The roads I take...

I just sat down to play a bit of guitar, and while I'm a quite mediocre player (probably due to lack of practice to a good part), I've written an number of songs - all in all I should have reached about 280, though some of those are only a few lines that never grew to a full song, and some are just new lyrics to existing songs. I taught myself to play guitar roughly 20 years ago, just from a chord table, mainly to be able to accompany my own songs, actually, and this is still one of the major reasons I play.

When I felt like it and took out some of my older songs to play through, I realized how ago long it really was, roughly 20 years ago, in 1992, when I wrote the first lyrics and full songs. Hard to believe even for myself, who lived through all of it! Man, it's been "ages" since I started to contribute to Mozilla in 1999, but this goes back even much further - and some of those songs still aren't too bad (granted, some of the lyrics I wrote as a 14-year-old sound naive today, but it's interesting how little of it, though that could just be me looking at myself).

Earlier today, I quoted some Country Music lyrics in a Mozilla IRC channel, and apparently it surprised people who know me pretty well Mozilla-wise that I'm a huge country fan, or there were even any outside the rural Southern US.
In fact, my dad played the drums in a country band in the 1990s (which inspired me a lot music-wise) and we have a pretty vivid country scene here in Austria - not mainstream, but good enough for common people to go to events and to have a thousand people or so at some of them. My dad stopped playing because being the CEO of a small company and having a family was ultimately more important to him, but the love of this kind of music stuck with him as well as my mum and myself. I continued writing songs, playing the guitar when I have time, listening to a lot of Country Music - and when I started singing Karaoke regularly, I took that music with me and I'm known in my regular Karaoke bar as the one who sings country stuff all the time.

Mentioning my dad being the CEO of a small company reminds me of him telling me sometimes how interesting it is that a lot of successful managers seems to be playing an instrument or sing in a band - possibly because both require a lot of harmonizing with those around you. And that reminds me of a brown bag session I attended via video earlier today on how to be a good manager (I'm technically in program management now but I don't manage any people, still I'm interested in those topics). I wonder how many Mozilla managers have music as one of their hobbies...

Some of you might know a song called "The F-Word", recorded by Hank Williams, Jr. and Kid Rock, which explains in all length that "in Country Music, you don't use the f-word", and yes, it's fun - esp. given how Kid Rock lyrics usually read
A bit more recently, there Jack Ingram's "Love You" that takes this cursing down a completely different path: "Love this mother-lovin' truck that keeps breakin' lovin' down / There's only one four-letter word that'll do: / Love you"
Nicely said

Still, that's music, that's lyrical art - and software source code is different.

When I read preed's article on Planet today and read this recent bug report, I couldn't help but burst out into a big "WTF?" myself. There are lots of hacks in our code, we sometimes suck, and can't get it to fuckin' work as it should - and this guy wants to put censorship on us instead of admitting in comments what's really happening in the code. This sounds plainly wrong to me.

When I looked into an older article about Netscape/Mozilla "censorship", I had a few good laughs though. See for example this one, from Netscape 3 (but apparently still present in 4.x):

lib/libmime/mimestub.c: Life kinda sucks, but oh well.

Given this is in libmime, and I heard enough talk about the suckiness of that lib, it's real fun to see this in a version of it - even though I don't know what it relates to.
Seeing "hack" used various times in security/ might make some people uncomfortable though... and // fucking idiot! in the same subdir might also not increase trust in this...

I guess it depends where you can use what words

When I started this blog almost two months ago, I realized I need a good title for it, and decided to go with "The roads I take..." as a play on one of my favorite quotes.

I've been a fan of American Country Music for a long time now, as well as writing songs myself, so when I purchased the album "the hits" of Garth Brooks a few years ago, I was happy to read some comments of how he came to write or pick up those popular songs in the CD booklet. For example some of those "the idea came to me and the song was done in a few hours" stories feel pretty familiar to me and it's great to see that big hits of great stars come to be the same way as I've done some of my favorite songs.

And then, there was this comment on "We Shall Be Free", a song he co-wrote with Stephanie Davis:

"We Shall Be Free" is definitely and easily the most controversial song I ever have done. A song of love, a song of tolerance from someone who claims not to be a prophet but just an ordinary man. I never thought there would be any problems with this song. Sometimes the roads we take do not turn out to be the roads we envisioned them to be. All I can say about "We Shall Be Free" is that I will stand by every line of this song as long as I live. I am very proud of it. And I am very proud of Stephanie Davis, the writer. I hope you enjoy it and see it for what it was meant to be.

And I felt I knew what he was talking about once again. Writing lyrics you clearly want to say something with, being proud of what it tells and what feelings the song transports to the listener as well as keeps alive in yourself. And, of course, that some thing you never thought of would happen.

Yes, it's true:
Sometimes the roads we take do not turn out to be the roads we envisioned them to be.
Feels a bit like how I came to be a member of the Mozilla community. And this blog, after all, is about the roads I take...