For the past couple of days I’ve been working with Let's Encrypt, a non-profit group that gives out free SSL certificates for use on websites. We’ve used a self-signed certificate March of 2003 and I generate a new certificate every year for the site. It requires the browser confirm that the site’s certificate is not trusted (i.e. not verified by a 3^rd party). The Let's Encrypt people have setup a system that verifies you actually have control over the website you are trying to make a certificate for, and provides a root authority signed certificate. Now any mainstream web browser can verify that the DrQue.net is who we say we are and browsers can peruse the site without any warnings.

   Good morning.

   On my ride home today I am seeing the first signs of fall.  Cool weather is just around the corner.

  Ren. Faire.

   One thing you do not experience when looking at pictures of steam powered equipment is the temperature.  These large cast iron beasts burn large amounts of coal as fuel, and in order to produce 40+ horsepower a lot of heat needs to be generated.  When attending an event like Thresheree you can get close to these engines when they are active, and they are hot.  Railroad engineers and farmers with steam tractors had to deal with these hot environments regularly.  Gives you more of an appreciation for the work they did.

   In working on updating my laptop, I ended up bricking it.  The C library was corrupt and when I tried to correct the problem I was unable to run anything from the command line.  When I rebooted, the kernel panicked.  There wasn't anything on the laptop so I decided just to start from the ground up.  That turned out to be more trouble than I had anticipated.  First I failed to boot from a DVD.  It burned and verified fine, but my laptop refused to read the disk.  I could boot from a minimal installed CD because the keyboard didn't work.  Finally I tried a USB drive.  That required the boot parameter "nomodeset" to be passed to boot in order for the video to work properly.  I had hoped this was the end of my troubles, but after installation the Nvidia driver refused to work.  What was suppose to be a quick upgrade has turned into a royal pain.

   Me with Amber yesterday evening at a Cajun restaurant.  I had done a long ride back home, but didn't feel like putting in the last couple hundred Calories needed to go to my favorite Indian place.  I did have enough for Cajun however, and I wanted to change it up.  Amber, Zach, Liz and I all went together.

   Our group at breakfast this morning.  Since Pluvius has moved back to town we've been trying to see him a lot more.  Breakfast is early--6:00am, but we all seem to enjoy the opportunity to hang out.  Today it was Pluvius, Steve, Pokie and myself.

   Our router has been giving us trouble.  The other day it was being painfully slow, so I reset it.  The router didn't come back.  After playing around with it, I got it to start, but it forgot all it's settings.  We've been meaning to update our router anyway, but that project has just gained higher priority.

   Pluvius and Steve work on the Kriegsmaschine--Steve's new computer.