To little birds, and to thee, beloved...

        may my heart always be open to little
        birds who are the secrets of living
        whatever they sing is better than to know
        and if men should not hear them men are old

        may my mind stroll about hungry
        and fearless and thirsty and supple
        and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
        for whenever men are right they are not young

        and may myself do nothing usefully
        and love yourself so more than truly
        there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
        pulling all the sky over him with one smileÂ

                                -- E. E. Cummings

I'll present this to you as a problem and I suggest you try to find what was wrong. I found in the end, but it took a very long time.

First some background. An uncle of my wife is a international tax consultant, and has quite some tech to support his business. I once made 400€ to set him up with a backup server (based on consumer-end hardware, but whatever). He's a nice guy, and ever since he discovered that I'm a computer scientist I have become his prime contact for anything IT. He's tech savvy and he pays well, what's not to like? I'd even do it for free as he always has nice challenges, but he insists.

On his network there is one machine that was always troublesome. It's a consumer-end machine that he exclusively uses for his accounting using a proprietary package made in Luxembourg (probably because of the local laws). In the past it acted weirdly, which I traced down to the RAM. After using some of my dumpster sourced sticks, it was ok... For a while, then it failed again. RAM again. Exchanging sticks, again failed. Since the RAM tested okay in my dumpster souced motherboards, I evaluated the cause as being a defective motherboard. As it was a older Pentium D socket 775 class machine, which benchmarks worse than a modern day Atom, I suggested to replace just the motherboard with an Intel D525MW. We did that and it was fine for a while. However, the power supply was already making weird noises and I told him that it's going to blow sooner or later.

Fast forward to Monday. He writes me an email that the machine won't turn on. Obviously, that must be the power supply. Monday I drop by at my parents to pick up two power supplies. A relatively modern one (480W) which had served faithfully in one of my servers and a dumpster sourced 250W powersupply. I was sure I could solve it in a half hour by swicthing power supplies. Yesterday, I went there and immediately got to work.

Indeed the machine wouldn't turn on. I lay the tower on its side, remove the old power supply (which clearly was of dubious quality, considering it weight next to nothing), and install the 250W one. Connect everything. Push power and... it boots. I say: "We're done. See, that was easy...". While the machine is on, I set it upright and .... blam power goes away. W ... T ... F ?!?

Okay, okay, two possibilities. Either that dumpster sourced powersupply really isn't all that cracked up to be, or the the motherboard somehow touches the case when in upright position. I try the 480W powersupply. For easy work, I obviously, lay the case back down. Install the powersupply (well the minimum to test this time of course), power one and yay! Works. I turn it off, connect the rest and put it back in its place... in upright position. Try to power on and... Nope... Dead as a dodo.

Okay, the motherboard might be shorting somehow. It's unlikely because the studs keep it at ~5mm from the metal, but let's try. I remove the motherboard and hold it in my hands. Power it on, works. Orientate it in the weirdest positions I could imagine (shorts in the cable of the powersupply, perhaps). Works. Weird.

At this point, I try something else. I remove the power supply and put it on top of the case, which is now in the non-working upright position. I lay the powersupply flat on top of the case and, it works. Do note that a power supply isn't mounted flat in the case. I rotate it 90 degrees and the power goes away.

At that point something dawns to me. I changed one thing, installed everything back in the case exactly as it was... and now it works.

So, what do you think I changed in the whole setup?

I'd like to start off with stating that I'm not against change. I've used so many user interfaces over the years that I adapt quite quickly. I'm also not against software upgrades, just not the way it's been done by all major players (including open source software) in the last ten years.

Let me start off with an example: Unity. I switched to Ubuntu 11.10 (from the 10.04 LTS) and I gave Unity a shot. I'm fine now with it, but I had to do something I have done many times before. Shut down my "what I know" mode, and adapt myself to the new paradigm. The way I did this was tell myself: it works in a different way, let's just play it with its rules. As a relatively quick learner that works. I had to do this before, back in my OS X period. Coming from a Linux and Windows (NT4) background, I really had to start from a clean slate. Unity was easier in the sense that I tried using it as Mac OS X with the dock on the side and stop using maximizing windows. Doing that works surprisingly well. It works, and apart from a few annoying bugs (?), I most certainly cope. (Why does Firefox insist on starting maximized for example. The auto hide function of the dock should be disabled too, just make sure no windows are under it and you're fine.)

A radical change in using Unity is also depending on your keyboard to search for applications you want to run. Especially those you run rarely. The most important stuff I have in my dock, but I don't see why I'd need to waste space for the nvidia-settings application which I run each morning to turn on my second screen at work. So, I end up typing "nv" each mording in the Dash Home.

Now, of course you have the people saying "just change distro" or "just change your desktop environment". Often the first implying the last. Obviously, I can do that. In 2000 I ran Peanut Linux with WindowMaker on my Toshiba Satellite 210CT. For us Geeks nothing has changed, I can take Ubuntu, drop LDXE on it, or take Debian and select E17. I don't even need to change distro to do that, I know how to do that myself. Thing is, changing disto is easier. It also is not a solution: neither changing distro nor changing desktop environments. So I prefer Gnome2 over Unity. Fine, but Gnome2 will disappear because they moved on to Gnome3 and I don't think the fork, made by some group, will live.

What's the point, you ask? The point is that I'm a nerd, I have lived more years with computers in my life than without. The problem is that I am the support guy and as a support guy I don't want bleeding edge. I want stability, evolutionary change and a predictable roadmap. I want to run the same system so I can support those who actually need support, which would be my mother and my mother in law who are both 10.04 LTS users. Do you have any idea what it means to switch over users like them from Gnome2 to unity? It isn't going to be pretty. You say Mint? Fine... Gnome3 with extensions to make it look like Gnome2, but it ain't Gnome2. It also adds an enormous workload upon installing the machine, if you don't go with defaults. Instead of an hour for installation, plus setting up a few programs, I need to change the distro on a fundamental level, making my installation time much longer. This is also why people change distros, and not desktop environments. Ease... Plain and simple.

This summarized what is so wrong with desktop environments: Maturity is considered a bug, not a feature. Let's see Gnome2 is stable, well known and actually works without too much glitches. We can't have that. Throw it away and start from scratch with a new paradigm, full of bugs and with no clear roadmap. From my point of view that is simply not acceptable for the end-user.

Oh, and don't think this is unique to Linux. I give you Windows XP. Say what you want about XP, but from the user point of view, the user interface is well known. From the system administrators point, it is also well-known, easy to secure and thus mature. Let's skip Vista, and go directly to 7. The interface is even more condescending and you have to change your way of working, just like on the Linux Desktop Environments. Instead of using the mouse to start program (which, like it or not, normal users do!), you have to use the search function in the start menu. Also, one of the things you could easily do in Windows XP was show the hidden files and still have a quite oversee-able home directory. Try that in 7, it becomes a mess and it's not something you want to have activated when normal users use it. (desktop.ini? What's that file, I'll just delete it) There are so many hidden folders and hard-links, it's not pretty (Do note the dotfile frenzy in Linux is no shred better). Windows 7 is the first Windows, I actually put the "hide hidden files" in enabled state.

In a similar vein: want to move your My Documents folder from your fancy-ass quick-but-small SSD to spinning rust disk? Without re-installation, it's not possible. Without re-installation, you're doomed to move every "Subfolder" of you home manually. Why? Under XP it was Properties of your My Documents folder and set it to the new location.

These changes are completely unnecessary and change for the sake of change. Yes, I understand that we can't keep XP with the advent of 8GB++ RAM Machines, but really?

So, Mac OS X is immune? Fuck no! My wife's superb iMac runs Snow Leopard and I'm scared shitless to upgrade it to Lion. She is the same category of users as my mother or my mother in law. Now, I haven't touched OS X much at all, but I know one glaring change that made many users bitch a lot: the way the pages scroll. Long-time tradition is that you scroll your scroll-wheel down, and your documents goes down, scroll it up and your document goes up. Mac OS X Lion throws this out and goes for the inverse. That's like reversing break and gas pedal. Yes, I understand why, and it does make sense on a touch device or if you have that fancy new Magic Trackpad. Well, we don't... Sucks to be us, and sucks to be me to try to explain it to my wife when we eventually and inevitably will be forced to upgrade.

Of course, you say, "this is limited to operating systems", just suck it up. Nope, let me present you Firefox. Their new release cycle is insane from a supporting person like me. On Ubuntu, I best stick to what has been shipped. Let's take Windows. If you are like me, but unlike most people, I will run my users as limited users. Say what you want, but taking this stance is the best way to keep your users from getting infected with anything. The downside is: they can't install anything except for the annoying little programs that go around this and install themselves in the users home folder (Google Earth and Chrome, I'm looking at you!) This implies the automatic updates so many software companies seem to love so much (how many have you running?) will not work. So you have to disable them, which I do. It also means that you get a feature freeze which, oddly enough is very desirable. Supporting a known subset of software simply is easier. Given they run Limited User, the risk is mitigated greatly. Firefox was fine, a stable release (akin to the LTS system in Ubuntu) as the 3.6 line and anything else for those who want more. Except Mozilla wants to stop this. We all need to jump on the update-frenzy bandwagon. No! It robs us of stability and predictability. This is clear with all the extensions breaking so often. There still is no Java Console for Firefox 8, and on the Windows 7 machine I discovered this, we have the latest bleeding edge Java.

This brings me to another annoyance: System developers, especially under Windows, still have not understood the concept of multi-user machines where not all users are privileged (and heck, to the example I'll give you this doesn't even matter all that much). Imagine I set up a machine for you, we'll say Windows 7. It's for you, your kids and wife. Obviously, I want all of you to have the best surfing experience and since you are married with that Swedish hottie, and you live in Germany and your kids thus need to write German you want the English UK and US, Swedish and German dictionaries in your browser. Dictionaries are extensions and what I'll describe is true for all extensions. How do you do this? Traditionally, for such a thing, you install these things centrally (%programfiles%\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions) instead of per-user (%applicationdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\randomstring\extensions). Try it... Do it... In order to get this working you will have to install it as your user, then elevate to Admin privileges and move the raw folders to the appropriate folders. Oh, and then set the security permissions right please. If you did everything right, those extensions will now be visible for all users. Most people don't know this, so you have extensions/dictionaries installed for each of them, all in different version, all in different state of usage. From a support point of view unacceptable. From within firefox, only the per-user system is supported. There is no check-box you can check if you are in the "Administrators" group to "install for all users".

Do note that OpenOffice has exactly the same problem with dictionaries. Luckily it detects if you are the "Administrator" user and offers you the option. Not so with the "Administrators" group, unless it changed (last I tried was OpenOffice 3.2).

I realize I deviated a bit with the above, but it illustrates another aspect of what is wrong with software these days.

Please, both in the proprietary world as in the free software world: Stop changing for the sake of change, especially in GUIs. Stop forcing upgrades upon us and do a Stable/Unstable distinction (Debian really got it right, but Debian doesn't make a good deskop without a good amount of manual work. Besides, even Debian is going to switch to Gnome3 eventually). Change is not bad, but radical departure is bad. Sometimes a product is just mature, and mature doesn't mean spoiled. It means, you can depend on it being what it is and not changing radically.

Windows XP, for all its failures is unique in the sense that it gave us 10 years of software stability. That was a great period to live in. I fear however, that this is in the past and we're bound to get in a rollercoaster ride.

Cuimhním (I remember): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XztbNJ87g Croíthe le chéile.

Cuimhní: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n08JRxVLKLE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3fHDt4xQFw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko0VPinyKKY

Today, my mom sent me a picture of my Grandma on Google Streetview. I thought it was photoshopped, as I have an uncle who is an artist and is quite versed in Photoshop. A little doubt still persisted and I checked with Google Streetview to be sure.

My jaw dropped wide open when seeing the actual Google Streetview picture. I posted links to the actual address to select people on Facebook and G+, because obviously her address would be published. Probably not the best idea.

Since I still want to share, I'd say: enjoy!. It's a screenshot I made myself.

Yes, that is actually my grandma... My *awesome* grandma...

If you don't believe me you can contact me, and I'll give you the actual location. Just promise me then that you won't share the address.

Where's your mama gone?

My phone threw out this sequence on shuffle last night:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9FIepqKao

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoipWH8T1JA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ye8GLPUVsM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIyxzeGQzS4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIAQCiMIEEQ

I know, I haven't been very fond of Unity. As a matter of fact, I still don't really like it and there are improvements that could be made. I still bit the bullet and went with Ubuntu 11.10 on my work laptop? Why? Because yesterday my laptop refused to boot. The harddisk decided to have some mechanical failure somewhere between yesterday and the Monday before: I was sick due to a quite heavy Gastroenteritis last week.

First thing, organize a new hard disk. While I was away running down the electronic stores, I asked a co-worker to burn me the latest Ubuntu 11.10/amd64. The rest of the day, I passed installing the system, and setting everything up for my work environment. As I didn't have a possibility to read the old disk, I started from the assumption that everything was lost. I had a backup at home, so I wasn't all that worried.

Still, I decided to give Unity a shot. First thing first, you do need a good machine to run Unity as conceived by Canconical. This is a Core2Duo P8600 with NVidia graphics (Quadro NVS 160M, according to lspci). I had tried 11.10/Unity on my old latop which is a Turion X2 TL-50 with ATI Xpress 1100, and it's too damned slow for Unity. This is mainly due to the ATI chipset being grandfathered and not getting any decent drivers anymore. Also, I used it with a trackpad. The last thing is important: the longer "mousing ways" strain you when using a trackpad, but at work I use a mouse and there it doesn't bother me all that much.

The second thing, I decided after my initial Unity experience was to give it the "Mac treatment", which means: stop using maximized windows. Maximized windows are simply a pain in Unity. If you don't use them, you'll do fine. Next up is to take care that you never ever, under any circumstances, put something under the "dock" (dash?). If you do that, it will autohide, so if you need it, it will take a few seconds to reappear. That is very annoying. This is, by the way, the same reason that maximized windows suck so much. No dock.

When you adapt yourself to that line of thinking, Unity becomes usable. That said, Unity needs a lot of resolution. One could argue the icons are too large, so you cannot fit everything you might need in it.

Two very positive things on Ubuntu 11.10:

• The top bar, while being very uncustomizable, is duplicated on your second monitor. So if you need anything from up there, you actually have less mouse movements to do. Remember, you can get your email, IM, RSS by default in there.
• The backup tool looks nifty. I'm running one now, but from afar it looks a bit like a time machine clone. Very good for the normal user. Yes, I do know how to use rsync, don't worry.

What I like much less is that you "feel" (yes, yes, I know cold hard data is better) slower. I cannot say if it's just the system, or due to Unity. Furthermore, am I not convinced that the current NVidia drivers are top-notch (NVidia is usually quite good on Linux). Just right now Movie Player (that's Totem for you folks, I really need to install VLC), decided that it was going to hijack my second monitor and set it to "mirror" instead of Twinview. How that's even possible, is beyond me. The NVidia XServer Settings applet also manages to kill Unity from time to time. Sure, that's not really Canonicals fault, but it's annoying when it happens. I'd rather use the native monitor section application anyway. I don't think that possible, except if I'd try Nouveau or something.

All in all, I'm not all that negative any more about Unity.

Still, don't even think of trying this on slow machines and especially not on netbooks. Which is odd, as I understood Unity was "born" for that market.

There is one thing I want to say that bothers me: It's this new philosophy of putting applications in PPAs (Personal Package Archives). It is very much a hybrid form between "Windows thinking" and "Linux thinking". The mantra these days is pretty much "Just add this PPA". It's just too close to "Just download and install this exe". I don't like it. I did install two PPAs (indicator-cpufreq and indicator-multiload), but I really do think these belong in the main repository. Sure, these are little things, but I really don't know what exactly I added to my system, now do I? It gets worse. I have an application called "IBM Storage Manager" to work on our SAN. It's a Java application and it "needs" Sun/Oracle Java 6. You want Java from Sun/Oracle? Oh, add this PPA. I will tell you what: unless that PPA is on an official Oracle/Sun site, I tell you: No fucking way in hell.
IBM Storage Managers seems to run on OpenJDK, so for now I don't need to install it. I really should try the BladeCenter management consoles. They are Java-Applet based. That might fail spectacularly too.

Hi jawtheshark,

Your request to join the Desura Linux Beta has just been accepted by Henley. To install Desura and start browsing, buying and playing native Linux games, follow the link below:

http://www.desura.com/install

We employ a "buy once play anywhere" policy, so any Windows games or Humble Indie Bundle games you have activated will show up when you login. If you are a developer or publisher you can add games, mods and addons you are developing. Looking forward to seeing your feedback and enjoy the beta, we've got plenty of updates coming!

Regards, The Desura Team

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Yay!

In Time of Scrimping, Fun Stuff Is Still Selling... WTF?!?

I know, I'm old fashioned and people like me break the economy of over-consumption. I save, like many generations have done before me. For me, it is absolutely inconceivable buying luxury items when you're having financial trouble. That's the times you tighten the belt and do with less.

I must truly be from a different planet.... Well across the big pond, but I wouldn't be surprised if my fellow Europeans aren't much better.

Every time you talk about Windows 7 (and you know my opinion on it, it's Vista a bit polished), you hear the fanbois cry up that it detected everything for them and they didn't have to install a single driver (except perhaps graphics drivers, but that's the same everywhere). Well, my first experience was on brand new hardware and it definitely didn't. My brothers new PC, and getting the -older- Wifi card to work was like going to Hell and back. I probably journalled about. Why, yes, I did, but I failed to document the process of the wireless PCI card installation.

Anyway, second Windows 7 experience was on my (brand new) Dell L502x. As I didn't want to use the OEM installation but start with a fresh install, I did a fresh install with the provided (okay, bought as an option) Windows 7 installation CD. That one was harsh, pretty much nothing was detected on it and I got presented with a grocery list of drivers to install.

You'd think that old hardware would be fine, right? For kicks 'n giggles, I took out my old AMD Athlon MP 2400+. That's hardware from 2003. I wanted to do something specific with it and I did, but since it was in the apartment now and I had two 1TB SATA disks lying around and a PCI SATA/Raid controller (obviously not from 2003. The Tyan Tiger MPX S2466 doesn't have SATA), I decided to have some fun and setup a striped 2TB volume and install Windows 7 Ultimate (trial). One good thing about Windows 7, and it's about the only one, is that it's very easy to get the installation media and if you don't enter a key, you get the 30-day trial version. I'd rather have Microsoft provide the ISO and MD5 checksums, but I could get what I needed here. (Also an interesting read, not to extend the trial period, that thing about the ei.cfg)

Now, obviously, I didn't expect the PCI SATA/Raid controller to be detected. Well, at least not in RAID mode. That's fine, given Windows 7 now allows loading of extra drivers from USB and I had them lying around on my fileserver.

So, the thing installs and.... Okay, graphics are standard VGA. Fine, fine, you don't detect a years old NVidia Geforce4. That's okay. I get it, graphics drivers are exempt of the "should be detected" part. However, can you guess which device wasn't found. A device that's pretty important and, believe me, something which is considered bog-standard hardware. No? It didn't find the integrated 100Mbps 3Com 3C905. Can it get any more standard? Really? Microsoft? 3Com, the most common NIC of all times (at least from back then). I simply cannot understand that omission. The XP driver doesn't want to install (no surprise there) and Tyan obviously isn't going to provide drivers for Vista/7 for eight and a half year old hardware. I have no idea where to get drivers. Perhaps at 3Com (Probably not)

Windows 7 may be fantastic (but I doubt it, given my experience), but this is really sad, sad, sad, sad.... Microsoft, disappointing you since 1975....

Anyway, this pretty much stops my experiments dead in the water.

Update 2011-09-25@16h20CEST
With the help of a USB Wireless key, I managed to get on my network. Just because I'm an optimist, I decided to let the Windows driver manager check online for drivers for the 3Com 3C905C-TX NIC. You know what? It fucking finds them at once! Can you understand that? These drivers are unavailable for free download, but Microsoft has them and isn't assed to include them in the default install. Again: one of the most common NIC chipsets in the World! I need to install a network to install my network. Pure insanity.

I also tried finding graphics drivers for the graphics card. Okay, it is a very low end card (but it's passively cooled, that's why I never threw it away): an NVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 with 64MByte RAM. NVidia doesn't provide Windows 7 drivers for it, and it gets detected as Standard VGA. I'll try the "look online" trick again, but frankly... Compiz does run fine on this card.

Vista/7 made so much hardware obsolete, you could consider it an ecological disaster.

AT&T appears to be blocking inbound mail from gmail, or at least from the server that is sending my mail. I've had bounces from two sbcglobal.net addresses, but one to a yahoo.com address appears to have gone through with no problem.

Anyone else have this problem?

You all know I love dumpster diving. The excitement of getting new machines to play with, new hardware to give a life... I think I'm going to stop, or at least stop actively seeking. If I can get some older hardware given by friends or family, I'll probably still take it. The dumpsters themselves, I'll probably leave alone.

There are several reasons. First of all, I lack the time... I wish I had as much time as I used to in the good old days I only had to care about myself.

Second, it really is not economically viable. The typical machines found these days tend to be 2.0GHz++ AMD XP or Pentium IV. Those are capable machines, but think about it. An Atom based machine can be had for 199€, new and with warranty with more memory and dual-core to boot and that in a sleek small case while being energy efficient. Obviously you're going to say... "But, but, a Pentium IV is better than an Atom D525". To which I'll reply: Oh really? I don't think so.. Yes, I do realize those are artificial benchmarks and the the P-IV does that with one core where the Atom needs two cores to achieve the same score. Still, it's more than enough for the daily worker.

Not to mention that dumpster diving is forbidden and I have been caught a few times. It's getting harder and harder because they know me and keep an eye on me. Well, that, or I'm starting to cultivate a paranoia ;-)

I also lack the space... My parents have been nice enough to allow me to have my old wardrobe full of old computer stuff. I've been hoarding, and in essence, never really giving anything away. Sometimes I managed and I made sure it would be good machines, but eventually people buy something new and (as I usually ask), I get the old gear back.

This brings me to the main problem. I have fine machines, but there is nobody to take them. Given the price of todays machines, why would they?

Months ago, I dumped one of my old "giveaway-but-came-back-after-about-two-years" machines on my parking spot in the basement. I had no time, no space and let it sit there. One day, I noticed a note on it, which basically asked me "Hey, this computer is probably defect, I'd take it away so I can use the spare parts". I couldn't go ok with it, as the computer had belonged to a teenage girl and I wanted to be absolutely sure that there was no data left on the disk. I also knew it still worked, and somehow I couldn't just say "Sure, it's defective, you can take it". It wasn't, so I wrote a note: "No, you can't take it, it still works".

However, this gave me an idea. Someone wanted this AMD XP 2800+ machine (even though this person didn't know what the machine was...) and I couldn't justify keeping it. So why not prepare it for that person and give it away to them.... Better, I have more stuff he might like. So, I also gathered materials to build two other machines (A P-IV 2.8GHz and a P-IV 2.4GHz). When I was done refurbishing, I put them on my parking spot behind my car with a sign on each of them with big red letters "Take me! I still work!". I also was pretty nice, as on the printed signs, I added the exact specifications of the machine. Heck, I even included a power cable for each of them!

This was about a week ago. Nothing happened. I already feared the mystery computer affectionado wasn't a common visitor of my underground parking. Today, I came home and only one was left. Oddly enough the 2.8GHz P-IV. I guess the person who picked them up didn't have enough space in his car to take them all.

I hope they found a good home... Worst case, some idiot disassembles them and he only keeps the optical drives. (You see, the remaining one only had a CD-Rom... The other two were equipped with CD-RW and DVD-Rom...)

So, unless I really find something absolutely extraordinary, don't count on much dumpster diving adventures. Perhaps I should also change my slashdot signature now....

Update, 2011-09-13@00h40CEST
Had to fetch my laptop from my car because of a larger alert on our systems. Machine number three is gone too.

        I remember the nights I watched as you lay sleeping
        Your body gripped by some far away dream
        Well I was so scared and so in love then
        And so lost in all of you that I had seen
        But no one ever talked in the darkness
        No voice ever added fuel to the fire
        No light ever shone in the doorway
        Deep in the hollow of earthly desires
        But if in some dream there was brightness
        If in some memory some sort of sign
        And flesh be revived in the shadows
        Blessed our bodies would lay so entwined

        And I will, oh I will not forget you
        Nor will I ever let you go
        I will, oh I will not forget you

        I remember how you left in the morning at daybreak
        So silent you stole from my bed
        To go back to the one who possesses your soul
        And I back to the life that I dread.
        So I ran like the wind to the water
        Please don't leave me again I cried
        And I threw bitter tears at the ocean
        But all that came back was the tide...

        And I will, oh I will not forget you
        Nor will I ever let you go
        I will, oh I will not forget you

        And I will, oh I will not forget you
        Nor will I ever let you go
        I will, oh I will not forget you

        Ohhhhhhh...
        I will, oh I will not forget you
        Nor will I ever let you go
        I will, oh I will not forget you
        Nor will I ever let you go
        I will, oh I will not forget you...

                                -- Sarah McLachlan

Cuimhneoidh mé ort go deo, a mhuirnín.

        Where are you this moment -
        only in my dreams.
        You're missing, but you're always
        a heartbeat from me.

        I'm lost now without you,
        I don't know where you are.
        I keep watching, I keep hoping,
        but time keeps us apart.

        Is there a way I can find you,
        is there a sign I should know,
        is there a road I could follow
        to bring you back home?

        Winter lies before me
        now you're so far away.
        In the darkness of my dreaming
        the light of you will stay.

        If I could be close beside you,
        if I could be where you are,
        if I could reach out and touch you
        and bring you back home.

        Is there a way I can find you,
        Is there a sign I should know,
        Is there a road I can follow
        to bring you back home to me?

                                -- Roma Ryan (as sung by
                                          Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin)

Tusa, is tusa amháin...

        Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art --
        Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
        And watching, with eternal lids apart,
        Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
        The moving waters at their priestlike task
        Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
        Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
        Of snow upon the mountains and the moors --
        No -- yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
        Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
        To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
        Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
        Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
        And so live ever -- or else swoon to death.

                                                        -- John Keats

Mó réalta geal, go deo...