studying hard to get back up to my level again until next week and I’m keeping my fingers crossed, because it’s not entirely sure that the course will actually take place, because that depends on the amount of people enrolling for it.

I also wanted to share some links and name some software for people learning the language as well. First of all, you have to learn Kana (hiragana and katakana). For Microsoft Windows users, you should also install the Japanese IME, so you can type Japanese on your PC. Its IME Pad (with handwriting recognition) is a really good thing to have as well! In my humble opinion, the greatest learning and dictionary tool of them all, both for Japanese as well as for Chinese, is WaKan. Among some of its great features are dictionary searches as you type, kanji lookup, stroke order and card printing. If you’re browsing the internet with Firefox or you’re using Thunderbird as your e-mail client, Rikaichan is a great add-on that adds tooltip help and dictionary word and kanji lookup when hovering over some Japanese text. Kanji-A-Day offers you a kanji, guess what.. yes, every day, so that’s another one of those things to start your day with. Furthermore, any article about Japanese is incomplete without a link to Jim Breen’s Japanese Page and finally also take a look at the Japanese Learning Suite.

I would also like to recommend the following books: as a course book I would suggest Japanese for Busy People I and II. An amazingly good book to learn your kanji is Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System. Although opinions about Heisig’s method are divided, I also suggest Remembering the Kanji 1 (here are some free sample pages). However, I don’t think you should wait with studying readings until you finish the book though! Finally, if you’re looking for a good dictionary, take a look at Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary.

We were recently at IKEA to look for a piece of furniture and I saw that they unknowingly have some great Go equipment on sale at the moment. They’re selling a product called Pärlor which are basically plastic pots with a lid filled with about 100 glass stones for €1,50 (price valid until August 2008) of which you can see a picture I made here to the left. Although a bit small, they’re quite good to use as Go stones: there’s black and white ones, they’re quite equally round in shape and easy to hold with two fingers and even the pots are great to hold the dead stones in. They’re great to give Go a go without the need to invest lots of money into some decent equipment (board, stones and pots).

For those who never heard about the game of Go (also known as Igo, Weiqi or Baduk): The Interactive Way To Go is a great place to get you started understanding the game. You can then test your skills in a game against the computer with Igowin. To divulging yourself even further into the matter, I can highly recommend Sensei’s Libary which contains tons of useful information and strategy discussions. Very nice is Tsume Go Of The Day, which serves you a new Go problem every day. Nice to get those brain cells working early in the morning.

Update (March, 19th): I removed the link to the Tsume Go Of The Day website, because it seems to have been taken offline. That’s very unfortunate, because it was one of my favorite sites to visit first thing in the morning.

If you want to play the game online, take a look at The KGS Go Server (KGS) or The Internet Go Server (IGS). Also take a look at MultiGo if you’re looking for a great game file viewer/editor. It also allows you to play against the computer if you install GNU Go next to it. EidoGo is also a very nice open source web-based editor and joseki tutor. Enjoy yourself!

This is Noli – my horse. Or to be more precise with everything: her given name is Magnolia and she is a pony of the kind ‘Deutsches Reitpony‘. Noli was born in the stable were I took riding lessons when I was a child. In this stable every child could choose a horse or a pony to look after it, which basically meant grooming it regularly. I happened to choose a pony mare, named Towy Valley Marguerite, but because this name really is a lot too long, she is called Margie. After a while the owner decided that Margie should have a foal. And that’s where Noli occurs in this story. She was born in 1994 when I was 12 years old. Ever since then I also took care of her and on my 15th birthday my wish came true and Noli was my present. We changed stables then and Noli is now living in an open stable near Hamburg. The picture on the left side is taken in summer, when Noli was standing on a meadow and the picture on the right side shows the two of us going for a hack in winter.

As we’re preparing for our summer vacation to Sweden, we’re going over our checklist of things we want to take along. One of the items pretty high up the list is the GPS device we recently ordered at Futurumshop (a Magellan eXplorist 210) for our geocaching adventures. We’re a bit afraid that it might not be delivered in time, while it seems that Magellan is having serious delivering problems right now since they didn’t have any models at the local Globetrotter store neither anymore. Oh well, we keep faith and aren’t running around screaming and frantically waving our hands in the air… yet. Read more