I was quite pleased to learn that a local theater has masks-required matinees! I’m planning to go see Clyde’s at the Moxie Theatre:
COVID-19 Safety Policy
First Sunday Masked Matinee: During the First Sunday Matinee performance of each show masks will be required at all times when indoors. We encourage anyone who is immunocompromised or at high health risk to attend this special performance. See CDPH mask recommendations here.
Masks Encouraged At All Other Performances: For all other performances mask are encouraged but not required. A mask can be provided upon request.
More of this, please! Support the arts and our health.
Sunset at Mission Beach. San Diego is alright.
I published my Health and Safety Guidelines page: https://gregorlove.com/health-safety/
Howdy, neighbor!
Hi Jean! It's nice to be back. I missed the conversation in this good corner of the web.
I went for a day the first or second year they had it. Glad to see they’re still going. I was slightly tempted to go last year when they announced Joy Electric.
Hello again, micro.blog! I dropped off here in 2020 due to technical issues apparently, but I think I’m back?
Short intro: gRegor, he/him, San Diego, try to make people laugh (or groan from puns), software developer, IndieWeb enthusiast, and COVID cautious.
Digging Paramore’s cover of “Burning Down the House” and looking forward to the other covers on the upcoming Stop Making Sense tribute album.
👋 Hi there, I'm in the indieweb.org community. That page monitors some Mastodon tag feeds for public posts with "#indieweb".
Want to read: The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by (ISBN 9781551528915)
Delightful music re-discovery: Emancipator. Good chill, electronic music to work to. Currently listening to 2022’s 11th Orbit.
m o o d
Ooh, this should be good: A Stop Making Sense Tribute Album teaser. First track by Paramore.
I filed a complaint with the CA Department of Insurance shortly after writing about the Geico adventures. These are some of the key parts of the complaint:
On December 4th, I received postal mail from Geico. Their letter was dated November 28, 2023 and was requesting additional information to process the application (vehicle registration, copy of a recent utility bill). It stated "You must provide this information no later than 11/30/2023 at 11:59pm Pacific for us to process your request to purchase a policy. If we do not receive these documents and/or information by this date, a new application for insurance with GEICO is required." Obviously I could not meet this deadline since the mail had not even reached me until December 4, 2023
[attachment: copy of the Geico letter]
I believe GEICO is engaging in unfair business practices and setting up impossible-to-meet requirements in order to avoid taking on new risk in California. I would like the state to investigate and take whatever actions are appropriate to prevent this in the future for other people. I have already chosen to use another insurance provider, so I don't need any particular resolution to my problem described above.
I did send Geico the information they requested on the chance they might approve me quickly, despite their impossible deadline, but I also wasn’t about to wait around. I immediately started the process with AAA. Geico did eventually respond in late December (around the 18th, I think) that I was approved and needed to call to make payment. Surprising, but I already had AAA coverage by that point and was happy to leave Geico behind.
On January 5th, the Department of Insurance responded in part:
I have information indicating your problem is resolved. According to GEICO General Insurance Company, your application has been approved and a payment is required to begin coverage.
Technically correct? Sure. Today I wrote back:
I am responding regarding file number [redacted]. I am not satisfied with Geico’s response in this matter.
I remain concerned that Geico is setting up impossible-to-meet hurdles for CA residents in an attempt to avoid underwriting new customers here. As the documentation in my initial complaint shows, Geico sent me mail requesting additional information after their own deadline.
I still sent Geico the additional information they requested on the chance they would approve me, but I had no reason to believe it would be accepted since their letter clearly said I would need to make a new application after the deadline. Based on the already-poor customer experience, I had no desire to wait around to find out, so I sought and eventually secured coverage from AAA.
I would like to emphasize that the 14-day underwriting process for coverage with AAA was completed before I heard back from Geico approving my application. By contrast, Geico took a month from my application to approve me and had only requested the additional information halfway through that period.
I am not currently interested in receiving coverage from Geico, but I hope you will consider this incident in a potential investigation of unfair business practices by Geico.
I have a work project that requires adding DKIM and DMARC. I was familiar with both, but hadn’t actually set them up myself yet. Thankfully, PHPMailer seems to have pretty good DKIM support built-in, as well as an example script to set up the public/private key pair.
I made a couple small changes in that example script. First I set up a full path to where I wanted the PEM files to be saved.
define('KEYFILE_DIR', '/replace/with/full/path/');
$privatekeyfile = KEYFILE_DIR . $selector . '_dkim_private.pem';
$publickeyfile = KEYFILE_DIR . $selector . '_dkim_public.pem';
I wanted the private key to be encrypted with a passphrase, so I changed the export-to-file line to this:
openssl_pkey_export_to_file($pk, $privatekeyfile, $passphrase);
After setting the $domain and $selector variables, running the script created the public and private key files and displayed the information needed to set up the DNS record. The script chunked the public key into 255-character segments because some DNS systems don’t like longer text. In our experience, though, we didn’t need the chunking, so we used the public key with the PEM wrapper removed.
Adding a few lines of DKIM configuration (from another of their example scripts) was all I needed to include DKIM Signature header with each message. I tested with a message sent to a Gmail address and it showed it was signed by the domain. Viewing the full email headers, I could also see dkim=pass in a couple places. I also used the Google MessageHeader tool to paste in the full email headers and it confirmed DKIM passed.
Watched 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, a documentary about how the word “homosexual” didn’t appear in the Bible until 1946. It was really good, as expected. I hope when it gets wider release it will encourage more Christians to re-evaluate how we treat LGBTQ people.
“In the teachings of Jesus, he never made any qualifications about ‘God loves you if...’ Nothing is ever mentioned about sexual orientation. And God doesn’t ask. That part is just irrelevant. We’re people. We’re children of God.”
—
Kathy Baldock plays a big part in this documentary. For a deeper dive, I recommend her 2-part video, “Unclobbering the Tangled Mess.”