I went to show someone my web site yesterday, and the SSL certificate expired a month ago. (And every modern web broswer freaks out about that, and prints warnings and blocks everything and acts like I’m scraping credit cars and stealing identities, even though there’s nothing here that could do anything involving any PII whatsoever.) That shows how on top of things I have been here. I haven’t even thought about the blog in months. I mean, it’s mid-March and I don’t even think it’s 2026 yet. I’ve completely lost the thread on time. Anyway.
First big news is that we adopted two cats last month: Diego and Zuzu. They are brother and sister, from the same litter. But Diego is like twice as big. He’s all muscle, incredibly strong and fast, constantly moving. Zuzu is tiny, all fluff, and absolutely beautiful. Diego was pretty outgoing from the start, and has bonded more to Sarah, sleeping on the bed every night and following her around. Zuzu has been extremely skittish, hiding in the closet and always running away, but she’s slowly made progress. Diego is very protective of her, and they play well together, despite the size difference. It’s been great to have companions again, even if they’re tearing the house apart at 2am every night.
I have to admit there is a slight bittersweet feeling if comparing them to Squeak and Loca. They were both very cuddly, especially in their old age. And Loca was my soul cat, and would spend all day and night with me. I can’t even pick up Zuzu right now, and Diego is not a cuddler. Maybe that will change as they get older, but thinking about the years with Loca and the reality that she’s gone is still painful.
* * *
Speaking of pain, I had to renew that SSL certificate, and a two-second job turned into like five hours of hurt. There’s this big schism between bncert and certbot and I think I started with bncert last year, then tried to get certbot going, and it completely screwed my site. Lots of panic, tons of floundering, and I could not get it to work. I eventually got the HTTPS stuff going and the permalinks were screwed up. Any configuration of the .htaccess made it worse. I don’t know what I did, but I eventually beat it enough to get it back to operational. But I will forget all of this, and in six months when the cert expires and the auto-renew script fails, I will screw it up again. (Note to self if you find this in August: don’t start chasing certbot; you used bncert.)
Anyway, if you find broken anything here, let me know.
* * *
Nothing else. Giant release at work, which I won’t talk about here, but that was 100% of my bandwidth for a while. Trip booked for first week and a half of April, but I still need to flesh out what I’m doing. It’s not to any current war zone, but who knows how much that will change in the next month.
I’m currently heads down with Atmospheres 2. Every month since like a year ago, I said I would wrap it up in a month. I think I’m close to that, or at least I want to get a feature-complete draft by the time I leave on April 2. It’s getting there, but it’s over 500 pages now, so it’s a slow process. I think I started this book in 2014, so I really need to end it. Also, I have published 19 books, and I don’t want the 20th to be some dumb compilation zine thing, so I really need to keep on this until it’s done.
Nothing else. Everything else. I’ll try to remember I have a blog before the summer is over or whatever.