Today was the last time...

... that I did a concert with the choir.

After having sung in the choir "Cantilene" for almost ten years, I am now officially getting too old to remain active as a member. Since we rehearse on saturday, since you can stay until you get 26, and since my 26th birthday is may 6th, I have one rehearsal left to go, after which it will be the end for me.

I feel pretty sad about that. Of course, ever since I joined the choir, I knew this day would come; but I never realized it was almost there until about half a year ago. Over the last ten years, every saturday (well, ok, almost every saturday) between 18:30 and 20:30, I was at the rehearsal; I realized how much of an impact the choir had on my life when I heard somebody talk about a saturday night TV-show which I had never heard of (it played somewhere during the rehearsal hours). At the time, I watched a lot more TV than I do now, and it was kinda "strange" that there was actually a recurring show on TV during prime time that I hadn't at least seen 5 minutes of.

I can hardly believe it's over now. 10 year is a long time. During those ten years, a lot of things happened:

  • Ayrton Senna died by crashing his Formula 1 car against a concrete wall at 300kph
  • I changed schools, to pursue a high school degree in IT instead of drama
  • The Taliban take rule of Afghanistan
  • My parents bought our first PC (before 1995 or so, we worked with a second hand Commodore 128D)
  • British Scientists clone a sheep, called "Dolly"
  • I finished high school
  • Lady Diana dies in a car accident in Paris, France
  • I first installed GNU/Linux on my parent's PC (Red Hat 4.2 at the time)
  • President Clinton allegedly had an affair with a white house trainee called Lewinsky, but denies it (later confesses he did)
  • I got my first Internet connection (a 14.4kbps modem to a government-sponsored (but free) ISP, even if you could only mail out of their network; doing other stuff with their services was impossible
  • Boris Jeltsin resigns as president of Russia (yes, I'm deliberately declining comment here)
  • I bought my first own PC (secondhand P166, which remained my primary machine until early 2003)
  • I became a Debian Developer
  • Al-Qaeda attacks major US cities using then unseen terrorist methods
  • I finished college
  • The war in Afghanistan ends the Taliban regime
  • I co-founded NixSys
  • Bush indicates even more braindamage by attacking yet another country; Irak this time

Yes, the ordering is right.

It's incredible how much the world and oneself changes over a period of ten year. I can't believe it's over.

Well, OK, it ain't really over yet. Next week will be the last time for me and someone else (who happens to have his birthday a few days before me). Then -- at least if they do what's always been done (I don't see a reason why they wouldn't) -- we will get a chance to choose the final song of the rehearsal, and will get a little present. After that, we'll offer the others something to drink, and I'll probably feel like an old man

In other news, I just had the first false negative (well, the first I can remember) on my business mail address. It's been active for a year or so, now. Pretty good.