Author: cosmo

Normally when you get a letter from the IRS you get a little worried. What did I do wrong on my taxes? How much do I owe?

To my pleasant surprise, the IRS informed me that I’m rich! I actually underpaid my corporate taxes and now the United States Treasury owes me money:

I’ll have to sit down and think of how I can spend this windfall.

Ha ha! That takes me back to the days of the Iraqi War. Oh, wait, we invaded another country on a completely trumped-up pretext! I guess the irony is lost on Obama and his crew.

I’m home alone, making some lasagna for tomorrow night’s dinner, and decided to crank some 80’s tunes. I fired up a Sky.fm app on our XBMC and have been enjoying the classics. You know it’s a good internet radio station when you recognize every song that plays. Madonna, Whitesnake, Duran Duran, The Romantics, INXS… awesome! The 80’s rock.

The “album cover” shown in XBMC for Sky.fm is Max Headroom. Bonus points if you know who Max Headroom is.

Double points if you actually watched Max Headroom.

Oh, and quadruple special points if you know what a blipvert is.

I’m shopping for a car this morning, and found a sweet deal on Craigslist:

Included in the details about the car:

Yeah, it’s actually a Honda Accord, but props for the original post and the sweet sticker on the back of the car!

I ordered some software from SAP about five years ago. Today I needed to access the order data (long story) so I attempted to login to my account. I have my order number, so I used the “forgot password” function. I figured I’d receive an email with a link to reset my password, or possibly a temporary password I could use. Instead, I received this:

Note that somepassword was my actual password. They sent it in a plain-text email. This means they’re not hashing the password, and possibly not even encrypting it in their database. Rule number one of password security is to never have password data in a format where it can be recovered like this. For a supposedly “enterprise-level” company like SAP, this is shameful. I can’t believe in 2014, after all of the password breaches we’ve seen in just the last year, that there are companies who still do this.

Naughty, naughty, SAP.

I’m doing some test work for a major product launch tomorrow. Fortunately I have control of the product administration area so I can control the prices a bit. My latest order included quite a discount.

By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a savings!

I’m working on a Windows 2008 server for a client, and ran into problems doing something as simple as extracting a zip file.

Path too long? Seriously? Doing some searches on the web, apparently even Windows 8– the latest version– has this same problem. Unix solved it around 1975; Linux and Mac systems have no limit and never have. It’s 2014. Why can’t Microsoft figure out a way to allow long pathnames?

Ugh, I can’t believe people use this operating system daily.

Tonight we headed up to the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins to watch Kyra perform in an honor orchestra. This is the third elite group she’s played with in the past month, which is pretty impressive– and also pretty taxing. She has to get up early, head out to wherever the band is playing, and spend 6-8 hours straight practicing the pieces the conductor has selected. But since these are the really good high school musicians, selected from all over the area, the performances tend to be quite impressive.

She had a brief dinner break after her all-day rehearsals and before the performance, so we picked her up and went to dinner. We learned two important things about Fort Collins:

1) The Beau Jo’s pizza parlor has closed down. We were all set to go there to celebrate Laralee’s birthday, but when we arrived at the spot, the place was shuttered and they’re building some new restaurant. Bummer.

2) There’s another restaurant down the street with a name that is as mysterious as it is awesome.

Back in the spring of 1993, some friends and I decided to go to the Smoky Mountains for spring break. I had just bought my very first car, a classic baby-blue 1982 Nissan 300SX.

As we left St. Louis for Tennessee, I was fiddling with the CD player. I had a Discman jacked into one of those cassette tape thingies that you insert into a cassette player in the dashboard. Yeah, pretty high tech. Anyway, I was changing the disc and not watching the road, and I drifted left a bit too far, hitting the interstate guardrail at 70 miles an hour. The entire left side of the car was scraped to bits, and the driver-side door was badly dented.

My poor baby! But, what’s done is done, and the Smoky Mountains still awaited. So we soldiered on, me a little sobered by the fact that the accident could’ve been much worse, and my friends joking about my bad driving. Later in the trip, we decided to re-enact the fateful moment when I hit the guardrail. The result was a classic photo that I loved so much I had it blown up and hung in my room for years.

As it turned out, the driver-side door wouldn’t even open any more, so we spent the rest of our week-long trip climbing over each other to get out the passenger side. I later had the door repaired so it would at least open, but the lock never worked quite right. (I later had a radar detector stolen out of the car, likely because of the lock issues.)

Ahh, good times. That trip had a lot of good memories… just ask Dirk.

While I was cleaning out the storage room today, Laralee was plowing through boxes and boxes of “family history” stuff her mom had collected over eighty years. These boxes contain everything from written diaries to dusty photos to crazy mementos. She was looking for things we should scan so we have digital copies (papers and photos) as well as organizing the piles into family members and approximate dates.

As you can imagine, it’s a daunting task. It took her about two hours to go through the first box, and judging from the pile still on the table, I think she might be halfway finished with it. Then there are all of the other boxes in the corner.

At some point, it might come down to a decision like the Christmas card archive: some of this stuff is just not worth keeping. I guess we’ll see if she’s as much of a packrat as I am.