Posts from — June 2006

Went to Florida today for a conference. As I was going through security, the TSA agent told me “I hope you are coming back before Friday.” I’m like, “Er, no, Sunday… Why?”

So she proceeds to tell me my drivers license expires on Friday and I won’t be able to use it to come back after that.

YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME.

So I say I’ll worry about it Sunday and she says “Fine, don’t say I never warned you.”

While waiting for my flight I do some googling for info and find a few horror stories about TSA and expired drivers licenses.

Gessh… a few other accounts told about how doing this can land you on the TSA watch list too, even after you get your license renewed.

Fortunately, I have a valid passport back home and a understanding wife who is going to send it to me here.

Now I just have to pray the passport doesn’t get lost.

Update July 2008: Since writing this I’ve found out that TSA will let you board a flight without ID or expired ID but you have to fully cooperate with their attempts to verify your identity. They will use some sort of national database with information about you and ask you a series of questions to determine if you are really you. So be prepared to know all sorts of information like your former addresses.  What they ask can change for each incident and person.  Wired has an article with more info about this.

I recently got a cool Nokia N90 smart phone but it throws up SSL certificate warnings when used with GoDaddy issued SSL certificates. These certs are nice because they are only $30/year instead of several hundred for Verisign. Allegedly they work with all modern browsers. Sigh, not with the latest Symbian devices.

Not only does it barf on websites that use GoDaddy, but also with my imap and smtp ssl certs used for my email. A pain when reading or sending on the N90.

I ensured the intermediate certificate was installed in the server correctly but that didn’t work.

Then I found a posting on Nokia support forum that said to install the root certificate in the phone using its native browser (not Opera). Which I did, by browsing to GoDaddy’s SSL certificate page and downloading the “Valicert Root — DER Format” root certificate. Once clicked, the phone’s browser prompts to install the cert and that root cert works for email as well!

Now I’m happy again!