Category: <span>Burnout blues</span>

Category: Burnout blues

Burnout blues, Music

Bad Magic

It’s been a while since I posted anything about music in this blog, but today I felt like writing something about my favorite band of them all, Motörhead. More in particular, I’d want to write a bit about their last album entitled Bad Magic. It was released on August 28th in 2015, so it’s long overdue. This would be the band’s 22nd studio album, and I only came to realize later on that this would end up being Lemmy’s will more or less. The album is full of energy and fighting spirit, yet you also realize Lemmy is reminiscing about the life he led…

Burnout blues, News, Research

New Challenge ahead!

It’s been a while since I posted news on this website, but times have been busy. After some setbacks in the past few years, about which I’ve written before or might still write more later, I’ve finally decided to pursue a new career path. While I’ve enjoyed my times at imec, I felt like it was time for a change of environment, some new challenge. I can proudly announce that I’ve updated my CV to reflect my start at Spectricity as senior characterization engineer. At Spectricity, the future camera of your smartphone is developed, and I will be involved in testing of these camera’s in our labs in Mechelen. These hyperspectral camera modules can see more colors than typical RGB camera’s that are common in today’s consumer electronics. Such camera’s enable a wealth of new applications in AR/VR, sensing, machine vision and many more! I look forward to the challenges ahead and will soon start my new job, after a few weeks of rest…

Burnout blues, Music

Catchy Cosy Records

The music section of this blog has been online for quite a while, but only recently I made a first post in it. Today, I’m adding one more to let you know what I’ll be posting here in the future and to give you a first example of records I want to talk about for a bit. You may note I also put this post in the burnout blues section of the website, as records have also helped me a lot in slowing down in life. Next to my professional life, also my private life had always been too packed until a few years ago.

The younger ones (and heck, also the older ones I reckon) among you, are probably using Spotify or other streaming resources for your musical entertainment. While I’m really fond of how accessible a wealth of music is available through these, I can’t help but love it more to have physical records in my hand. The size, the sleeve and artwork, it feels good to hold and look at. It looks beautiful when it’s on the turntable, as you can see on the left. The imperfections because of dust, minor scratches or surface noise, it all adds to the experience. You’re holding history when you’re holding records, they’re more dynamic than one would assume. So you wonder why I’m not on Spotify if I’m into music that much? My Spotify is my record collection that today holds over 750 records, all collected during the past 2 years. That’s about 1 new record each day. That’s so much to discover, so much to listen to again and again.

Burnout blues

How psychotherapy got me back on track

I’ve described before how burnout hit me pretty bad and how it brought me to the darkest place in my life. Luckily, I received a lot of support from friends, family and colleagues, but for some aspects their help simply wouldn’t be sufficient. Despite everyone’s good intentions, their view will always be biased, as they usually look at the situation from a very similar perspective as your own. For an outsider perspective, I had to rely on professional help, something that was totally new for me…

Burnout blues

How things all came to be…

It’s been a while since I posted something in this category, and as I mentioned before, here I plan to post experiences, thought, reflections and so on, if and when I feel like doing so. While I’ve “declared” the burn-out as more or less under control about a 100 days ago, obviously it’s by far not all behind me. I’m not even sure if it will ever be, or if I’d even want it to ever be. That might seem weird at first, but I’ve learned so much from going through a burnout, about myself, about how to take better care of myself, about things in life which are important and which are much less…