Shay’s Blog

I got a personal email certificate from thawte this weekend.  I am not sure what made want this, but it is free.  For those that are not familiar with what a certificate does for you, it allows you to sign and encrypt your email.  Encryption is a nice feature that definitive has a purpose, but do people pay attention to a signed email?  A signed email assures the recipient of the email that the sender is who they purport to be.  Does anyone pay attention to this?  I am curious.  It really does not create a lot of work other than getting the certificate.I went a couple of extra steps after getting the certificate.  First a standard thawte certificate does not list your name in the common name attribute on the certificate.  To get your name in the certificate, you have to get your identity confirmed by some of thawte’s network of notaries.  It works off a point system.  I was able to get enough points from two notaries this weekend.  Then I went the extra step of actually generating my own private key with openssl which comes preinstalled on the mac.The reason for generating my own private and then generating a public key off of it is if thawte had s security breach, then someone could read my encrypted mail and send out encrypted mail posing as me.  I thought it was kind of cool to generate my own private key.  I followed the directions here. 

As I mentioned in my earlier post about the blog software updates, it has been a long time since I have posted.  Anyway I wanted to give my blog readers an update on the biggest event since I have posted.  I proposed to my girlfriend Alicia and she accepted.  This is course means we are now getting married and are officially engaged!  We have set July 26 as the day which is coincidentally both our sisters’ birthdays.  I am very excited.  We had been dating for about 15 months when I popped the question. We have selected a location in the Dallas area called Grand Traditions.  They are Corinth which is kind of a drive for us, but we like their setup the best.  We wanted an all-inclusive place that could host both the ceremony and the reception.  There are only a few of them that were indoors in the Dallas area.  Grand Traditions had separate rooms for the ceremony and the reception, and we will be the only event going on.  Plus they allow us to bring our own alcohol which is both a money saver and let’s bring what we want. 

Wow, I have not posted in a long time.  I have to not had the blog posting bug of late.  I spent a little while updating the wordpress installation to 2.3 which adds some performance enhancements and tagging which are both nice features.