“It smells like ham in here,” she said.

I gave her a quizzical look, wondering where this was going.

“A lot!” she added.

I shook my head and glanced around nervously, hoping no one had overheard.

“Hamalot!!! Hamalot!!! Hamalot!!!” she cheered.

I find the whole idea of so-called security hilarious; the invented things that supposedly make things safer – like Airport Security. One of my favorites is the credit card signature.

Its been years since I’ve actually signed the back of a credit card for this reason. Most of the time, the checker at the Wal-mart doesn’t look at it anyway. Ever since I read the Credit Card Prank, I have gotten a bit more daring – at the self-checkout lines anyway. Sometimes I try to sign with an “X”, “I Hate Wal-Mart”, and, as an ode to my eldest son, “I Like Monkeys”.

Today, I was at Shop-Ko and I went through one of the self-checkouts. It seemed faster – I only had light bulbs, printer paper, highlighters and a new toothbrush – and I wasn’t in the mood to chit-chat with the checker one lane over.

I put my purchases on the ol’ credit card, and signed it with what looks like the pattern on Charlie Brown’s shirt. I bagged my stuff and headed to my car. As  I passed the self-checkout attendant, she commented, “Nice signature… it looks like the Rocky Mountains”.

Now, I was a bit flattered that she said something, but where’s the enforcement? I could have been using a stolen credit card. She should have called in the store security. They could have thrown me up against the wall and have me frisked until the situation was all sorted out. If I weren’t me, that’s $30.19 for which I’d be liable.

Security? Yeah, right.

I wonder what I should sign when I’m back at Shop-Ko later today.

DCOM, it turns out, is #2 on the all time Spawn of Satan list.  I haven’t run into a project with more problems than the one using OLE for Process Control (OLE) over DCOM.

This week’s adventure happened because the client upgraded their machine to Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.  Most in the tech industry know it was rolled out to curb zombie PCs.  So the firewall and nearly everything else was closed down.  Without being told about the upgrade, I was at the client site trying to figure out what was wrong.

Fixing the problem was relatively simple once I Googled DCOM changes in SP2.  In fact, I even found an article on the OPC Foundation’s website on Using OPC via DCOM with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (direct link to the .pdf).

(Hat tip to Professor Z.)

I finally decided to make the design of this blog (and the rest of uhri.com) my top priority. With that being said, I have some challenges to overcome.
Some challenges facing my site are:

• The home page is ASP.NET. (Ok, actually right now its just .html.)
• My blog is WordPress (which means PHP).
• The rest of my site will, most likely, use ASP.NET since that’s my primary programming architecture. Any non-blog features I add will use ASP.NET.

I’d like to have seamless integration between the two sections of the site.

As far as I can tell I have a couple of options:

1. Move the “blog” to the home page and ditch the ASP.NET home page all together.
2. Ditch WordPress and move on to DasBlog / SubText / VineType and hope they finally get all the features I want. I’d be running full ASP.NET at this point.
3. Build duplicate structures between the ASP.NET and PHP sides of things.
4. Ditch the whole blog thing and write my own (NIH 2000 Syndrome redux).
5. Flatline uhri.com and never blog again. heh.

The last one sounds like a good option right now.

I think where I might end up is this:

• Build a master page for the ASP.NET pages.
• Completely customize the WordPress themes to match the Master Page.
• Build a single style used by both the Master Page and the WordPress theme.
• Create an ASP.NET home page that uses RSS to pull the articles from WordPress. (The other option is to pull right out of mySQL, but that doesn’t seem nearly as fun. Or Nerdy).
• Make the home page of the blog (/blog/index.php) redirect the user to my home page.