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