I got my first computer when I was in seventh grade. It was an IBM AT/XT that we upgraded several times over the years. By the time I was in high school, my dad bought me a SoundBlaster sound card and some 6-inch computer speakers. I actually do not remember who made them: it was either JBL, Creative, or Altec Lansing. What I do remember is that they were the generic beige color of all PC hardware of the era, the right speaker had knobs for balance and volume, and, as a pair, they could go very, very loud. No one else I came across had computer speakers that large or that loud.

Sound quality-wise, however, they were not great. Back then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was still rare to hear any sounds at all coming out of a computer. It was enough to be able to hear the beeps and blips coming from my DOS-based productivity software and games.

Due to lackluster sound quality, and the fact that CD-ROM drives were too expensive for me to buy until the mid 1990s, these computer speakers never replaced my CD system’s speakers as my main playback system. They are important to me, however, because they enabled me, for the first time, to use the computer to record and mix music.

A week before I left for college I bought a Sony boombox to use as a bookshelf stereo. It had detachable speakers, so you could actually achieve stereo separation, and, of course, “mega bass”, which was pretty much mandatory for good sound in such small speakers.

I chose this particular model because it had an analog 3-band equalizer, as opposed to several genre-specific settings; I relied on the EQ to pick out guitar and bass parts I would transcribe. As a bonus, it didn’t have a crazy light show like the many of the other boomboxes on sale in 1996.

I don’t remember very well how it sounded, to be honest, because I wasn’t able to use it that much. My freshman year roommate and I did not share musical tastes, so I had to play my music through my computer using headphones. (My computer’s CD-ROM drive actually had a dedicated “play” button and its own headphone jack.) I didn’t realize it at the time, but all those hours listening to music over headphones (the cheapest headphones possible, I’d say) in my dorm room were the very beginning of my headphone-centric music listening preferences.

My parents bought me my first CD player at the JC Penney Outlet. It was a damaged, open-box, no-name system that resembled a single, tall unit. It contained, from top to bottom, a turntable (though the clear cover was broken off and missing), an AM/FM radio, a five band equalizer, a dual deck cassette, and a single cd player at the bottom. The only reason I asked for it, and thought my family could afford it, was because it was damaged and was being sold at a steep discount. I also told my parents I would listen to classical music on it, which was my intent, but didn’t actually happen too often.

It came with two bookshelf speakers with RCA inputs that plugged in the rear, that I set up about ten feet away from the receiver. I couldn’t tell you how good or bad the sound was. All I knew at the time is that it was amazing compared to what I had at the time: my mom’s 20-year-old transistor radio, and a cheap, toy-like boombox with a dual cassette deck. The most important upgrade, of course, was upgrading from records and tapes to CDs. CDs didn’t have tape hiss, had high dynamic range, and didn’t wear out over time or get eaten by the plater sometimes.

I blasted music through this no-name system for hundreds of hours through middle school and high school. I measured my school papers by how many album listens it took to write them. I used it to practice singing, to transcribe songs with my guitar, to play back 4-track recordings, to lie back on my bed with CD liner notes while my favorite new song played on repeat.

I amassed an enormous CD collection, mostly through the Columbia House and BMG Music clubs, and partly through weekly trips to my local record store (which is long gone now).

Now that I’m a parent, I am amazed that all my loud music playing didn’t drive my parents crazy. They never complained to me about my music blasting from 3 PM to 10 PM every day. My kids are too little to listen to music on their own, but I’m already thinking about which headphones to get them, so we can all coexist in the house.

I have no idea where this system went or who made it, but, based on it being my first CD player, it is probably the most important speaker system I have ever owned.

I love music, and I love headphones, but, oddly enough, I have no special love for speakers. The reason, I suppose, is that, since I was a broke teenager living with my parents, I have never had the opportunity to listen to loud, room-filling music at my home. Roommates, sleeping children, and close neighbors have always prevented it. That said, my love of music has always depended on speakers, and, as I got older, they got a little better over the years.

I’m going to publish a short series of posts about the various speaker systems I’ve had over the years. After that, I will post a short series of posts about all the headphones I’ve had, and loved, over the years, as well.

I took a break from SwiftoDo development to build a new app, Simple Call Blocker, which I posted about earlier this week. Building it was a fun diversion, and I learned a lot in the process, too. If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering what’s up with SwiftoDo, however. I have been working on it this summer, too.

Since this spring, I have been promising everyone that I’m working on iOS 11+ Files app integration. This feature will let SwiftoDo open files from any cloud service provider that ties into the iOS 11+ Files app. That includes Dropbox, Box, NextCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, and many others. Adding additional data providers to SwiftoDo has been a long time coming.

Some background on SwiftoDo data providers

I designed SwiftoDo data providers to be plugins that could be swapped out, which would allow me to support numerous cloud storage providers. I have had so much trouble getting the Dropbox data provider to be solid and stable, however, that I was loath to create more data providers. My thinking was that I was liable to cause more problems for my users (and myself!) than I would solve. Therefore, I concentrated on fixing up the Dropbox data provider code, which is now, after three or four rewrites, pretty solid.

(The Dropbox data provider code has always worked, but it had a rare but nasty crashing bug for some time, and some issues related to stability, ability to handle spotty network connections, and ability to handle, gracefully, Dropbox “rate limit exceeded” API responses.)

iOS 11’s Files app, which I did not anticipate being available when I first wrote SwiftoDo, obviates the need for additional “native” data providers. I just wasn’t sure if SwiftoDo would be able to tie into it.

Can Files integration be used for SwiftoDo?

I have been under the impression that integrating with the Files app would require a rewrite of major sections of the app, or would simply not work well due to sandboxing limitations. I thought this because all Files-based iOS apps that I have used follow Apple’s “Document-based app” template very closely: Think “Microsoft Word” rather than “Reminders” in terms of user interaction patterns. They open to a file browser, you open a document (typically a single document), work on the document, save it (automatically), and close the app. The life cycle of a document is fairly limited: after the app is killed, your file is closed and does not reopen on load. Most of these apps don’t work offline at all, unless you’re working with local-only files, because they can’t open your file.

In contrast, SwiftoDo works a lot differently. It manages your task list locally and syncs it to an external file. It lets you archive completed tasks to a second external file. It keeps the opening and choosing of files down to a minimum. Most users set up their todo.txt and archive files once and never touch those settings again. It lets you work offline (primarily in “manual sync mode”, but also when the network is unavailable) and sync your changes to the cloud on demand.

Integrating SwiftoDo with the Files app, without giving up anything, seemed like it might be a considerable challenge.

A “Files” data provider

To my surprise, implementing a “Files” data provider has not been as challenging as I thought it would be. Accessing documents via the iOS document picker and restoring them after the app is killed, via secure bookmarks, is actually pretty easy. It took me only a couple hours to set up a data provider that would upload and download to iCloud Drive and even Dropbox through the Files app.

That is not nearly enough to ship the feature, though. There are still some issues regarding stability and error handling that I have to work through.

Adding this feature also prompted me to display file names in Settings (rather than 2 screens deep in Settings) and atop the task list in the main view.

What is next?

After I finish the Files data provider work, and the new Xcode and iOS versions are officially released, I plan to build SwiftoDo on the iOS 12 SDK and drop iOS 10 support. I’ve been thinking of bumping the version number to 3.0 at that point, to mark the change in iOS compatibility.

I will also consider the future of Files integration in SwiftoDo. It temping for me to remove the entire “data provider” layer and just make SwiftoDo a normal iOS document-based app. That would be a big deal, and I would not make that change unless I understood fully what that would mean for users. I also have to consider how long I will continue to support the existing Dropbox data provider, as it will be somewhat redundant.

After that, I will have the opportunity to simplify the codebase quite a bit. It is tempting for me to rewrite some or all of the UI layer, to incorporate the new techniques I have learned since coding version 2, over a year ago. Any changes to the UI code will probably be related to new features or a minor redesign of the sorting/filtering interface that I have been thinking about.

Recently I released a new iOS app: Simple Call Blocker.

It is a free utility that lets you block unwanted calls to your iPhone. Unlike most of the call blockers on iOS, it allows you to block whole ranges of numbers, such as your phone number’s extension, for free. You may also whitelist numbers, ranges of numbers, or all your contacts’ phone numbers, so that they will not be blocked by this app, even if they are in the blacklist.

The Simple Call Blocker website explains it in more detail.

Why did I write it?

I wanted to write a small, relatively simple app that would allow me to explore the following things:

1. iOS application architecture: I have been reading books and articles on iOS application architecture, and decided to create a new app to practice new techniques, such as the use of coordinators for navigation rather than storyboard segues, that I have been learning.
2. algorithms and operation queues: I started the app by writing some simple algorithms for creating sequential phone number ranges to load into an iOS CallKit directory extension. The last thing I wrote was a multi-threaded operation queue for processing blacklist and whitelist rules and refreshing the iOS call directory extension that actually blocks the phone numbers.
3. Core Data: I avoided learning Core Data for years; that changed with this app.

Overall, the app was a lot of fun to write. It took me about a month in my after-hours “free time” to create. The overall process has made me a better iOS app developer. I’m excited to bring forward the skills and concepts I developed on this project to future work.

Why a call blocker app?

I started getting neighbor spam calls, so I downloaded nearly all the iOS call blocking apps I could find. There were fewer such apps than I thought there would be, all of them seemed amateurish in some way or another, and all of them (as of a month ago) required an in-app purchase or a subscription to block my neighborhood exchange. I wasn’t willing to pay for that feature in any of the apps that I tried, because all of those apps weren’t that good. Plus, blocking an exchange, or a continuous range of numbers, is pretty trivial, so I thought I could create an app that did that, and offer it for free to people.

So is this just a “practice” app?

No. It is well-written and works as well as iOS’s Call Directory extensions allow it to. It has a rough edge or two, though, in that it reloads its directory extension and reports success or errors back to the users, rather than trying to prevent the user from ever encountering an error from being reported by the directory extension loading process.

What that means is that you can ask Simple Call Blocker to block more numbers that iOS will allow—there is an undocumented limit—and the app has to wait for the CallKit Directory Extension’s load process to report success or failure before it can tell the user what is going on. I decided not to try to impose limits on how many numbers could be blacklisted, but instead allow the app to report the Directory Extension’s errors, if any, back to the user. I figure that the undocumented maximum number of blocked phone numbers probably is dependent on whatever hardware is in your phone, and probably is increasing in every new iPhone model.

The Simple Call Blocker directory extension is coded extremely conservatively, and it optimized for very low RAM and system usage. If iOS cannot load it, it is because the user put too many numbers in the blacklist, or because it is still loading numbers from a prior attempt.

Releasing the app for free, I think, makes it OK that it may not work exactly as users expect it to.

What is the future of this app?

I plan to support it through various iOS releases, but otherwise not improve it too much. After all, it is a free app.

I want to know more!

Go ahead and download the app in the iOS App Store (it’s free!), and check out the FAQ online.

🎵 Tonight I’m working overtime and listening to The Hold Steady, which almost makes it all right.

“DON’T FEED THE TROLLS, AND OTHER HIDEOUS LIES” is a great article by “Film Crit Hulk” on our collective failure to respond properly to internet trolling culture.

A Twitter follower reminded me of a line in the famous parable from Bion of Borysthenes: “Boys throw stones at frogs in fun, but the frogs do not die in fun, but in earnest.” Defenders of trolling insist it’s all just a joke, but if trolling is inherently designed to get a rise out of someone, then that’s what it really is. In many cases, it is designed to look and feel indistinguishable from a genuine attack. Whether you believe what you are saying or not is often immaterial because the impact is the same — and you are responsible for it, regardless of how funny you think it is.

I think that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of trolling. It isn’t a joke. It isn’t done for the lulz. “It’s just a joke” is an obvious cover for bad behavior.

It reminds me of an episode from my youth. In high school I had a friend who had a stash of Playboy magazines that he got (I think) from an older brother. Somehow we found out about them, demanded to see them, and teased him about them as we thumbed through them together. “Why do you have these” we would ask, teasingly, knowing full well why he had them. My friend’s face would grow bright red and we would stammer: “because they’re so funny”. When pressed, he would double down on it: he would swear, up and down, that he had them because they were hilarious. Sure they were.

It puzzles me, why we act as if it’s even possible that verbal abuse on the internet is “just a joke”. A decent response to “it was just a joke” is “it doesn’t matter”.

The biggest mistake we ever made with trolls was making the question of abuse about how to placate and fix them instead of how to empower the people they hurt or manage your own well-being in the face of them. Like so many abused people, we thought the solutions involved walking on eggshells and not provoking them back. But instead, we must acknowledge “that we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be.” And that means acknowledging the awful, terrifying power of jokes and the immunity we seek in “not being serious.” This is exactly why people troll in the first place. Because deep down, they know it’s serious, and that’s exactly why it makes them feel powerful.

In the online world, people who violate community standards should be banned from those communities. Gathering spaces online are not public spaces: almost all of them are owned by private companies or individuals. Freedom of speech is up to the owner of the space; the level of discourse there directly reflect’s the owner as well. By law, they might not be legally responsible for the content of their site, but they are ethically and morally responsible for it, regardless. Owning and running a site where terrible things happen should be a black mark on a company’s or a person’s reputation—and that should matter.

It would be nice if people started to care about reputation again, and if bad reputations led to lower profits and lower stature in the global community. Sadly, we are in a time, right now, where that does not seem to be the case.

🎵 I’m back to my wired OPPO PM-3 & HA-2 SE headphones stack today, listening to Foreverland, by The Divine Comedy. It’s an album that slipped by me in 2016. I used to love The Divine Comedy in the late 1990s, and still take Casanova for a spin every six months or so.

I’m re-committing to Pinboard, after a year or more away from it. I’m happy with what I am doing now, and thought I would document it in case anyone else wanted help understanding how to use the Pinboard effectively, especially if their usage lapsed, as mine did.

What is Pinboard?

Pinboard is an “antisocial” cloud bookmarking service. You can keep all your bookmarks there and use its barebones website or third party apps and browser extensions, all using an open API, to access them. It’s a paid service, run by a single person, with a clear and straightforward business model. When I signed up, I pre-paid for ten years of service. Part of my impetus for using it again now, after having abandoned it for, well, nothing, is the sunk-cost fallacy. The other, more important part of that impetus is that I really like the simplicity and speed of Pinboard, and I like the Pinboard iOS client I use, Pinner.

What do I use it for?

I use it for three things:

1. To host my bookmarks in a cross-platform, always accessible way. I can get to the same bookmarks in Safari on my Mac and iOS, and in Chrome on Windows.
2. For research and archival purposes, especially for programming projects I am working on. I can search these bookmarks on keywords, title, or description to review the best of the web pages I previously read on a topic of interest.
3. As part of a homegrown “read it later” service. I can send article URLs to Pinboard from various apps, and read them later using Pinboard’s website, an app or browser extension on my Mac, and an app on iOS or Andriod.

Number 3 used to be the primary purpose of Pinboard to me. I had signed up as part of an effort to get replace Pocket with something more privacy focused. After many years of using Pocket (formerly “Read It Later”) to collect articles I was interested in from the huge stream of RSS feeds I parsed every day, I wanted a change. Primarily, this was because I became uncomfortable with Pocket’s business model: Why was it free? How did they really make money? What were they doing will all the data they collected on me?

I also wasn’t crazy about some of the UI changes made to Pocket over the years. I wanted more control over the reading experience, too, which is something that using a web service with an open API would give me. It helps that, at the time, Safari’s Reader View debuted, and I thought it was fantastic.

I was pretty obsessive about channeling all the articles I read through Pinboard, so I had a one-way workflow from discovery to reading to marking read. I never deleted anything from Pinboard, either. I thought I wanted a history of all the articles I ever read, in case I wanted to search through that history later. (Of course, I never did that.)

Why did I stop using it?

I stopped using Pinboard for three main reasons:

1. I started reading Twitter more than actual articles linked to from it. The constantly updating timeline was incredibly addictive, and less mentally taxing to follow than reading complex articles from actual publications. (I have since given up Twitter because it was too addictive for me to handle responsibly.)
2. My wife and I had kids, meaning that I no longer had a bunch of downtime after dinner to catch up on all the articles I had bookmarked to read later. I would still send stuff to Pinboard to read later, but I would never actually read the articles.
3. My wife and I subscribed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. I started reading from those publications, from their apps, a lot more than scouring RSS feeds for articles from a dozen sources. Reading from their apps did not fit very well with my Pinboard workflow.

Overall, Pinboard became a graveyard for links I didn’t actually want to read. Instead of a useful resource, it was a junk pile full of stale content.

Digging out of a mess

I took the following steps to return Pinboard to a useful utility for me:

1. I deleted everything I had in Pinboard—over 3,000 bookmarks that were doing me no good. Most of these were articles I imported from my RSS reader (Reeder) or Twitter (via Tweetbot), read once, and then just left in Pinboard.

• I installed Shiori on my MacBook Pro. Shiori is a Pinboard bookmark launcher and editor. It's like QuickSilver for Pinboard—hidden until you need it, only a keypress away, and accessible from anywhere. I set it up so that Control+Option+Command+P brings up the bookmark search window (from anywhere), and Control+Option+Command+B brings up the bookmark editor.
• I set up Pinner on iOS. Pinner is a full-featured Pinboard client. It will open Pinboard bookmarks in Safari or within Pinner, via Safari View Controller. It has two app extensions for creating bookmarks. The first extension, “Quick Pin”, has no UI, and is for quickly adding bookmarks to read later. The second extension lets you edit, interactively, all the metadata associated with the bookmark prior to saving it.

My workflow

I developed a new workflow to work with Pinboard, so I don’t end up with a mess of useless bookmarks again. Honestly, though, calling it a workflow is an exaggeration. I basically decided to manage Pinboard with a simple set of rules.

I will continue to use Pinboard both for permanent bookmarks, which mostly involve specific technical documentation about Swift and iOS development, and for a read-it-later service, which are bookmarks I want to keep around temporarily, some of which I plan to keep long term.

1. Bookmarks I would keep in Safari, for sites I would log into (banking websites, personal websites, blogs, GitHub, BitBucket, etc.), are stored as private bookmarks with tags. All of these bookmarks are also tagged “Safari” so I can pull them all, as a group, with a Pinboard search.
2. Bookmarks for articles to read later, and everything else, are saved with the “read later” flag set to “true”, primarily by using Pinner’s “Quick Pin” extension or the “send to Pinboard” command within Reeder (my RSS reader app of choice).
3. I regularly use Pinner or Shiori to browse my “read later” list. Basically, I had to kick the Twitter habit.
4. After I read articles marked “read later”, I delete the bookmark, or choose to save it. I am pretty ruthless about deleting bookmarks now, which is the opposite of how I used to be. If I don’t read something after a few days, I will just delete it.
5. Rarely, I will choose to save the bookmark. If I do so, I edit the bookmark’s metadata to remove the “read later” flag and to add keywords and a description. I open copy the first paragraph of the article to the bookmark’s description field, so it’s clear to me later on why I saved it.

So far this workflow has been working well for me. I collect “read later” bookmarks throughout the day, read through them in the evening, and delete almost all of them at the end of the day. My Pinboard bookmarks list is much smaller than before, but contains only good stuff that I want to act on, either now or later.

A git commit somehow disappeared, eradicating all my app code and obliterating at least one evening’s worth of work. I cracked open a Guinness, restored a backup from Arq, recovered about 80% of my work, and re-did the rest. I’m happy I didn’t lose my cool.

Thomas Finch’s iOS 7+ Icon Generator is a nice, little utility. It takes a square app icon and masks it to match the rounded corner shape of modern iOS icons.

I have been wrestling all day with an Access query with a ton of parameters that causes a crash when run via VBA, but works fine when run manually, which no one would ever do.

Drafts 5 is a great app for capturing thoughts, drafting notes, and capturing tasks, and quickly sending them, via Actions, to other apps or services for further processing. The typical workflow is:

1. Launch Drafts
2. Type a draft
3. Launch an Action to process the draft

On iPhone, swiping left from anywhere to pick an Action is right at your fingertips, since you are typing on screen. On iPad, if you type with an external keyboard (which I highly recommend), launching an Action is a little more cumbersome. By default, you have to move your fingers off the keyboard and reach up to the screen to get to your Actions list. There is another way to launch Actions, however, that doesn't require you to move your fingers off the keyboard.

Custom hardware keyboard shortcuts

Drafts 5 lets you assign custom hardware keyboard shortcuts to any Action. This is an extremely rare, and extremely powerful, feature. You can configure hardware keyboard shortcuts for text formatting commands and to insert text snippets (such as today's date) into your draft. You can also define a set of hardware keyboard shortcuts to use to complete your drafts.

I use Drafts 5 throughout the day to write microblog posts, notes, and tasks and send them to where they need to go: Dropbox, Ulysses, my to-do app SwiftoDo, and so on. For all my most-used Actions that process drafts, I use an easy-to-mash but hard to accidentally type accelerator, Control+Option+Command, plus one letter, when I complete my draft and want to send it on its way.

I use the Control+Option+Command accelerator only for Actions that complete drafts, so it’s always clear to me when I type it that I am ending my draft and sending it somewhere else.

Here is my list of hardware keyboard shortcuts, each of which I find incredibly useful:

• Control+Option+Command+D: save draft to a Dropbox folder
• Control+Option+Command+U: save draft to a Ulysses Inbox folder
• Control+Option+Command+T: send tasks in draft to my todo.txt file via SwiftoDo
• Control+Option+Command+M: post draft directly to Micro.blog
• Control+Option+Command+G: search for draft text in Google
• Control+Option+Command+A: search for draft text in App Store

Each shortcut is easily mapped to its Action via the "Edit Action" dialog. (See the photo that accompanies this blog post.) If you forget what custom shortcuts you created, hold down Command while editing your draft, and all the custom shortcuts you defined will appear in the standard iOS hardware keyboard shortcut pop-up display.

These hardware keyboard shortcuts don’t necessarily save me a lot of time and trouble, but they make my Drafts workflow on iOS feel fast and comfortable. I highly recommend setting some up for your own iPad Drafts workflow.

I love the Apple Watch. I didn’t always, though. When I first tried on a Series 0, a couple weeks before it was released, I quickly made the decision not to buy one. I thought it was too expensive and that it was not immersive enough. I had been expecting an iPhone for the wrist; what it was instead was a wristwatch with some extras. Six months later, however, I relented and bought one, mostly because Target was offering the Space Gray Sport model at a deep discount, and I wanted to pick a holiday gift for myself that my family members could chip in for.

I quickly grew to love the Apple Watch, despite its slow speed and lack of viable third-party applications. The first-party Apple Watch applications alone—such as Messages, Workouts, and Weather—pleased me very much. Caller ID on my watch was great for avoiding telemarketing calls at dinner. Something as simple as having the temperature always available on my watch face far more useful than I had anticipated.

I have a Series 1 now because my Series 0’s screen popped off due to battery swelling after almost two years. Apple covered it under an extended warranty and sent me a Series 1 for free. The Series 1 is much faster than the Series 0, and is not going to be obsoleted by Watch OS 5 in the fall. Still, it isn’t as fast, and consequently as useful, as the Series 3. I fully expect a new Apple Watch model to be released later this year, which will be even faster.

If I still had the Series 0, I had planned to upgrade this year, for increased performance alone. Now that I have the Series 1, I am not so sure. My Series 1 has great battery life, but is starting to show performance problems. Workouts, for example, take a long time to start. Third party apps are still, largely, useless for me, for the same reason. Despite these problems, most of the features of the Apple Watch are still working just fine for me.

The main feature that would tempt me to upgrade, at this point, would be new or better health monitoring features. The idea that the watch could save my life, by monitoring for irregular heartbeats, is very compelling to me. I would welcome and pay for any additional features in that area. If they are confined to newer hardware, I would definitely upgrade to get them. I care more about that sort of thing than I do about increased speed, cellular or GPS connectivity, or (if the rumors are true) a larger display area.

Here is a wrapper class to hide implementation details in Microsoft Access VBA projects: DAOQueryRunner.cls. DAOTemporaryTableController.cls relies on this.

This VBA class helps you work with temporary tables in Access VBA projects: DAOTemporaryTableController.cls. You may need to do so if you want to join using a subquery as criteria, which Access does not allow.

I decided to make use of GitHub Gists again. My first gist in several years is LoggedInUserName.bas: a VBA module to get logged in user name from the Windows API.

🎙 I am a sucker for an Upgrade draft episode: The WWDC keynote Draft 2018

All weekends should be 3 days long…if not 5! 😀

📺 I’m enjoying the “remix” version of “Arrested Development” season 4 a lot better than the original version. I’m sure time passing and my expectations being lowered helped, but I prefer to see all (most) of the characters in the same episodes.

Mean Girls (Original Broadway Cast) is up for the Tony for best musical this year, and I think it has a legitimate shot. While this is a weak year for the American musical, the music of “Mean Girls” is fun and catchy, and the lyrics are funny and full of wordplay. The singing and production of the cast album are top notch, too.

I like it. The high school setting and girl-centric plot, though not the music, remind me a lot of “Bring It On”, which is another musical that has a fantastic cast album and works a lot better than you would think. I don’t know if this show will be a hit on Broadway, but I predict a long life on high school drama club stages in the future.

🎧 Headphones review: Sony MDR-1AM2/B.

There’s more beauty in this world than you can guess

Recently, with the help of someone on Micro.blog and Apple Music, I have turned my family on to the music of Justin Roberts. His band plays children’s music in a power pop style. His music is really catchy, and his lyrics are wry, funny, very kid-friendly (my daughter sings them all the time), and sometimes also play to the parents on emotional level as well.

My favorite Justin Roberts song, by far, is “Recess”. Like the best power pop songs, this song has more hooks and ideas in it than most albums do. The lyrics are cleverly and consistently written from the point of view of a bored kid stuck in a classroom, waiting for the recess bell to ring:

Can’t you hear the blacktop callin’? Classroom clock is stuck or stallin’ There is nothing that will pass the test Unless it’s recess

In the second and third pre-chorus endings, the lyrics expand out beyond the tedium of the elementary school classroom to the wonder of the outside world:

One more dotted I One more crossed T Then we’ll be runnin’ free There is more beauty in this world than you can guess

That last line resonates powerfully with me. Seeing the beauty in this world is something children do naturally. I think we forget how to, as we get older, and our knowledge of history and current events expands, and our experience of life evolves from dreaming of what our lives might be to actually living them day-to-day. Our dreams get smaller and more finite as time passes. As we get older still, we relearn to see the beauty, in a different way—with a wonder that is tinged with sadness. As an adult, I see that the splendor and joy of the world is counterbalanced by its disappointments and horrors.

The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children

The line “There is more beauty in this world than you can guess” always makes me think of the contrasting sentiment expressed in the poem “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith:

Good Bones BY MAGGIE SMITH

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

This is a profoundly powerful poem that I read in college and have never forgotten. As an adult and a parent, I return to it often. It has always made me feel, in some way, like a teenager who concludes, upon first entering the adult world, that I have been sold a bill of goods: nothing is as nice or easy or fair as my parents and mentors (and, let’s face it, TV and movies) told me it would be. This poem distills all the disappointment and disillusionment that experience and maturity bring into seventeen simple and somewhat humorous lines. I love how it ends on a note that is somehow both cynical and hopeful: “You could make this place beautiful.”

Selling the world to my children

It’s my job, as a parent, to sell the world to my children. I want to tell them the good—now, while they are young—and the bad—later, when they are older. In both times, now and later, I have to remember that Justin Roberts and Maggie Smith are both right about the world. It contains all the beauty that has any meaning. It also contains all the horrors that have ever befell anyone. The most important thing I have to teach my children is that they can make it better—they just have to try, even after the veil of childhood innocence has fallen, and they see the world for what it really is.

I’m still testing and fixing things in my dev build of SwiftoDo 2.12.0. It feels weird to have gone so long without issuing a release. I hope to get everything done next week. I have a very full weekend of family activities ahead of me, though, so I can’t do much till Monday.