This evening, I was casually browsing some art on deviantart.com, where I’ve been posting my pictures the past half year. When one photograph mentioned the death of a member of deviantART, I became curious. Surfing for more info on his death, I eventually came upon the journal by his life’s partner Wendy who also is a photographer on deviantART. And when I read her story about him and how she felt about his death, I started to cry. I don’t know him or her, but her story touched me and made me reflect on my own life.

“[…] The only things left that I can do for him are to honor him, make him proud, and make sure he is not forgotten. […] What did I ever do to let him know how much he means to me? Not enough. […]”

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This cartoon by xkcd.com really applies to my brain. Unfortunately scientific problems aren’t the only interesting things that distract my mind :|.

@#$&!@)#$!$!@#$!@#$%!!!!! Aarghhhhhhhhhhh!! **steam blowing out of my ears**. I’ve so had it with the Postbank. Incredible. The online banking account of my volleyball club - where I’m treasurer - has been blocked for almost 3 weeks now because of the theft of my bag. I had to block the account because there were some codes in there for online banking. And now I finally received the paperwork to get the new codes, and guess what? They never bothered changing the owner of the online banking account, even though the steering committee changed twice since in the last two years.

So they don’t want to give me the codes, even though I’m owner of the account, I’m representative of the club, and the guy who’s name is on the paperwork hasn’t been in the steering committee for more than a year! So… now I’m going to have to fill out another form to change the name of the contract, after which I’ll have to ask for paperwork to get the new codes again and only then will I be able to use online banking. I’ve totally had it. That means I won’t have had access for a month at least. And that’s for a business account for christ’s sake! Can you believe it???

Yay! Today I received a package in my mailbox from my dear friend Susanne. Yi-Jia Susanne Hou is a Canadian concert violinist that I met online a little over three years ago and have been friends with ever since. Enclosed in the package was her second CD called Fantasy, personally signed of course ;). I wonder if it will reach the top 3 of my Album Top 25 just like her first CD Fire & Ice did.

Four years ago Susanne won the Canada Council for Arts Instrument Bank Competition and was given the loan of the 1729 “ex-Heath” Guarneri del Gesù violin. Last year she might have had to part ways with it as the competition was held again, so she intended this CD to be a ‘momento’ of her time spent together with it. I’m glad that last year she won the competion again, so she retained the loan for another three years. I hope that she will be able to play on this wonderful instrument that she calls ‘the love of her life’ for a long time to come. You can find out more about Susanne and her music on her website, where you can also buy her CD.

Now that the latest update of iTunes (7.4.1) has Album ratings, I thought it was a good idea to see which albums I actually ‘like’ most. They actually made it smart enough to use the average of all the songs as the default rating for an album. Too bad it doesn’t have fractional ratings though.

Anyway… Tijl wouldn’t be Tijl if he didn’t use some kind of algorithm to calculate the more accurate ratings in order to make a ranking ;). So basically what I did was making a selection of all the albums with a default rating of 4 or 5 stars. Then I calculated their real ratings by taking the average of the song ratings. In the end I let my heart pass the final judgement in order to make the final ranking.

So here’s what I got out of that… 25 albums that I actually should buy ;). Be aware though that three of these albums are actually not albums at all, but ripped audio from dvd’s (Solidarnosc Live, Fantasia 2000, Jarre in China). The links bring you to the respective webpages on allmusic.com, unless there isn’t one, in which case it brings you to another relevant page about the album.

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