Sleeping Outside the Box

I want music that breathes–not just pumps and jams but takes in the air and exhales in a waltz. Speak to me in french, Portuguese, Russian. Drum in a dead language. They don’t hear you anyway. It’s all just noise to the self obsessed, photographing themselves and tuning out to the tweet noise, awaiting only replies. The news says there’s nothing new but I can hear the “bump, ba dump ba dump” of the accordion, breathing a dance into the air.

The cafe is dark, connected, sulfur smelling under the guise of the peppermint oil that lights the lamp. Someone throws a beer bottle on stage, thumping into the leg of a twelve year old who is reinventing music as a living organism. He doesn’t stop–he doesn’t even look up, entranced in the moment. This kid is God.

“Hey, play Freebird!” This from the peanut gallery minus a beer.

The kid plays on, a pattern of breath inside the beat that just sings.

“Deaf boy!” The man starts again, but by this time I’m right behind him. He hears the sweetest melody of his life in the last seconds before he hits the table, unconscious, breathing. Still breathing. He’s finally in tune.

The music continues. The darkness lightens. The ether turns milky, borealis, a ghostly succubus, luring in wayward coffee drinkers and beer connoisseurs.

We hear the siren’s call. This savant messenger speaks well. He carries the tune and we tune in, leaving our egos by the side.

All I see is a metallic shimmer, blue, green, swipes of sudden chaos into view.

The cruisers are smashing down the mainway, ricocheting off the walls with malice and gusto. Benny doesn’t care if he scratches the paint; it’s new but everything is these days. He can roll another out the maker box in half a breath.

The other cats apparently aren’t so wealthy as Benny. They curse and rant in hi-def subliminal microwave, neon vector raves pulsing from the decks of their cars, flashes of red and black, blipping abuse at the other motorcraves. One in particular, this jocky puck who sports a flyboy mohawk and a thread leather seatback throttles it forward next to Benny, giving him the bird with his telehand. Benny is thrown for a sec by the florescent intrusion. The projection threatens the sky with epileptic seizures. Cars screech and skitter around the blaze of light.

Benny sucks it up; he’s taken the piss before from ingrate halflings who haven’t been on the track longer than the day. This punkbag doesn’t have the verbal skills to make Benny flinch. And with that, a kiss-off glance and a for-real finger in the air, Benny rips the box a new one. There’s something to be said for the finesse of a seasoned motorcrave, but you have to be there to witness it for yourself.

The causeway is clear now; the light is gone. Motorcraves are in a new city by now. I’ve got a headache.

I’ve started writing 10 minutes a day on http://writeforten.com/users/antic

Here’s day 1:

Full of hope and something bittersweet. This is the dream of a new reality. Sometimes I think I see someone sweet; it’s never a known quantity. This feeling will pass. Who needs it anyway. A feeling of broken ambition and it’s all it takes to go down.

Back in the bar she sits sipping sapphire gin, looking up from the glass only to flirt with the bartender. He’s too old for her, or so thinks the boy on the other side of the counter. He’s been a bar-back for 3 days but that’s long enough to know the type that sits alone, drinking like a fish and pining for the older gents. She could do better, he thinks. She could do him.

There’s this place back east. It’s a festival that goes on all year. Sometimes I dream about it, full of people running around all the time, splashing each other with their drinks, joyously, celebrating whatever it is they wish, without fears or regrets. I don’t remember the name, hope it’s the same.

Wet washed and wiped out, drowning in peptides. I can feel this fuzzy fissure in my scalp, running down my neck. It’s like it’s been engineered to tickle my melancholy. I can’t remember the last time I had this emotion. It’s like swimming in the ocean at 10, or maybe I was 8. I stayed up late, ran out to the edge, found a fish that was swimming on sand, gasping for breath. I could tell it was in a bad place. There’s no disgrace in gasping for breath when there isn’t anything to breath. At least he’s trying. At least his heart is in it. Pull through little tyke. Suck it up, there’s water right there. Just a nudge, a flick, a wet kiss.

I’m feeling more alone than ever now.

Stop what you are doing and watch this talk by Dan Buettner right now.

Hans Rosling never fails to impress:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html

I’m working on a new sleep schedule. It won’t work this quarter–but maybe in the Autumn. Then again, winter is the best time to explore sleep changes…

Here’s the idea: http://antic.ShadowPuppet.net/28-hour-day

Someone posted a top 10 security concerns for a Joomla developer on a google group I’m in (not that I use Joomla) and I noticed that the issues were not Joomla specific. They were things every web developer should keep in mind after being hacked or in preparing for that scenario.

However, the list didn’t provide any solid useful examples of why the items are important. They also missed some really important issues that affect all web developers.

Here are a few security concerns I keep with me whenever I develop a site:

1. Always filter for malicious data and THEN validate user input, both on the server side. Do not rely on JavaScript or any other client-side technology to prevent hacking attempts or malformed data. Look up XSS (cross-site scripting):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

2. Build your server side scripts so that they cannot fall victim to cross-site request forgery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery

3. For any user login form/handler, use SSL Get a cert (something like $100)–or generate and sign one yourself (free), which requires you and your users to add a security exception (because it’s self signed):
http://www.yatblog.com/2007/02/27/how-to-create-a-ssl-certificate/
If you fail to make this information go via SSL on your webserver, you are requiring all of your users to send passwords in cleartext through every computer between them and your webserver.

4. Always use SSH/SFTP to connect to your webserver. FTP is insecure. When you connect via FTP, you are sending your credentials in cleartext over the network. Anyone listening in will be able to scrape your access info.

5. Escape any database input before it goes into queries, lest you become victim of SQL injections:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection

There are many more concerns but these are the ones that jump to my mind this early in the morning.

My brother posted his bucket list on Facebook, so I here’s mine. It’s a list of the top 10 things you would like to accomplish in your life before you “kick the bucket”.

01. Become financially independent (meaning I don’t have to work at all if I don’t want to because I have enough passive income to just play music, travel the world, write and spend time with my family and friends) before I turn 31. Last year, my goal was before I turn 30, but I think I’m going to be 6 months late of that mark.

02. Do a free standing back-flip. I wish I had done this a few years ago when I got health insurance for the first time in 8 years. Now I’m without coverage again and I just don’t want to risk it. I fell on my head without insurance a few years ago and they charged me $4K to tell me I was OK. I guess I’ll have to wait for completion of #01.

03. Write a novel. I haven’t even gotten to the first draft phase but I do have 6 Word documents with crappy titles, meager plot summaries, a few brainstorm snippets and two character outlines. I’m half way there, right? o_0

04. Speak at a TED conference. http://www.TED.com. On what? Whatever it is that I give to the world before #10 happens.

05. Master the Accordion. I’ve had an accordion for 8 years. I love it. It’s awesome. Every time I pick it up and play it, I get hypnotized by how awesome it sounds. If I were stuck on a desert island and I could take only one thing with me, I would still choose to take a boat but if loopholes like that weren’t allowed and I was forced to choose something that couldn’t get me off the island, I would probably take an accordion.

06. Produce a musical album. I love to sing but I know I’m not that good at it. After mastering the accordion, I’ll probably move onto that part, but I love music of all kinds, so I might pick up another instrument.

07. Travel the world with my daughter. My little girl is teh awesome!!!!11!!!one! I want to show her all the places I haven’t seen yet.

08. Learn to speak, read and write Mandarin Chinese fluently. And German, Russian, Arabic, Zulu, Hindi… I would also like to learn just enough of every language that I could pick out a strangers dialect and say a few simple phrases with confidence. Just a “Hey, you speak {language name}? Cool. I’m just learning.” It’s surprising what kind of connections come out of just knowing that.

09. Create a game or some other meme that will withstand the test of time, passing from generation to generation.

10. Become a singularity. Hey, screw this whole ‘before death’ thing. I plan to bypass that part.

Previous buckets kicked:

* Master riding the unicycle
* Learn a foreign language…not necessarily fluently ;)
* Buy a house
* Visit any part of Europe (went to London)
* Visit any part of Asia (went to Thailand)
* Have a child
* Start a business

Apparently, Gmail thinks I like SPAM:

I would expect Gmail to know enough to filter out its own words from Gmail adsense inclusion–or at the very least, filtering out the word ’spam’ but maybe people really do visit their spam box, simultaneously thinking to themselves, I’d love some spam!