I'm quite proud of myself hitting this milestone. 10,000 tracks is a good solid foundation for a musical profile - although my listening habits have been limited by the amount of music I can fit onto my laptop at any one point of time. Go browse around my profile if you're interested in seeing what exactly I've been listening to lately.

Update 03/10/05: This post was looking a bit anemic, so I thought I might as well update this post with my weekend activities. What a busy week I've had - plenty of visitors and entertaining going on in Heidelberg and surrounds. After I'd sent Shaunak and Devang off on their excursion to Barcelona (I wonder how that worked out), I set to work preparing for a two-day meeting involving collaborators for my PhD. Basically, everyone involved with doing the actual hands-on work in EUROCarbDB was gathered together in Heidelberg to discuss exactly how we were going to get this project done. I'm happy to report that I think we've got a good group of people together, and we might actually be able to get some really good stuff done. As is the standard procedure with guests in Heidelberg, we take them out each evening and show them the town. I knew Matt (from Cambridge) from way back, but I'd never met Matthew (from Oxford) before. I was pleasantly surprised to find out he's a bit of a music geek (like I am), and I even managed to be introduced to The Dead 60s while he was here. It's not a bad band, playing a mix of Ska/Dub, which given my current predilection to reggae, fits quite nicely in my listening habits. We managed to stay out till far too late on both the evenings that the Matts were around, and covered quite a few of the bars and pubs in Heidelberg. The drinking also helped with "team-building", as I'm of the belief that you never really know someone until you've been drinking with them.

It's a long weekend here in Germany (something to do with reunification), so that meant that I had an extra day in my weekend where I wouldn't have to wake up before the afternoon the next day. I decided to head down to the funky cultural centre Karlstor Bahnhof (Karlstor train-station) to go and see a set by Talvin Singh. I remember listening to his first album OK, and being totally blown away by his music. That was back in my drum-n-bass days, where I pretty much exclusively listened to that. Since then, I've stopped listening to it so much, but I still enjoy the occasional bit of drum-n-bass (having moved on to listening to more Breaks over the pure DnB). I figured I should at least check out his gig since the tickets were only 10€, and it was only about 15 minutes from my house by bus. Apart from having to deal with obnoxious Americans (who let them in to Germany?), the set was pretty good, and I promptly planted myself on the dance-floor for a bit of leg-wiggling. The music was pretty much standard Singh, but only really good if you happen to be into it before the gig. I managed to stick around there until 2, when I realised that people I was meant to meet at the gig hadn't turned up, and the music had descended into some really deep DnB/Jungle, which became indistinguishable from all the other DnB out there. Since my hopping energy (required for dancing to DnB) had been completely depleted, I had to call it an evening, and jump on one of my magic buses home. As a side note to anyone planning on living in Heidelberg, there are no night buses running on weekdays, so you will have no chance of getting home at any time past midnight. But you wouldn't be out on a school-night right? Right?!

Oh yeah Di - I've picked up a copy of Quicksilver, and I'm currently up to the point where Daniel Waterhouse is facing a flotilla of Pirates, pretending to be the captain of the ship he's on. Good reading, especially when it's cold outside :).