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?

Last night I mucked around playing Starcraft and watching games on YouTube for a couple hours. And then I uninstalled it.

Looking at how much time I actually spent playing, I didn't have a problem, unless you consider normal TV watching habits a much bigger problem. And it was nice being interested in a spectator as well as participatory sport for once.

But... nah. It's too much energy in the wrong place. And it's kinda played out, too. And my earlier efforts to set constructive limits— pushups between games, coding a One Post Wonder feature between games— were going by the wayside.

So I uninstalled the game. And then I watched half a movie with Roberta and worked on privacy locks for One Post Wonder for an hour and a half. Hooray for "default activities" that involve people and personal goals!

I don't expect to always be this productive. Relaxation takes many forms and not all of them seem purposeful or social. But hopefully my default activities on nights my daughter is home will expand to include things like picking up my guitar again.

Glad my friends and neighbors were able to enjoy the Philly 10K today. But I'm a little triste because I've given up running.

A quick two-mile run used to be my fave way to grab a little cardio before work. But this year I started getting "flat tires." My tendon (?) would just go boom, and I'd be hobbling for a couple days.

That happened twice in two months. Not especially painful, but a sign you're doing Something Wrong, yes?

So I stopped banging my bones against pavement, and it hasn't happened since. Bicycles, no problem. Dancing, no problem. But I need a new quick and dirty workout.Still, I haven't entirely abandoned contact with pavement. I remain kind of epic when it comes to walking.

When I first moved to Seattle I circumnavigated Lake Union on foot on my first full day in town, summiting both Queen Anne Hill and Capitol Hill. My first latté may have been a contributing factor.

So when my sister arrived in Seattle, and wondered how to get from point A to point B... I just said, "ya got FEET!"

So having trained under the red sun of Krypton– um, I mean on the hillsides of the Pacific Northwest– walking into flat Center City from flat South Philly is really no thang.

I just have to learn to treat my shock absorbers with respect.

The Triplets of Belleville can be read as a commentary on hyperreality.

OK, yes, I'm full of myself today because I learned that word this week. Bear with me.

The cyclist is at the center of a moral drama, in which his mother seeks to protect him and others seek to abuse him; both sides profit from his labor. But he is oblivious to all of it, because the landscape unspooling before him constitutes his reality, whether it is actual or a projected film. He is not aware of the difference. He does not know how close he comes to disaster.

This is the core notion of hyperreality— the state in which consciousness cannot distinguish the real from the virtual. In a technological society, there is a risk that we will all be enabled to inhabit our fantasies to such an extent that we ignore what is transpiring in the real.

There are those who would say this has already happened.

A classic from the vault:

2 cups almond milk

1/4 cup brown sugar, maybe a little more

1/4 cup peanut butter (the real stuff, not the hydrogenated oil crap)

1 tsp vanilla

Mix well. Fire up the ice cream maker. Pour it in. Wait. Yum.

Makes 1 pint. (I halved the recipe tonight, because I knew I was gonna eat it all. Mmmf.)

Peanut butter stands in for dairy fat much better than most things do. Everybody's afraid of peanuts now which is a shame because most of us aren't allergic and they are yummy.

This recipe stands well on its own. You don't have to smother it in chocolate or extra sugar. You do have to like peanuts.

Yesterday my kid needed an escort to a summer camp reunion in Central Park. So we hopped on MegaBus and I faded away once she found her peers at Columbus Circle.

Columbus Circle is also home to the Museum of Arts and Design. Which is home to all sorts of things.

High points for me included Orly Cogan's "bittersweet obsession," an embroidery piece exploring the relationship between food and drug addiction. There is something compelling about edgy work in this medium.

Similarly, Stephen Dixon's "21 countries" is a series of dinner plates, each of which "commemorates" an invasion carried out by the United States in the 20th century. When I look at these, I see the ceramic tiles of the stations of the cross that hung in our kitchen when I was growing up. It's hard to look away.

The museum also currently features the "MAD Biennial," in which several floors display the works of "makers" from all over the city. I found a lot of that work less than intriguing, with some notable exceptions, particularly the musical instruments and turntables, most of which were intended to be played as well as seen. I would have loved to stumble upon a concert.

Probably the biggest clinker for me is Rafael de Cárdenas' "nightclub" that took up much of a floor. It's a nightclub with deep blue lighting and terrariums full of fake plants. Okay, I guess I get it, but the trouble for me is that I already know a nightclub with nobody in it and the lights on is just a cave. I've stayed until last call before, after all.

Apparently there are performances in the nightclub at certain times, and maybe it takes on a whole new aspect then.

After the museum I rented myself a bike and orbited Central Park. I attempted to rent a CitiBike; the kiosk took several minutes to walk me through the process, then rejected me with no explanation. I wound up renting from the more traditional place just inside the park. Which gave me a bike whose right-hand gearshift didn't work at all. Which I figured out while climbing hills to get back again, through the north woods. But I still had a blast.

As you've noticed by now, One Post Wonder got a major facelift today. Sean Puckett has done a sweet job, removing clutter and improving the user experience while respecting and enhancing the best of what was already there. I'm stoked to have a collaborator who grasps where I'm trying to go.

A few changes may take a moment to get used to. There is only one button to change your userpic now; it's on the "Me" page, where people had the most luck finding it. And the buttons to move text blocks, video blocks, and photo blocks appear only when necessary. The buttons to add new blocks appear only at the end of the article– but you can then use the arrows to rearrange the blocks. We both feel this is a good compromise to make things less confusing overall.

With a second contributor joining the project, now is a good time to review the core values of OPW:

No more than one post per day! That's the point. This rule may be bent but not broken. For instance we may introduce "indulgences" which recharge slowly, but you won't be able to post twice times a day, every day. Not even for money.

No big-brother filtering. The "one post per day" rule allows you to filter posts yourself. If you're not riveted, just don't click the arrow to keep reading.

This is a business, but you can opt not to be the product. We may profit from its operation, so long as we are able to focus on the best interests of our users as well as the bottom line. We will eventually explore operating OPW as a "B corporation" to help lock this core value in place. We may display advertising, but you will have the option of paying a membership fee to see no ads.

You own your posts. You grant us a license to show them to people by posting them here. Duh.

Thanks again for believing in what we're doing. More improvements are coming down the pike.

So apparently kickstarter is not the right way to fund scaling up your social network.

Their guidelines prohibit campaigns "to fund websites or apps focused on e-commerce, business, and social networking."

Interesting. But there are lots of ways to go about scaling the site, and the work before us right now doesn't require more money. It requires solving the riddle of building interest and bringing intact networks of friends aboard.

I stumbled across this discovery while hoping to answer an unrelated question: how to fund adding certain features to the Apostrophe open source CMS. That, my employer could do on kickstarter, but it sounds out of their usual line.

Today I changed logins so that your login should "stick" for a long time, rather than just the current browser session. And I added a little nudge to invite a friend if you haven't done so yet (or more accurately, not since today, since I just started keeping track).

Also, Sean Puckett shared a post about his work toward improving the look and feel of the site. Can't wait!

OK, that was really over the top.

I participated in a flash mob tonight.

Some band called World Town Sound System played Rittenhouse Square, and they put out a call for salsa dancers to show up.

I could see several problems as soon as I got there:

1. The song wasn't salsa, exactly

2. They'd restricted access to the front of the stage, where they wanted us to be

3. They had no idea how many of us there would be

But hey, what the hell. It worked out. I came across a salsera of my acquaintance who hadn't shown up with a partner and we managed to dance without harming ourselves or others in the tight space available.

The band ain't bad. Their songs kinda sound similar to one another for the most part, but the energy's great.

In One Post Wonder news: I've been offered help with the visual design of One Post Wonder, and Progress is being Made. Thanks to Sean Puckett for jumping in.

So I've eased up on my own changes to the look and feel to see what happens there. I'll be concentrating on the functionality in the meanwhile.