I'm ROOPHLOCHing again. Not really by
choice. There's a huge thunderstorm
going on. Massive rainfall. Hope my
basement escapes the fate of tfurrows'
poor house[1].

It's strange that the storm is
happening now. They usually happen in
July and August and we didn't get any
this year. I'm fascinated by
thunderstorms and I'm sitting out on
the porch. At the same time, I don't
really like them, so I hope it ends
soon. The thunder is cracking loud.
Unsettling.

Actually, speaking of tfurrows, he
mentioned that when he recently
purchased a bag of grain from the
Amish, they said that if he didn't
have cash or a cheque, he could mail
one in later[2]. I had a similar
experience in Vancouver a few years
ago. My wife and I ate at a great
Vietnamese restaurant (sadly, it has
disappeared since) and our waitress
was the daughter of the
cook/proprietor. The food was great,
but when we finished, they didn't have
interac and didn't take charge cards.
I didn't have any cash, and the
waitress said, "That's okay. You pay
next time." What a shock. Well, I
explained that we were from out of
town and walked over to a nearby cash
machine to get the money, but I was
floored by the level of trust.

Later, my wife contended that it was
simply the best way to handle a bad
situation. The customer had no cash
and the owners refrained from
antagonizing them or worrying about it
later. "It must happen a lot," she
continued, matter-of-factly. "It's
better to wake up the next morning not
worrying about going to small claims
court."

I prefer my interpretation. I hope
that they got a lot of repeat business
because of their good faith. They
would have gotten mine, had I lived
there. Then again, the restaurant is
no longer there, and my wife tends to
be a better judge of human beings than
I am.

The thunder has stopped.

I guess that's it for this ROOPHLOCH.

Oh. One more thing. There was a brief
(several hours) outage on the XMPP
server and www.circumlunar.space. The
Let's Encrypt certificate did not
renew properly. I'm not quite sure
why and it's one of those annoying
problems that you only get a chance to
fix every couple of months. If you
don't fix it, you have to wait another
couple of months to find out if your
next fix works.

In any case, I've added the renewal
date to my phone calendar. If it
hasn't renewed a few days before the
expiry date, I'll just do it manually.
I have to restart the Prosody server
(for XMPP) and Shizaru (for the old
dubya-dubya, as D. Letterman would
say) to get them to load the new
certificates anyways, so it's best to
just pay attention and do it myself.

Alternatively, I suppose I could learn
to write a script with a few
conditional elements.

Or not.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2019-08-29_waterproofBasement.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2019-09-03_ROOPHLOCH_Entry1.txt