Remember, without encryption, your e-mails are like postcards in the real mail. That is, anyone along the way to its destination can easily read it. Encrypting your e-mail text with gnupg is like putting your postcard in an envelope. It’s not totally secure (especially from the NSA), but it makes it much harder for strangers to read your dirty little secrets.

So, in the interest of carrying on future e-mail conversations in private (when appropriate), here is the public key for my main e-mail address (thomas, you know, at gumption.com):


-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (Darwin)
mQGiBEZlpbsRBAC+OhEyLtvvXhtkququ9Xxk0A8pnwWQoEif3UyFoggncnKcDVZX
or7JdrJBo1eNsOK6o5lTCZjqub/soqwI+6HF+oBq75/KPwW4a7u1kP6agmes7cbR
MZe3/0eQGckpHQrV5EfD15/EeuXtQjUjqm+G39T431edfbQ+0BFUOeVLKwCgrlEN
d0YvJkKjptTqBUngL1E9rc8D/0hmYOE725z5Fvm0dd3+FSUBfsKjxbyH3gT8XQZ/
he44bHe9MbYks6L25I8FcwO+nTSyw2Ytv+WGL1zNqyXfdCDtpP2YEm+YnEx6PaEI
Vp9X+PlhLsxjJeaMfYOsBfpeUxhAJjkYRPwKteWGeYnUjFSKIhu0GbIPPgyR7kes
DNnQA/9sKfEHVi0eQbLjtQaXxyEsH2GwRaGGGwSXStTQEyC1Z3eLBUrNulIFYvwC
dcJwnVhY99WOmCStpsO9Np+4K857hgVVNHz3+FKwZXHF/aPGv1Sftqr6iUrY/7op
K434jXzgVmNJCDanaid8Kp8PnBFY8w2aX6RT8hx2FCTYHARpCLQqVGhvbWFzIEJv
aG1iYWNoLCBKci4gPHRob21hc0BndW1wdGlvbi5jb20+iGAEExECACAFAkZlpbsC
GwMGCwkIBwMCBBUCCAMEFgIDAQIeAQIXgAAKCRBXPLnfG4DfjtZwAJ0TKGRwnQ3W
jGBQ2ILM0ZRN7T1vUQCfaMex2trBD8Qtmy8Tfte/lXh+fsa5Ag0ERmWlwRAIAKPA
foOBV2tW3RMFyo6NQGGlZBs6GD1ib2i2cI84meoEYiCpRKc4+y0fTZ+PcW/sMyZP
eIluBZq7YmUD1v8qBNa3M/ldQnlWM1Tfe6WopAfwcUJ/Nmd9L6lQlf6tPpymoELR
48xqco0RwPR3bynZGvUuAaQLMljzvSo9qN/vow2bWFQ1bnOdHY8mVkD5UdXGh36r
wwcJ3aHmIri+AqFpeKMMf01ggDSpJepfNIeTJc6sIGCoQwJIQO9NyyD3/jNSKbdW
GVaZsP1rWqCMisYSWOELPmjM5bS2iGV+7TmEUxwIyJmBqMVy8HCLBqN0YieokANf
o053SQCC5cqhhKA7orMAAwUH/RHj4H9ZlZQ6v1cbVGoEtTNDvtnZj1qa3QWQ5eur
0kdF/yAhLbZ/HREkKEaCKfdTF/ZJCSy0ZtUsoNvQtP/XhzL318UxsMKYOJy9GEaI
TVqHda/VcMrelELfWtsvkK5uvrQFpo/UkBg9J0YQVvwVJd03e2flXiVHNLRUEplL
BziUeeETuyRbw6MsDKUf22uRg28+vwOdUxgaZ7vqoRS/DoTCZ+hSMJTOeCZKM7R0
S0I6Ja6oIwPPVGHca+Rbxv51NYP4Qy20BX9gxms4SbQHMUoUa31+NVIkcsApE+bo
h3zWbbpPpyInY6gcnzHLBnWtgK9gEk6ruigHLj6oFRrJoOGISQQYEQIACQUCRmWl
wQIbDAAKCRBXPLnfG4DfjjgYAJ9GJo/apT5wwxLAK+EVq7xvuWzTZwCdGK0uoKo4
wiTlHXQP5/CTNioGrJk=
=XXAk
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----


Of course, you shouldn’t actually sign (i.e. blindly trust) this public key as being mine. Someone could have hacked this post and changed the above key to their public key. That’s why you should always verify a public key through more secure means. Like calling the owner and having them read their public key fingerprint (a much shorter representation of the public key intended for humans) to you so you can verify that it matches the key you have. Then you can sign the public key which means that you have verified that the key is correct and actually belongs to who you think it belongs to.

So, now I’ll just wait patiently for someone to send me some ciphertext.

Of course, I did get a chance to play around with CSSEdit. Curtis Thompson turned me on to this fantastic tool (Curt is also the person who got me to try out django when I was pounding my head against the wall with TurboGears, so I’m in deep debt to him). Essentially, if you’re working on a Mac (and really, what developer worth their salt isn’t these days) you owe it to yourself to try out CSSEdit. Especially if you’re just getting started with CSS, it helps you learn from any live stylesheet on the web, so you can examine how others (who likely have much better Kung Fu than you) have put together their presentation layers. I can’t live without it after only a day of use.

A quote from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where I originally became interested in the word:

I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. [...]

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.

I’ve got lots more to say about gumption, but that’s a good starting point.

I recently left my job as a Software Architect at a large health insurance company mainly because it was draining all my gumption. Not just gumption for my job, but my entire life’s gumption was being sucked away. For years I had been trying to work on my own hobby software projects, but night after night and weekend after weekend, I just couldn’t bring myself to work on them. The lack of Quality in my day job drained any enthusiasm I had for the rest of my life.

That’s why my wife decided that I needed to leave. So, we tightened our budget, payed off most of our debts, and I quit on March 9th, 2007. I don’t think I’ve been able to stop smiling since.

I had been planning on re-launching my blog on March 12th so that my friends and ex-coworkers could see what I was up to, but I found myself plagued with too much gumption. That is, I’ve spent most of my time actually coding! Every time I’d remember that I needed to blog about what I was doing, I’d be in the middle of some new functionality and just couldn’t bring myself to stop and install wordpress. So, to everyone I had promised this blog to, I apologize for the delay.

And don’t give me a hard time about the default wordpress look and feel. It’s on my list! Today I had wordpress gumption. CSS gumption is a whole other ballgame

For those of you that have been patiently hitting gumption.com and getting 404 after 404, here’s the project I’ve been working on to learn the awesome pythonic web-application framework, django (don’t worry, much more on that in future posts).

http://djedna.gumption.com/

Essentially, it’s an online catalog of my music collection. Yes, I know it’s plain. Remember, CSS gumption?