Heartfelt, honest, competitive, and hopeful. A great speech by MJ.

MJ is headed into the Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend. ESPN is counting down with the top 23 Michael Jordan moments.

When I was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I was lucky enough to have a membership one summer to The Multiplex health club. This is where the Bulls used to practice before they built their own practice facility.

And once I had the chance to rebound for MJ after practice. He’d often stay late and just shoot around. Sometimes he’d let the local kids rebound for him. One time I was just there by myself so he motioned to me and I started rebounding. I felt so honored. And the guy didn’t miss.

Sometimes he’d play a little fake one-on-one with you too. He’d never ever let you hit a basket though. He loved rejecting you and talking trash. It was all in great fun, of course.

The thing that always blew me away about watching Jordan, Pippen, Horace Grant, and Oakley up close was just how fast they were. These guys were giants, but they moved faster and reacted faster than any humans I’d ever seen. Light years faster. It was a whole new level.

Anyway, I’ll never forget those moments. Good to reminisce.

Hey, even at 46 he’s still got the fade away:

Terry Gross conducted an interesting interview with Quentin Tarantino in which he explained how he originally wanted to be an actor. He only started writing because he was taking acting classes and needed audition scenes to perform…

I didn’t, like, study writing, I studied acting. And when I first started writing, it was literally in acting classes. And what would happen is – now it’s really easy to get scripts and stuff, but back then, you know oftentimes you’d buy the novelization to a movie if you wanted to get an idea of what the scene, you know, what happened in the scene.

Because like, you’re an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I’ve always had is I’ve always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I’d go, hey, I’d like to do that in class this Wednesday. And so what I would do is I would just remember the scene and I’d go home and I’d write out the scene from memory. And anything I didn’t remember I would just fill in the blanks myself and then go and give it to a classmate and then we’d do it.

Last week we were dragged over the coals — and rightfully so — for failing to communicate clearly regarding a security exploit that was discovered in early August.

It turned out that the issue was related to Ruby on Rails. The exploit affected multiple products (ours and others). After the initial investigation, and escalation to the Rails security team, the root cause was patched within a few days of the initial report. We then updated our apps, tested, and deployed updates.

Fixed promptly, communicated poorly

Problem was, we did a terrible job communicating from start to finish. We didn’t communicate well with the person who initially reported the vulnerability, we didn’t communicate well internally, and we didn’t communicate well publicly.

Perfect security is a moving target. New exploits and security discoveries pop up over time. They occur in OSes, web browsers, frameworks, embedded systems, and commercial software. Anyone who’s in the software business has to deal with these issues from time to time. What matters is that issues are taken seriously, delegated properly, handled appropriately based on severity and priority, and communicated clearly with all parties involved. When someone reports a security issue, they’re reporting it because they want to help. It’s important for us to keep that in mind.

Getting better

After ultimately reviewing what went wrong, we began to rework our internal process for dealing with security reports. This is a longer term project which we’ve just begun. Something we could do in the short term was review how we communicate publicly about security on our main security page on 37signals.com.

After a fresh slap in the face (which is definitely a healthy thing from time to time), it became clear that the words we were using were the wrong words. We weren’t setting the right expectations. Some of the lines were cringeworthy. It just wasn’t us. I don’t think any of us ever liked the way this page was written, but we never got around to changing it. Now was the time.