Oddly beautiful.

Years ago, when I was getting almost tolerable on the guitar, I threw down the gauntlet and asked for songwriting challenges. The result was the most interesting stuff I ever did, musically. And then I got distracted by dance. Which I do not regret in the least. But I'm ready to try music again.

So! Here's how this goes.

Please reply with:

An object ("a toaster")

A character ("a flying piano teacher")

A catchphrase ("that's GOTTA hurt")

A rock/pop musical subgenre ("emo punk," "new wave," etc - if you think it's obscure, just cite an example I have some hope of knowing or finding, links help)

... And I'll compose and record a song featuring these items. It may take me a while, but I will eventually get to an album's worth of requests.

BRING IT!

It is safe to assume it:
We will consume it.
The moon, the sea, the mountain. "Too soon,"
We'll cry, and sing a mournful tune,
And hold an observance, and soon resume.
Be good to each other in the time remaining.

It will do you no good to lament it.
In the time you strive to prevent it,
Disrupt, resent and reinvent it,
A new need emerges and brooks no dissent.
Be good to each other in the time remaining.

That's a bit dire. That's a bit strong.
The time remaining may be very long
As reckoned by Romans or roaches or cats.
We are clever creatures. As clever as rats.
But there are no guarantees, for all of that.
Be good to each other in the time remaining.

Eventually the stars will go.
The planets and the asteroids. Slow
Streamers of the solar wind blow
Outwards, carrying uranium
And other heavy elements to tantalize the cranium
Of our successors. Need I explain?
Be good to each other in the time remaining.

Don't cry for the sun, little one.
You will long since be cold and done,
Along with the idea of the idea of remorse.
And even irony will run its course.
Be good to each other in the time remaining.
Be good to each other in the time remaining.
Be good to each other in the time remaining.

Hmm.

There were wonderful teachers, like our choral director Gordon Adams, who definitely got more than one kid through those four years, compromising with punk rockers on the performance dress code ("you can wear your boots if you wear the suit") and taking heat from the administration over it.

But high school wasn't so bad honestly. My peers matured a lot when we all hit the ninth grade and merged with another school. I made lasting friends and did nerdy and less-nerdy things with impunity. Hell, I lettered in cross country.

Before that, though, I was public enemy number one. Yep, from the day I arrived in town in the fourth grade and said, "hey! have you guys heard about the gas crunch?"

Yes, I was that kid: full of adult knowledge and words, and hopelessly socially unskilled.

I was verbally, though not physically, pummeled for the ensuing five years. I had no friends that lasted; as soon as someone warned them I wasn't cool, they got the hell away from Toxic Boy.

So I have to give props to my mom, who said:

"Adults are going to tell you these are the best years of your life. Don't listen to them. I remember being your age. It was terrible."

Mom was on the "It Gets Better" train before it was cool.

I don't like to spend my post for the day talking about the site itself, which sort of misses the point. But privacy is exceedingly important, and today I spoke cavalierly about it in a way that rebounded on me. As well it should have.

Other sites have been through some nasty issues around privacy lately. I am not bulletproof and need to take it at least as seriously. Especially with an audience of people who take it very seriously.

So what happened today? Nothing to do with the code or the privacy of your posts, I'm relieved to say. Just a dumb, dumb personal screwup in which I casually warned a friend (hopefully still a friend) that they had posted publicly. Because I wasn't paying enough attention to see that they hadn't.

"Tom that is totally ridiculous, you built this site! You know how it works, you coded it!" Yes it is totally ridiculous and I have no adequate explanation for my behavior. My inadequate explanation, if you care to hear it, is that I was rushing around doing way too damn much this evening and didn't think through what I was doing. I was not in programmer mode, I was in friend mode, and I was doing a crappy job of it.

However, learning from my dipshit mistakes— and owning my own frailties— is important. I'm thinking it's not enough to show a "this post is public" warning only when someone clicks reply.

I think there should be a lock icon visible to everyone who can read the post. If it ain't there, it's public. No ambiguity.

Although, obviously, it should not offer any details about exactly who is allowed to read it (except to the author), everyone reading a post should be able to tell instantly if it is public or not.

I will be working on this promptly. I will also be reviewing the steps I'm taking to secure the server against attack. If the server itself is compromised, everything else is a moot point. We do not actually know if this has ever happened to other social networks. We can only take their word for it.

This experience brought me up short and made me realize that while we haven't had an actual security breach yet, we will if I don't treat privacy as job one. I will be giving it an appropriate level of attention in future.

"I'm sore as hell from yesterday's dancin! But now I'm going to twitch and stomp and tap my foot because I expect the same level of activity I had yesterday."

[Eyeroll]

Whatever, body.

... In OPW news: that new "bug" button you see at the top of the page is meant for bug reports 'n' such. Bugs wing their way directly into our issue tracker, the same place Sean and I keep track of our own stuff. If we comment on your bug, you'll get an email, which includes a link to a page where you can reply further or unsubscribe.

For the geeks out there: we're using a github private repository for source code control on this project. Each repository comes with an issue tracker... but if the source code is private, the issue tracker is too. I spent quality time with the github API this weekend adding just enough plumbing to allow OPW users to create and update issues without ever having direct access to github.

It's kinda nifty. I spent too much time on it, but I reckon I'll either open-source it or turn it into a product in its own right.

I just took a two-hour kizomba dance workshop with Manuel Dos Santos and Flavie, visiting from Montreal. Which is funny because we barely missed meeting them during our Montreal vacation this summer.

Manuel is a born entertainer, but he also has a rarer talent: he knows how to teach adults.

The thing about adults is that we usually don't have to be in that class. Sure, we'll miss out on something if we don't show up, but we have other choices. And we will exercise them if we don't feel good about what's happening.

To teach adults effectively, you gotta:

• Take the temperature of the room. Pitch your instruction to that level of skill.
• Take time to reemphasize things until they stick.
• Make sure people aren't frustrated.
• Make sure people aren't bored. (Quite a balancing act, there.)
• Keep 'em laughing, but not too distracted (see "bored" and "frustrated").

Manuel started off by blowing our minds with five minutes of kudoro— a high-energy but surprisingly easy step, as a warmup. Everybody feels good: check!

Then he asked us all to just dance for a minute, to gauge our level of skill with kizomba (hint: not a lot yet).

And then, he taught us two incredibly simple moves... and we did then for ten minutes at least, until he knew we had the feeling of the thing right. But he made sure we switched to dancing those moves together with a partner almost immediately. Because, y'know, that's the fun part.

And then he introduced the ladies' exit— the most important move in kizomba, the bit almost everything else is based on. And we drilled that for a long, long time...

And then we learned all sorts of things. And nearly all of us decided to stay for that second hour. Because we felt we were really getting it.

Toward the end, he threw in some slightly more advanced material. But he also quietly dropped one move when he saw the room react to it. Save that for another time. Teach the room you're in.

He's teaching the workshop again tomorrow out at La Luna in Bensalem. If I were free I'd go again.

What a difference getting that BIG THING out of the way can make.

Last night I finished a week-long slog at work, bashing out a feature I'm tired of even thinking about. (It happens, even at the coolest job ever.) Today I got to work on... SOMETHING ELSE! I knocked out SOMETHING ELSE in one day. Because I was that happy to do something new for a change.

Speaking of which, today One Post Wonder got:

Email notifications. I was so nervous about enabling this, but the response has been very positive. You will receive no more than one per day, and you won't receive anything you already saw in your bellbox.

YouTube videos. Well, they worked before, but not if you used the youtu.be shortcut link.

Poetry. Specifically, if you press "shift-enter," you get a line break instead of a paragraph break. If you paste plain text from a text editor, you also get line breaks. And when you post, you'll find your line breaks stay in there! That's the really new bit.

Faster. Not to bore you with the details, but when you clicked on a notice in the bellbox, there was a noticeable pause while One Post Wonder loaded certain things all over again. Now we only load 'em once. Zoom zoom.

But this does not mean I won't be returning to the issue of locks. Sean and Dawn made a very convincing case for making things just a little more flexible, so that it's possible to avoid reading your aunt's unfortunate birther tirades while still giving her access to the baby pictures. Because you're just that good a person. We have a design solution in mind that won't add any extra work, apart from a moment's thought when you stop following someone. And hopefully you don't do that every day. Right?

Last night we set off on a mission of mercy. An old friend has a problem: someone keeps entering her apartment, taking shit, and wrecking shit.

The intruder is vindictive. They squeezed an entire tube of expensive eye cream all over her bathroom. They cut off the bottom of her pants. And they stole half her professional wardrobe, something she can't afford.

Our friend is older, so she feels particularly vulnerable.

This person is breaking in during the day, and there is never any sign of forced entry, so I strongly suspect building staff has something to do with it; she lives in a high-rise apartment building with a gorgeous view. Just the sort of place you're happy until some lunatic starts gaslighting you and you start to wonder if you're crazy, amirite.

So despite being a technophobe, she bought some security equipment, and asked us over to help set it up. And I spent three hours wrangling the gear— a security camera and a "cloud DVR"— which almost works at this point.

Everything works, actually, except for uploading the video "to the cloud." Or at least sending her pictures by email when the motion sensor triggers. Or something. Because if the only evidence is in the apartment, I have no confidence we'll catch the bastard.

Unfortunately the cloud bit is sticky. The email feature has no test button and doesn't seem to work. The "cloud push" feature is... what? What the hell is cloud push? The FTP feature is tempting, but I'd have to figure out a way for her to know it was happening and browse the results. The whole setup is a pain in the ass; somebody slapped as little code on top of Linux as they could possibly get away with. Mutter mutter.

Is there a drastically better solution for a simple task like monitoring the front door and capturing incriminating pix of whoever's coming through it?

Alternatively... does anybody know what the hell "cloud push" is?