Song Lyrics in the age of the Internet

When I was a kid we didn't have the internet. We didn't have computers for that matter. One of the things that I love about the internet and modern music players is that they can download and display song lyrics as the song is playing.

Back up 30+ years. I used to listen to my radio (WRKO) at night and every once in awhile I'd hear a song I liked. To help me remember it I'd record it on a tape recorder, then play it over and over again, writing down the lyrics a verse at a time! If the sound quality was bad (and it was usually, recording a song on an AM station being played on a cheap radio) it could take time to figure it out.

Fast forward to the present. There is a song from the late 70's that I like entitled "No Time To Lose" written and played by the Tarney-Spencer band. Found the song on YouTube recently and enjoyed listening to it. I googled the lyrics and found that *gasp* there were only two versions out there and both were bad. Both were missing words, had the wrong words in certain sections, etc. So... I reverted to the olden days and began playing it over and over again on YouTube until I was satisfied that I had them down correctly, or at least 95% correct. I may be missing the word "and" at the beginning of one of the verses. Here you go... in all its glory:

Tarney-Spencer Band... No time to lose...

Every day I walk in shadows
I know not what it is I'm heading for
As the evening light is dying
A gentle heart lies near me sighing
You feel the same
Will you ever change
You can never understand
We can only be like water
Rolling on to find our way
Just get on with the game
With the game, what a game

No time to lose, no time to lose
No time to lose, no time to lose
Go with the flow, never let go
No time to lose...

There ain't no way to see forever
It's only day to day I'm living for
Like a wheel you keep me turning
It's your love inside me burning
The question's plain,
Will your love remain?
You can never understand
We can only be like water
Rolling on to find our way
Just get on with the game
With the game, you know the game

No time to lose, no time to lose
No time to lose, no time to lose
Go with the flow, never let go
No time to lose...

You can never understand
We can only be like water
Rolling on to find our way
Just get on with the game
With the game...

No time to lose, no time to lose
No time to lose, no time to lose
Go with the flow, never let go
No time to lose...

No time to lose, no time to lose
No time to lose, no time to lose...

Better off in a bubble?

There is a lot of hate and hurt in this world. People seem to enjoy attacking other people's beliefs, life styles, education, lack of education, choice of clothing, choice of reading materials, hair styles, make up, etc.

Sometimes I think it is just best to believe what you believe, and live your life according to how you think it should be lived and let it go at that. If there is something good in that, it will be seen. In the end, good is good and nothing can change that.

I, like everyone else, can have some strong opinions but I think that perhaps from now on I will follow Jame's advice (and my favorite quote): be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.

Of course if I am asked for my opinion, that might be a different matter.

Sown among thorns...

I don't know about you but the world really has its fingers in me. I absolutely must have my time to play games, go off-roading/geo-caching, etc. I strive for the latest software or hardware technology, at least to what I can afford. I enjoy my hobbies.

Now, there is nothing wrong with those things, but are they what is most important? Are they what I should focus on?

When the commonly reviled Jehovahs Witnesses come to my door I don't say "not now," or "thanks but no thanks," because I see in them a willingness to do the Lord's work that I often lack. Instead I talk with them for awhile, offer them drinks, etc. There are a few who are regulars now that come by to talk and we enjoy our talks. Sometimes they leave me with research to do, sometimes I leave them with some research. It's nice.

But they always remind me how wrong my life is and how unwilling I am to adjust and adapt to what the Lord has in store for me.

From Mark 4 (NET Bible - Parable of the Sower explanation):

4:18 Others are the ones sown among thorns: They are those who hear the word, 4:19 but worldly cares, the seductiveness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it produces nothing.

3rd Wheel in my own head

Most of my dreams are fairly uneventful. The more interesting dreams are relatively far and few in between. I can count on one hand my three or four most interesting (in all of my life), those being "the turnaround," "big bird," "superhero" and last night "southern belle." Yes, I title my dreams. I'll summarize my previous dreams before going into "southern belle."

"The turnaround" was my anti-nightmare dream. I think I was about 8 years old, and it started out as one of those typical running from a monster but can't move fast enough dreams. But at some point, I just got angry. I had enough of being chased, I turned and even tho' the monster was a LOT bigger, I attacked it. I never had another nightmare of that sort again.

"Big bird..." what can I say? It started out as one of my other more interesting dreams, a repetitive dream. The dream started as it usually does, driving down an alternate world Rt. 93 toward an alternate world Boston. Usually the dream takes me right into downtown Boston but not this time. This time I veered off an exit heading West. The road turned into a country road and there was a pull off area, so I did. I got out of my car and I heard a crashing noise in the surrounding woods and out popped Big Bird. He ran straight at me and all of a sudden I became Big Bird (looking out through the costume and everything) and was heading back into the woods, down a rough path. I began to hear chanting and a man speaking. I snuck up to where the sound was and saw a large circle of people with one man "preaching" and the others all murmuring excitedly and nodding, etc. I listened closely and heard the man speak about... the elliptical orbits of the planets in our solar system. So at that point, I had to get across the circle, my path continued on the other side. I started stepping through the crowd (still Big Bird) saying "excuse me, sorry, excuse me" all the way across and then I ran like crazy. Next thing I knew I was in the kitchen of the house I grew up in (Stoneham) relating the story to my parents.

"Superhero" was just fun! I got to play a spy, then a superhero-like person who could fly and was super-strong and I had to battle with aliens. Enough said about that!

Last night's dream was different. As far as I know, I am always a part of my dreams. Last night I was not. Not only was I not involved in any way, but the dream I had was just bizarre. It was set in the Civil War era and centered around the life of a young woman, a Southern Belle. I was just a 3rd person point of view, a sort of floating camera. It started all happy, her family owned a plantation, she was rich. I will breeze through this a bit: In the process of the North Army coming and going (gaining ground, losing ground) she somehow had half her face shot off. Literally gone, just a sort of pit. She took to wearing a porcelain half-mask and continued on with her life. Fast forward, the North finally took control of the region, she was placed under house arrest and her house was occupied by Northern troops. (Again, I am skipping detail, but the dream itself kept jumping into the future). Finally, she irritated the Northern soldiers in her house so much they took away her porcelain mask and her face was filled with what looked like terracotta instead, and she was chained up with her own slaves.

And that is pretty much how it ended, as I awoke because my arm went numb due to my daughter being in our bed last night and I slept on one side at the edge of the bed all night.

Anyway, that dream will go down as one of my more interesting ones, I think.

Back to work, I have deployments to make and testing to be done.

Just a brief update.

Nothing much going on. That's not true, tons of things are going on, but nothing Earth shattering. Isaac and cub scouts, Anabelle and Space Pirates and soon, Daisies, work for me, choral group for Sandra... Anyway, I just added an RSS feature to my own web site - see if it works for you:

Mike's Junkyard Blog

Select the link and add it to your favorite RSS reader.

As for the site itself; It's my site where I muck around, play mostly. I wrote it in Euphoria. You can see some of the source code by clicking the links on the "links" page.

Geode Caching and Windows 7

We geo-cached today. We broke a personal record and found a series of 30 caches over 4 hours. It was a blast! Isaac came up with his own joke: What do you get when you cross a rock with geo-caching? Geode-caching (hence the title). Pretty funny!

We also went to the carnival that was in town. Sandi, Isaac and Anabelle drove, I decided to walk Cookie (one of our dogs) to the carnival. We got there and at first she was just a little anxious. Over time she grew more and more anxious until a booth where you threw darts at balloons just pushed her over the edge and the poor thing was terrified. I took her away from the carnival and waited for Sandi and the kids to finish up.

Other than that the only thing left to announce is that I am legal now with Windows 7. My official copy of Win 7 Ultimate arrived today and I've installed it. It was a bit of a pain since there was no upgrade path from beta to final, but that's alright, sort of starting with a clean system and I saved off a lot of my data ahead of time - using the transfer took and some manual backups. I kind of miss the little beta message at the bottom, right-hand corner of the screen.

Crowning achievements as a programmer

I guess "crowning achievements" is a bit extreme, but there are several applications or bugs I've worked on that I was pleased with. I'll just list some of them out and provide a brief explanation as to what the were and why I was pleased with them.

1) My first program used on-the-job ever. I was working as a material handler and going to school for CS at night. I wrote a program to create receipt documents for items that were not expected or properly shipped to our site (at DEC).

2) ARS (Action Reporting System). This was probably my first MAJOR application. It was basically a "call desk" application that allowed users from several facilities to log requests to various operations groups. It could be for IT or Facilities and others. It was flexible, and well laid out, but it took me several months longer than I had estimated it would take.

3) Automated backups. Not really a programming task, altho' it did involved making changes to some of our software that helped manage our tape library. Not only did I automate backups for 3 sites, but also met with the operations managers of several other sites and we created a rotating schedule with one another to store our tapes off-site; this saved DEC about $250,000 per year (Or was that per quarter? I cannot remember now) in off-site storage fees and also in personnel.

4) My first "money making" application. It was a silly application that ran on Windows or Mac OS (7 or 8). It's purpose was for tracking software on company-owned computers and adding the lists to our asset tracking software that the companies also used to manage their physical inventory.

5) Another application used in conjunction with our inventory software. It tracked (and kept an ongoing history of) a company's parts inventory in a manufacturing site. It was also smart enough to predict (based on past usage) when you would need to reorder. The fun part was devising a file layout that acted as not only a file of current inventory, but mapped the actual history of the transactions.

6) Mortgage application. It was huge. It was powerful. And we had a chance to make good money on it by selling it to a competitor but we did not and they squashed us anyway (since they dominated the market). A LOT of dynamic data mapping and interesting structures and logic managing it all.

7) Data mapper. Heh. What? Mapping data? Big deal! Well this one was. It had to map LOC and BA data from one bank to another (back in the day of large bank takeovers). Both banks used completely different tracking and management systems. It was a challenge but it was great fun! It had to be dynamic, determining how it should map raw data on the fly, not in any specific format.

7a) DES. I had to implement a DES encryption library in DEC BASIC, and some basic methods to do stuff like encrypt/decrypt/generate PINs, MACs, etc.

8) Bug #1. I was working in OpenVMS for DEC and THE Andrew Goldstein logged a bug report and it was assigned to me. I looked at it and pretty much figured out the issue within a week but I spent over a month looking at it simply because it was logged by Mr. VMS and I did not want to blow it. Turned out it was NOT a bug, but a POTENTIAL bug if we ever completed an unused section of our backup code (a framework was in place but never activated, the bug was in that code). I documented the heck out of it and closed the bug.

9) Bug #2. I worked in the security section of the VMS group. I got to see some cool bugs. This problem was in memory management. A few lines of assembly language were out of place and an object was being cleared when it should not have (under very special circumstances). It was my first big kernel issue.

10) Bug #3. This one was daunting. But, like the bug before it, it simply came down to code being executed in a certain order that caused an issue. I can't actually go into detail with this one. I can say it was obscure.

11) Finally, in my current job, I wrote a little servlet that conformed to certain library specifications that would indicate to the caller whether or not items were available for use based on certain criteria. It was designed to be simple and very quick because it was called on the fly from someone else's website that interlinked their library services with our permission services. It was a lot of fun to write and my first solo project after moving.

And that's the short list of the things I had the most fun with. I have written many other applications (including disk scanners that were used by other people in their own products) and graphical queue management software, graphical system management software, data gathering software (for QA), data generators, data sifters, etc., but those stand out in my memory.