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Last night there was a youth talent show at church, where any of the teenagers could put on an act. Some sang, some danced, and then there was the Happy Hands Club.

From the left, that’s Alex as Napoleon Dynamite, complete with the afro, nerd glasses, and the all-important “Vote for Pedro” shirt. Then we have McKenna and Kyra, both taking this very seriously. And the cute blonde on the right? Yep, that’s Zack.

As the curtains opened and they started their sign-language routine, someone leaned over to me in the audience and asked who it was on the right– she didn’t recognize the teen. I explained that it was Zack, and she was surprised. “How did you get him to dress in drag?” Well, he actually asked if he could be part of the troupe.

Anyway, it was absolutely hilarious, including the fact that the three on the right were (mostly) in sync while Napoleon was just slightly off. When the song ended, Napoleon suddenly ran off the stage in classic style.

One of my clients is having some trouble uploading a spreadsheet file into the web system I built. I asked her to send me the file so I could look at it and, if necessary, do a test upload to pinpoint the problem.

Imagine my surprise when she replied with:

Umm, a fax? Apparently she’s going to print the spreadsheet to paper and fax it to me, whereupon I’ll presumably create a new spreadsheet, enter the data, and load it into the web system.

Welcome to 1986…

I got a chuckle out of this one.

Laralee doesn’t keep up on current events, so I had to explain it to her. I guess she didn’t think it was quite as funny.

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.