I Knew

I knew.

If i was honest with myself, I knew.

I didn't want it to be true,

But when I thought it through,

I knew what you would do,

Because I knew you,

So I knew. I knew.

 

I knew I shouldn't go along with your plan,

So when you came to me with it, ... I ran.

I tried to get as far away as I could.

I thought I'd avoid you, and do as I should.

But then you cornered me, and I came unglued.

Well tell me, what else was I going to do?

 

I knew.

If i was honest with myself, I knew.

I didn't want it to be true,

But when I thought it through,

I knew what you would do,

Because I knew you,

So I knew. I knew.

 

So I told them they were evil, like you said.

You made me do it, let it be on your head.

You should've seen them all squirm, when they heard.

Oh they knew that they were wrong, by your word.

So of course they begged for mercy, on their knees.

And of course you let them live, as you pleased.

 

I knew.

If i was honest with myself, I knew.

I didn't want it to be true,

But when I thought it through,

I knew what you would do,

Because I knew you,

So I knew. I knew.

 

You're a gracious and compassionate God,

Slow to anger and abounding in love.

Can you tell me what was I thinking of?

I ran away from you because I knew...

 

I knew.

If i was honest with myself, I knew.

I didn't want it to be true,

But when I thought it through,

I knew what you would do,

Because I knew you,

So I knew. I knew.

 

If i was honest with myself (I knew)

I didn't want it to be (to be true)

But I knew as soon as I thought it through,

I knew exactly what you wanted to do,

I knew you, God. (I knew you, I knew you)

So I knew. (Oh I knew.) Yes, I knew.

I knew. I knew. I knew.

 

---

These lyrics are in the public domain worldwide. Sheet music is also available.

Darkness

I know there's light out there, but

I seem to live in darkness here.

I drown myself in gloom,

And do I even care?

 

Leave the truth on the shelf:

I'm lying to myself.

I say that I'm O.K.

Believe it if you dare.

 

When you read my mind,

You know my thoughts and then

You can tell just anyone you please.

Nothing is the same,

Once people know my shame,

I'll go into hiding.

 

What if I run away?

I'll leave behind the life that I know, but

There's no safe place to go.

They'll find me now wherever I am.

They'll follow me there, and

They'll follow me back (again).

Where can I go?

Where can I go?

 

---

 

My friends want to protect me,

And to keep me from all consequence.

They say it's safe in here,

But do I even care?

I want to go outside.

I want to see the world.

I want to live my life,

Though I know life's not fair.

 

When the day is done,

I need to rest, but now

I can see how much is left to do.

No one helps me out

With my unending task.

I'll never be finished.

 

What if I run away?

I'll leave behind the life that I know, but

There's no safe place to go.

They'll find me now wherever I am.

They'll follow me there, and

They'll follow me back (again).

Where can I go?

Where can I go?

 

---

 

In the light of day,

What can I say? I can't

Ever seem to make up a good excuse.

All I do is lie,

To justify myself.

And no one believes me!

 

What if I run away?

I'll leave behind the life that I know, but

There's no safe place to go.

They'll find me now wherever I am.

They'll follow me there, and

They'll follow me back (again).

Where can I go?

Where can I go?

 

A Week Since You Left

The last set of song lyrics that I posted were really upbeat and positive and sappy. In the interest of balance, here is one that leans in the opposite direction. I'm not actually bipolar. It's just poetry. I can write this stuff without actually feeling the emotions the narrator must be feeling. Honest.

---

It's a week since you left,

And I'm so bereft,

A mangled-up ball of emotion.

I feel like a sham,

And I don't give a damn.

I'm struggling to go through the motions.

 

I can't let you see that I'm falling apart,

But when I go out I don't know what to do.

I can't let you know that you've torn out my heart,

So I try to pretend I can live without you.

 

It's a week since I've slept,

And I'm such a mess,

But I put on a brave face and fake it.

I think about you,

And I know what to do.

It hurts but I just have to take it.

 

So no one can know that I just want to die.

I pretend to believe I can find someone new.

I walk through the park and I stare at the sky.

If you found out you'd hurt me, that might hurt you.

 

For a week you've been gone,

And my life is just done,

Since I have no more use for my future.

I'm deeply obsessed,

And completely distressed,

Because thinking about you is torture.

 

But I relish the hurt, it reminds me of you,

I don't want to forget or get over the pain.

You're my reason to live even though we are through,

And forgetting would mean that I'd lose you again.

 

For a week I'm alone,

And I guess that's the plan,

Even though it's incredibly lonely.

I will learn not to fuss,

And I'll do what I must,

And I'll think about you, and you only.

 

So go, live your life, and forget about me,

I promise I won't let you know of my pain.

I wish you the joy, be content and carefree,

Go, leave me behind, and find true love again.

 

Dust

There's one thing in this life that you will learn:

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

They say time is the fire in which we burn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Eat and drink, and weep with those who mourn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Death comes for every person who is born.

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

It was years ago, I was twenty-two,

Ready to go, fresh out of school.

I had so much that I wanted to do.

I had no idea I was such a fool.

There's one thing in this life that you will learn:

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

They say time is the fire in which we burn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Eat and drink, and weep with those who mourn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Death comes for every person who is born.

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

I couldn't change the world by myself,

[But] I had ideas and a full bookshelf.

I saw the world and I saw the grief,

[But] if we worked hard it could be enough.

There's one thing in this life that you will learn:

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

They say time is the fire in which we burn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Eat and drink, and weep with those who mourn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Death comes for every person who is born.

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

It seemed to me that the plan was sound,

Get a group together and buckle down,

With sweat and tears and some common ground,

We could bring the world around.

There's one thing in this life that you will learn:

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

They say time is the fire in which we burn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Eat and drink, and weep with those who mourn.

Dust you are, and to dust you will return!

Death comes for every person who is born.

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

Dust you are. To dust you will return!

Now for something completely different...

I was in a weird mood and wrote some lyrics, or poetry, or something. I'll just post what I wrote without further comment and let you draw your own conclusions...


Hungry is the bear who lives
A life of shameless luxury
Within the porticos of tents.
Never have the learned ones
Bathed all the infants of the poor
With such aromatic ointments.

I've come from Alabama
With a basket full of questions,
But no one ever answers me.
I'm running from the lawyers,
But I'll sing you my life's story
With the banjo laid on my knee.

Run me ragged.
Rain on my parade.
Strip me naked.
Only the truth will set me free!

Ride the endless bullet train
Until the early winter sun
Sprinkles you down upon its bust.
Cover our ears with cotton
As the earwig conceals its pups
With a thousand motes of sawdust.

I am just a single man,
Treading grapes of speculation
In the winepress of my own mind,
I've sold my hesitation
For that bread and red lentil stew
Because my brother was so kind.

Ride me roughshod.
Call me a loser.
Take my ephod.
Only the truth will set me free!

File down your fingernails
Until the marrow shows right through,
Until you've beaten a dead horse.
In a universe of pain,
Nothing fills the head with knowledge
Like the dread tutor of remorse.

Clench my collar.
Listen to me wail.
Hear me holler.
Only the truth will set me free!

Feed me toxins.
Halt my reverie.
Sell my organs.
Only the truth will set me free!

Cut me deeper.
Drain out all my blood.
Kill me faster.
Only the truth will set me free!

Firefox: Why I Refuse to Upgrade

Everybody knows, newer is better, right? Well, sometimes. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes newer is worse. Sometimes newer is a lot worse.

Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, for example, have been getting a great deal worse in a wide variety of ways. In this post I will catalog just a few of the most annoying reasons why they are worse, and why I am steadfastly not upgrading.

However, lest anyone think I am entirely negative all the time, I want to start out by spending a couple of paragraphs pointing out a couple of good things.

In the first place, I want to note that I am only talking about this at all because Firefox is my primary browser, the one I use most. Being a web developer and a geek, I experiment with a wide variety of browsers. Firefox is the best of them. When I first started discovering the problems that the rest of this diatribe will talk about, I considered switching to another browser, but the plain and simple fact is that I was unable to find another one that's as good. There isn't another one that's as good. Firefox is the best.

On top of that, the Firefox dev team have been working, trying to make improvements, and a handful of the improvements they've made have been good ones. They've added support for CSS properties that weren't handled before. One of the ones I personally find useful, not just for aesthetic purposes but in some cases for practical reasons, e.g., improving legibility when there's an image in the background, is text-shadow. That's a very worthwhile thing. Even better is the new support for display: inline-block, which makes whole categories of layouts easy to do that were previously, in a word, not. There have also been some performance improvements, which are quite noticeable on older single-core hardware. So I don't want to imply that the Firefox developers haven't been doing anything good. They have.

But they've also been making mistakes lately, some of which are quite serious.



Here's something that's easy to see: recent versions of Firefox can't seem to display certain images (a LOT of the images on the web) without darkening them considerably. Here are a couple of screenshots (one cropped, the other scaled down, but they're not doctored in any other way) showing the same image in Firefox 3.6 and in Gimp. I want to be clear that this is exactly the same image, bit-for-bit. Notice how much darker it looks in Firefox? It's not supposed to be like that.


The same problem shows up in every build starting around version 3.5. Here's a screenshot of Firefox 4.0.1. Again, this is cropped but otherwise undoctored.


How did Firefox 2.0 handle it? Well, let's see here... Oh, look, Firefox 2.0 displays exactly the same thing as Gimp. The latest versions of other browsers, such as Opera and Chrome and even MSIE, do the same thing as Firefox 2. So does every other image display program I have tested. Recent versions of Firefox are the only software I have found to have the odd darkening effect.

Update: Here it is in an alpha build of Firefox 8:

(Yeah, the desktop there looks different. When testing new versions, I use a separate user account, so as not to mess up the profile -- add-ons and configuration and such -- in my regular account. It's easier than dorking around restoring from backups.)

Okay, so that's purely an aesthetic issue. I mean, it's annoying, but it doesn't cause any real material harm. It's not like the images are totally black and impossible to see, or anything. It's just like you're looking at them through really dark glasses. So, no big deal, really. Sure, it's a bug, and they should fix it, but on the balance if that were the only problem I'd upgrade in a heartbeat.

Here's something more serious: all versions of Firefox starting from the 3.0 dev cycle have a serious dataloss bug that shows up if you use bookmarked tabsets. What happens is this: the first time you choose Open all in tabs after upgrading, every single website you already had open in a tab vanishes. You panic and just about keel over from a heart attack on the spot, but once you take a few deep breaths you discover, much to your relief, that the back button does work. You have to go through and hit the back button on every tab, but you're able to recover (at least most of) your tabs. Okay. So, now, how to stop that from EVER happening again? You hunt through the prefs and find the option that controls this disastrous never-should-have-been-implemented new behavior, and you turn it the everliving %#$@! off, and you think you've solved the problem.

But you have not solved the problem by changing the preference. You've just made the problem more subtle, so that each time it happens it can go unnoticed until it's too late to retrieve what was lost. What happens now, each time you click Open all in tabs, is that one of your existing tabs is replaced. If you don't notice this, you make the mistake of hitting close-tab like you normally would when you're done with a page that you've opened, and now you're now short one of the pages that you had open, probably one you weren't done with, possibly something important that you needed to remember to deal with. This happens every single time you click Open all in tabs, until over the course of a few hours or days of regular browser use you eventually figure out what's happening. It took me about three days. I knew I was losing tabs, some of which were kind of important, and I was very much in a lather about it, but I didn't understand out how or why it was happening. Undo Close Tab only showed me pages I didn't need any more, and I couldn't find the ones I'd lost. It was like returning to the bad old days before sessionstore, when a plugin crash or power outage meant things you'd had open were just gone. (Update: this one will be fixed in version 8, but the fact that such a serious bug persisted across no fewer than six releases before finally being eliminated is very telling. Somebody was a little too concerned about dorking with the toolbar layout and just completely forgot about checking to see if there were any dataloss bugs that should be fixed before release -- several times in a row.)

Firefox 3 also crashes significantly more often than Firefox 2. (I don't rightly know how crashy Firefox 4 is or isn't. I haven't used it very much, on account of the fact that it hasn't addressed the above problems.) Firefox 2 never crashes, unless you try to open completely insane numbers of tabs at once. Firefox 3 crashes more than any previously released version of Firefox since clear back when it was called Phoenix.

I haven't even talked about insane new behaviors and UI (*cough* tabs on top *cough*) that can be configured away by changing some settings, because hey, if changing some settings is all I have to do to get things working right, I can handle that. End users might feel differently, but I'm a network administrator. If I can handle tracking down dependencies and compiling things from source, I think I can manage changing a couple of settings. I could write another whole post explaining why e.g. Tabs on Top is stupid and why the arguments in its favor are nonsense (maybe I will write that post later, if I have time), but ultimately it's not important, because I can just turn it off anyway with a pref, so who cares?

But I do want to say one general thing about the UI changes in recent versions: starting with Firefox 3.0, every single UI change, without exception, is something so undesirable that I have difficulty imagining anyone would ever actually want it. Not a single one of them is useful, even potentially. As long as I can turn them all off with preferences I don't really care, but when there are big outstanding bugs, including dataloss bugs, persisting over *multiple* versions (and I'm not talking about a couple of point releases), maybe it's time to stop needlessly fiddling around so much with the UI for a while and concentrate on basic stuff like stability and correctness. IMO, if the Firefox team spent the next entire release cycle just fixing bugs and not introducing any other changes at all, that would be a good thing.

So that's why I'm not upgrading to recent versions of Firefox. I've got 2.0.0.20 both at home and at work now, and I'm sticking with that as my primary browser for the forseeable future.

What would have to happen for me to change my mind? Someone would have to release a browser that's better than Firefox 2.0.0.20. That is all.