Let me introduce you to...

Bert!

Bert is my new (and first) MacBook, who joined Einstein (my not so old Fujitsu Siemes desktop) on Friday. He's replacing Lila, my old Sony Vaio notebook.

I sometimes have the impression that computers, or more generally technology, and I don't get along very well. Lila started out wonderfully and I enjoyed working with her for the first year or so. Then she started freezing on me, sometimes even blue-screening. That was shortly before Service Pack 2 for Windows XP came out. I installed it and Lila started to behave again. Then I went to France for a year where I had to write lots of essays and other assignments. That's when Lila started to misbehave again. She constantly froze on me and when I had to restart an essay 6 (!) times - not even telling Word to save my document every 2 minutes helped - and ended up in tears, I knew things couldn't continue like this. So I got Einstein. Einstein has been very dependable, except that he is very, very noisy. But I've heard from several people with Fujitsu Siemens computers that they're having the same problem. He's mostly doing his work, but in times when you have to work at the computer for a couple of hours, the noise can become very annoying and even deafening.

Meanwhile, Lila had been converted to Linux and has been working nicely ever since. But since she is pretty old (I got her in 2002), heavy and the battery has a durability of approximately 10 minutes, I can't take her anywhere. And that comes in the way of researching and writing in the library (well, not in the narrow sense of the word, but since many of the books I'll need in order to prepare my finals and probably my thesis cannot be borrowed from the library I'll need to read and write on the spot). Which means that I had to buy a new laptop. And since more and more friends of mine are getting MacBooks or iMacs and are extremely satisfied with these (and other) Apple prducts, I decided to opt for a MacBook myself.

Now I have Bert, and he appears to be working excellently. And he's white and beautiful, quiet and slim, and Mac OS X is very easy to get used to. Let's hope that this time I have a couple of years until I need to start worrying about him... My dad will be taking over custody for Lila.

Being happy with Bert does not mean though that I don't have any more technological problems. My PDA (a HP iPAQ Pocket PC) decided not to read my SD cards anymore, which means that I can't listen to music or use my mobile navigation system. I'll try and contact HP later this week to ask them if this is a problem that I can fix myself, or if I'll have to send my poor little PDA (which, come to think of it, I never named...) to HP...

Yep...technology and I really aren't best friends...

Seriously?

I'm not a TV junkie... Okay, maybe I am...just a little. But I have to say that, right now, I hate myself for being a TV show fan, because every spring (or whenever it is that a TV show goes on hiatus) I go through the same ordeal:

1) *boom* A huge thing happens in one of the TV shows I like. It could be a person dying (or looking as if), a bomb exploding, someone claiming to love someone and waiting for a reaction, a sentence starting with "I never told you, but...", a person flying to a planet far, far away, someone reading something he or she should have never read, a marriage proposal, and other such wonderful things.

2) *silence* Seconds, minutes, hours passing by...

3) *zoom into a face* Mostly of utter shock, or indecisiveness.

4) *fade out* Sometimes followed by "to be continued..."

Or, to say it short, a cliffhanger.

Most of the TV shows I liked or loved at one point in my short life have brought the art of cliffhangers to perfection: Alias, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lois and Clark - The New Adventures of Superman, Gilmore Girls, Emergency Room, Charmed, and most recently Grey's Anatomy, just to name a few. They all have left me with summers of speculation, anticipation and impatience. In addition to that, some of these shows love(d) to leave you hanging with a cliffhanger from one episode to the next one. Those cliffhangers I can deal with, because it only takes six days before I know how they turn out. Season cliffhangers? Yep, not my strength.

Take for example Alias, episode 22 of season 4: "Before the Flood"... After having saved the world from ending, Sydney and Vaughn (the two main characters) are driving towards the beach. They seem happy since Sydney had agreed to marry Vaughn shortly before the world was supposedly ending. A happy song is filling the inner sanctum of the car.

Sydney: "Vaughn, what are you telling me?"
Vaughn: "Well, for starters, my name isn't Michael Vaughn."
The camera turns to the right and we see a car coming towards us, crashing right into the side of the car.
Fade Out.

Huh.

I know, it's just fictional, a TV show, nothing serious, not the main focus in life, blablabla.. I know that speech, I've given it to myself countless times. But when I watched that scene, my heart stopped for what felt like minutes. A TV show that can do that (without physically endangering its viewers) has to be a great show, I acknowledge that. And I know that cliffhangers are supposed to keep viewers interested in the show. Well, all I can say is: success!

Alias is finished, we all know how it ended. Grey's Anatomy and other shows will be back next season...

Now I have to wait until September to find out what will happen... I'm glad I have lots of more serious things that will keep my occupied all summer: trying to graduate from university, music, family and other stuff. Or: a real life... (it's a miracle I actually have one...)

One good thing about cliffhangers: All the speculations and theories about Alias brought me to an internet forum where I've made many, many friends. Thank you, cliffhangers. :)

The end.

*Fade Out*

12 of 12

Another 12 of 12! And it's a Saturday, which means that I actually had something interesting to do! To see what everyone else's day looked like, see Chad's blog.

1) 02:30

These boots were made for dancing... Just came home from a night of Dixieland at a club. Fabulous!


2) 11:00
Waking up...


3) 11.30
An apple-cinnamon muffin for breakfast...

4) 14:45
Done washing and drying my hair. It takes 45 minutes of blow-drying to make it look this good...

5) 15:45

Enjoying some self-cooked rhubarb. Yummy! I love its typical mixture of sweet and sour.

6) 16:30

Ready to go, everything I need is packed up in my new purse, which I bought 2 weeks ago.

7) around 17:25

It's the annual Dixieland Festival in Dresden - the biggest Dixieland/Jazz festival in Europe! There are Jazz and Dixieland Bands in every club and every corner of the city. Thousands of Dixieland fans are crowding the inner city...

8) around 17:30

...and that's what will be left of them at the end of the day...

9) 17:50

Going with the flow of the crowd. Target: the building on the right side of the picture.

10) around 18:15

Listening to The Dixie Ramblers from Belgium. I already heard them at the club I went to last night with a friend and they were really great! So I was more than happy when I read that they'd be playing today outside a building that is only a mere 100 feet away from the building I was supposed to be in later on.

11) around 18:30

I liked the reflection in the mirrored windows of the building.

12) 18:55

From Dixieland to Bach - after listening to the Dixieland Band I went around the corner to "my" church. We had a rehearsal at 7 pm for our 8 pm concert.


13) Bonus pic: Dreamscapes
I took this picture in March 2006, on a choir trip to Japan.

The latest addition...

...to my puzzle collection. It's a pretty famous German comic strip by an equally famous German comedian. The line in the bubble says "The egg is hard!", which - in itself - isn't all that funny, but in the context of the cartoon it belongs to it's one of the funniest lines ever delivered by a comic creature. lol

I already have a new puzzle project piled up, and it's going to be even more difficult than this one...