All The Best Nick Donofrio

Take a Fancy to Last.fm

I love to hear music in randomly order—mostly because to have some scheduled unscheduled behaviors in my daily routine. Originally, I used Pandora radio, which is a personalized Internet radio service that helps you to find new music based on your old and current favorites. Unfortunately this service is not longer available in Germany due to licensing constrains. Because of that I was happy to hear from a colleague that Last.fm also offers the same kind of service.

Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio website. Using a music recommendation system Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all songs the user listen to on the streamed radio stations.

To create your own radio station you have to enter an artist or tag to start listening to Last.fm radio. To do this they also offer a computer program to view and edit tags, send recommendations to your friends, create your own stations and tune into personalized radio. The software is available for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating system. You can see a screenshot below.

My favorite stations at the moment are:

• Artist: U2, Maná, and Hans Zimmer
• Tag: Jazz, Big Band and Salsa

The Best Christmas Classic

Today I heard in the radio one of my favorite Christmas classics ever, which is “Feliz Navidad” from José Feliciano. I can listen to this song all year long and in my opinion José is a tremendously underrated talent. He is a Puerto Rician singer and guitarist and was left permanently blind at birth, but he overcame the effects of his impairment and scores many international hits. If his brilliant voice and his classical guitar inspire you—I’m sure you will love “Que Sera”, too. Gracias por siempre… José!

… just happy

During sport I love to hear music. I put the headphones in my iPod and my ears and select Shuffle Songs. To get song in random order is one my most used play options, because it gives me the change to get rid of the organized, scheduled and planed working days. It brings randomness and chaos in my life, which I love! I think this is because randomness and chaos is the nature of everything. ;-)

But that is not the story I want to tell you! Today I was doing cycling and felt just awful. I was hungry, had no energy and no motivation to finish my ride. My heart and my pulse were dancing Samba and I had the fear that I will die in the next five minutes as a result of a cardiac infarction.

Then my iPod played the song I will Remember from Toto. My batteries were recharged and I just felt happy. Just because of this song–that’s one nice example how music can change your life and your emotions.

Probably the people would say that just happy isn’t enough, but in my opinion it is one of the greatest moments ever. It means that you fell no anger, no sorrows, no stress, no nothing beside happiness—one of the greatest moments.