Favorite music
Anouk
Another post in my favorite music category: Anouk, a Dutch singer.
Between 1998 and 2008, Anouk left The Netherlands and moved to US to escape the pressures of fame, only to return a few years later.
I embedded two of my favorite songs in this blog post. The first song (Nobody's wife) was recorded in 1998 before she left, the second song (Michel) ten years later in 2008 after she had returned from the US. In the first song, she is getting eggs smashed at her t-shirt and simply takes of her t-shirt to continue in her bra. In the second song, she performs live in front of 60.000 people, and is visibly more relax.
I've been a big fan of Anouk from day one, for more than 10 years, and still think she is one of the best European singers.
U2 - City of Blinding Lights
U2 playing City of Blinding Lights for Barack Obama on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in DC. Monumental performance!
Pearl Jam - Black
I must have listened to this Pearl Jam song a million times. This video chills up my spine and makes me want to be a rock star. Eddie Vedder's raw passion comes straight from his heart and his soul and can bring a grown man to its knees. Powerful stuff!
Bush - Glycerine
The song Glycerine, of the post-grunge band Bush, is probably the song that has had the most impact on my life. I was 17 years old when I discovered this song. I had just moved out of my parents' place to go to college and started dating the woman that would later become my wife.
Around that time, in 1996, the song was performed live, solo, by Gavin Rossdale, during a heavy storm at the MTV Spring Break festival. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can go back in time and replay sentimental memories of our youth. (The YouTube video of the MTV Spring Break performance is embedded below.)
Even today, 12 years later, this might still be my all-time favorite song. I just listened to it ... twice. Nostalgic!
Pink using Drupal
Pink is using Drupal for her official website. She also began using Mollom to protect her site's content, and we've blocked thousands of spam attempts since. The site was built by her label Sony BMG. Yay!
Call me soft, but my favorite Pink song is "I have seen the rain", a song written by her father while he was stationed in Vietnam. You can watch the YouTube video below ...
FooCamp
Tomorrow, I'm off to San Francisco to attend FooCamp, the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly.
Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised when Tim O'Reilly invited me to FooCamp a couple months ago. I first met Tim little more than a year ago when we had a breakfast meeting in Sebastopol. We talked about Drupal and Open Source software, Tim connected me with various other people in the Open Source community, and after breakfast, we were invited to spend some time at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol.
And now FooCamp. I've never seen a line-up of people this impressive. Some of them include Larry Page (co-founder Google), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft), Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus and of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Mitchel Baker (President of the Mozilla Corporation), Allison Randal (Perl Foundation), Guido van Rossum (founder of Python), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger.com, co-founder Twitter), Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent), Kevin Rose (creator of Digg), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr), Chris Dibona (Open Source Manager at Google and one of my favorite geek-heroes), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) ... the list goes on and on.
Despite the incredibly interesting audience at FooCamp, the opportunities, the desire to evangelize Drupal, the quest for what to do after my PhD, and the many friends I have in San Francisco, I can't help but feel out of place already. Maybe this feeling stems from the fact that I have to leave my pregnant wife behind for a couple days, I don't know. One thing is for sure: life has been a chain of unexpected and often incredible events that keep taking me by surprise. I'm grateful for that. :)
Kvraagetaan
Music from the Fixkes, brimming with sentimental memories of my own childhood. (Hat tip: Pietel)
