“I can’t see the point of all this strutting and fretting. We’re all as good as dead.”
“Not in my book, we’re not. I’m not dead in here, and neither are you. I’m saving your ass, Winter.”
“Writing won’t help. Your stories won’t help me.”
“Winter, the future is always a fiction.”
“I’m more worried about reality than fiction. I’m worried about the present, Mr. Fitzpatrick.”
“The present will look after itself. But it’s our duty to realize the future with our imagination.”
It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.
There also used to be a more robust local Metro section.
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight.
So the Post will avoid staying on autopilot by… not making endorsements? How lazy. Sounds a lot like switching on the autopilot to me.
A paper with guts would take a principled stand via an endorsement… which the editorial staff was already prepared to do. Instead, in the absence of an endorsement, you hoped us readers would make up our own minds, and when we made up our minds that we couldn’t trust the Post and our collective reaction was to cancel our subscriptions, we get remarks about how important this paper is to the world. But it doesn’t matter how credible, trusted, or independent the paper’s voice might be if it’s not used.
Americans don’t trust the news media because of this precise example. We want news that gives us the facts and truth. The fact is, an endorsement was forthcoming, and if it’s true there was no quid pro quo, then there shouldn’t be any issues with it being published now. Doing so would go a long way to restoring lost credibility.
I cancelled my WaPo subscription and made a donation to Harris, if it wasn’t obvious who The Glenn Fitzpatrick Times would endorse for President
Did I just spend an inordinate amount of time tonight making sure my email has its SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configurations are set up properly, even for addresses that only ever send mail to me? Yes, yes I did. While mine had been set up correctly already, I read the other day about upcoming / already implemented email provider changes and figured why not make my settings stricter now too? All it took was changing “?all” to “-all” in my SPF configuration. The part that confused me the most after that was that even though I’m sending emails through Fastmail, if I sent mail directly through their webmail or via my desktop mail client everything would pass all checks fine, but when I’d send emails from my applications or other systems they’d fail with error messages like:
(glennfitzpatrick.com: Sender is not authorized by default to use 'foo@glennfitzpatrick.com' in 'mfrom' identity (mechanism '-all' matched))
I was really scratching my head since they were all using the same credentials, and I couldn’t figure out a way to adjust the SPF DNS setting to permit specific email addresses.
After some research, it turns out that if you don’t have the email address you’re sending as added to your account (even just as an alias is fine), then when it’s sent it goes through their forwarding server which causes SPF to fail. Once I made sure all my application-specific emails were added to my account as aliases my SPF checks were passing once again but now in strict mode.
In other news, today’s weather was nice, and the Capitals are going to the playoffs!
I bought some new shoes today. Last week when Katie and I went to upstate New York to see the eclipse we did some sightseeing to see the waterfalls around Ithaca, and I learned two things:
It’s not that my shoes were bad or uncomfortable. It’s that when hiking on a trail with plenty of mud, if the shoes that you’re wearing don’t really have any tread on them, you’re going to go slipping and sliding and it’s a wonder that I didn’t splat. I say we were “hiking” on a “trail” but it was more like walking on a wide, flat path where if it had been a bit drier there wouldn’t have been any mud. But mud there was, and slip-sliding I went in my casual sneakers that look more like running shoes that I picked up on a whim at Costco to replace my old casual gray canvas Nike shoes after they got a bit old and stained and floppy and worn. Hiking boots would have been a better choice (both for the ruggedness as well as the activity) but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to pack them.
Later on the same trip I went walking across what I expected to be a dry field, but soon I started squelching in the grass. I tried to power through but it just got squelchier and squelchier so I jumped up on some nearby rocks to avoid the bog I found myself in, but when I thought I had safely circumnavigated the swamp and jumped back off the rocks I landed right in the thick of it and spent the day waiting for the eclipse with muddy shoes and soggy socks. When I got home from the trip I tossed my shoes in the wash and while they’re now clean, it was time to start thinking about replacing them.
So today I went out looking for new shoes. First stop was Dick’s Sporting Goods and while they had some casual-looking shoes that I could have bought if I needed a new pair right then and there, since none of the shoes really spoke to me (despite having tongues, wakkawakka) and I wasn’t in dire straits shoe-wise I continued with my errands.
Later I wandered in to a Rack Room Shoes and wouldn’t you know I found the exact same pair of casual grey canvas Nike shoes that I had just before my current pair? I was surprised to find them so easily as when I had looked at Zappos’ site the other day I couldn’t find any of my old shoe styles available, or if they were still made they didn’t have them in my size, but finding the old shoe style I really liked available in my size in the second store was not something I was expecting.