Losing my Sense of Taste for a Day

Last week something strange happened to me. After eating loads of Wasabi and Chili, I woke up the next day without any taste from my tongue.

I realized while having my breakfast because the chocolate syrup didn't taste as sweet as usual. It still took some time until I fully recognized my loss of taste.

So if you ever wondered how chocolate tastes when you can't taste, I can tell you it's boring. And because I lost all my other taste senses, it didn't taste bitter either, just like an tasteless paste.

The good part about chocolate is that it has a very good smell, so smelling it makes you remember what it tastes like, so you imagine the taste. This does not work with salt for example. I tried a little bit with the tip of my tongue. Normally it's quite intense when tasted pure, but for me it had less taste than a few grains of sand.

For lunch I had salad with many ingredients. Again, I know what most things taste like, so I imagined the taste and really thought I had little bit of my sensuality back. But I rather blame my memory for that, again.

The evening was even worse. I had potato wedges with tomato ketchup. If I didn't know ketchup before, I would be wondering why people love this viscid cream so much. At least it had a slightly sour taste when swallowing. And that taste came from my palate. I didn't know you can taste with the roof of your mouth... but it's true.

I better skip the part about how beer tastes without a taste, and even water tastes horrible without any sense of taste. Yeah, not tasting has some kind of anti-taste. Probably water has some taste that cancels out this anti-taste to taste neutral... who knows.

Luckily, the next day I slowly regained all my senses and now this temporal disability has vanished. But it left some great impressions on me and I want to summarize those for you:

• You judge a lot about food by it's smell and your imagination about how it could taste.
• You only fully realize how wonderful the sense of taste can be when you lose it
• Never eat too much of Wasabi unless you intend to have the same experience I had :-)

Reviving an old Eumig R 2000 projector

A few weeks ago I was carrying out the waste when I found something strange in the waste room. First it looked like a television, but when I took a closer look it turned out to be something different. It was a 8mm film projector.

I couldn't resist taking it into my flat and take a closer look. I plugged it into the power plug and turned it on. The lamp was still working and a motor was transporting the non-existent film. But there was some flickering on it's screen.

It must have stood somewhere for ages, so it was quite dusty. I started cleaning it and also opened it's case. It was quite a surprise when I found out that you can flip it's mirror outwards so you can watch movies on both the internal screen as well as the projection on a wall. The only thing it didn't have was sound.

As soon as this day I ordered a 8mm movie on eBay, the cheapest I could find as I just wanted to try it out. A week later I had the movie.

But how to get the movie into the projector? I failed feeding it at first. So I thought: "Maybe I need to rewind it". So I transfered the movie onto another film roll and tried again. I had quite some troubles getting the film through all the rolls and gears inside the projector. But finally I succeeded and had to find out: the movie was upside down. So maybe it was all right the way it was before. I retransfered it to the original film roll and tried another time. This time the projector accepted it and started showing the pictures on the screen. Hurray!!!

Later that day me and my girlfriend made ourselves a movie evening with 5 minutes of film. It was the Max and Moritz movie, part 1. As the projector is a silent one, we played a Ennio Morricone CD in the background. What an amazing experience for a guy who grew up knowing the television only.

As I never intended to watch movies on this device, I had the idea to sell it on eBay later on. But before I did, I came to a flea market and started talking to a dealer there. He said, that a few minutes earlier a guy wanted to buy a projector like mine. Before he could write down my number, that guy came back and I talked to him directly.

A week later that same guy came to visit my flat and took a look at the projector. And he actually bought it. So I sold my projector which didn't cost me anything.

Summing up I avoided that the projector would have been disposed in an inappropriate way, I had some fun playing around with it and I made some money selling it. I wish things like that would happen more often to me.

Merry Christmas

Christmas Tree HDR
Originally uploaded by theowl84

Merry Christmas 2007 to all of you and your loved ones.

Mango Lassi Recipe

My girlfriend and I have a favorite drink: Mango Lassi. Maybe you want to try it as well, so here is the recipe.

First, all you need is to pour these ingredients into a glass:

• Natural Yogurt (without sugar and flavor)
• Mango Juice
• Brown Sugar
• Milk
• Brown rum (you can skip it if you don't like alcohol)

Fill the glass up to 1/3 with yogurt, 1/3 of milk and 1/3 Mango juice. Then just add a spoon full of sugar and a little rum. You can vary the amounts of each ingredient if you wish. Now stir until everything is mixed together.
It's best when still cold and freshly prepared. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

My new Canon EOS 400D

I am now an owner of the Canon EOS 400D digital SLR camera - and proud of it. Initially I wanted to get myself the previous model - the 350D. But before I orderd it I found out that Canon has a cash back promotion now. This means they return 70€ to your bank account if you send them a proof of purchase. So the new camera model wasn't that expensive compared to the 350D.
The last days didn't leave a lot of time to try it and the weather wasn't nice either. So I only have made a few pictures so far.
The camera is really great. It has all the functions I wanted to have like AEB, up to 30 seconds shutter times and great image quality. I will write a little bit more about my camera as I have more experience with it.
You can have a look at some of the pictures on my flickr page:

A Poem against Suicide

This is a poem I wrote to a girl I learned to know on the Internet about a year ago. I learned to know her in a time of depression and she was talking about suicide a lot. I decided to publish part of the poem I wrote to her at that time. I cut the first part to maintain her anonymity.

Talking for hours without a break,
I cannot imagine this is fake.
So it didn't take long to realize,
This is becoming friends without looking into the other's eyes.

There are so many things we share,
But one difference that makes me care:
While in my life I try everything I haven't tried,
You embrace death and suicide.

I don't know anyone with such an obsession
And please don't blame it on depression!
This thing is really spooking in my head:
I don't want you to be dead!

I think you are creative and smart,
I love your poems which is your way of art.
I read some of them and sensed your cry:
This world does not want me, so just let my die.

There is still one thing I don't understand:
You want to see the world on the other hand.
You are interested in many things including Spanish,
So death cannot be your eternal wish.

Sometimes life is good, sometimes it's bad,
Sometimes you're happy, sometimes you're sad.
There is so much this life is giving,
So promise me, you will stay among the living.

I met the girl a few month after I wrote this poem and she is fine.

Countries I have been to

I found a nice site that allows you to create a map of all your visited countries. Check out mine...


create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

I signed up to flickr

As I have some photos I want to share with the world, I decided to sign up to flickr. You're welcome to view my pictures.

Also take a look at my new widget on the blog that shows my pictures!

My New Bike

I got my new bike a few days ago. The day I got it, I did a 22km trip followed by a 35km one the next day. I love it. It's fast, it's light weighted and it makes your back hurt. That's what everyone will experience when using a race bike for the first time I guess. I wasn't used to this kind of sitting style. But on my third trip there was no pain anymore, just fun.

My third trip took me to my girlfriend's place - some 44km away from home. And I was almost as fast as the train to the same destination: only 1:30 hours for one way.

My New Bike

I finally did it! I bought my new bike - a Genesis Corsa 6600 racebike. I can't wait to finally ride it - which will be on Wednesday next week. I'm definitely gonna post a picture on my blog then!

Brain Scan

I had my brain scanned again. For all of you who don't know yet, I like to take part in psychological experiments. They do take some time and don't get me money, but you can learn a lot from them and sometimes you get pictures like this fMRI one - for free!

This experiment actually consisted of two parts. First I had to do three tasks (visually, cognitive and motion) in the fMRI scanner, two weeks later I had to do the same set of tests in a NIRS scanner. While the fMRI is the big magnet tube you have to lie in, NIRS is just like EEG but without sticky pastes and hours of setup time. It's only light beams going in your head and going out again.

As far as I know, the results of both tests will be compared later. I don't really care what they do with my thoughts now, as long as I have this wonderful pic.
Actually this is only one picture of many others. I have a 3D view of my head on my computer now that allows me to slice and dice it in whatever way I want to.

Welcome to my blog

Hello everyone!

I've been wondering... do I need a blog, do I want to write one and most of all, do I have time to write one? I've decided to give it a try.

What is my motivation for blogging? I'm thinking about many things from my every day life. Some times these thoughts are so interesting that I share them with friends and other people. But in the end they will be forgotten sooner or later. This blog will therefore be a collection of my thought about life, a journey through it and it will give you an insight who I am.

I hope I can make this an interesting blog, so keep coming back!