My response to Dave Winer’s post about Michael Moore’s new movie has generated a lot (for me) comments. I appreciate the comments whether you’re in agreement with me or not. I’d like to address them for a moment with this post. Dave Winer, in his response to my post, asks:

At least it wasn’t what I expected.  By default, the current directory for your Windows service is the System32 folder.  I keep forgetting that which causes me problems when I try to access a file or folder using a relative path.

Surprisingly, most of my good friends who read this blog don’t care much about software development or .NET. They’re not riveted by gripping stories of flexible configuration section handlers, or the heart palpitating episodes of my titanic battle with the StringDictionary’s handling of string casing. Nor do they spend their leisure moments contemplating new and exciting IBlogExtension plugins.

And I expect my arms to be tired (ba-dump pshhh).

Check out this video of a guitarist playing the theme to Super Mario brothers. I especially like the part where Mario grabs a few coins.

Finally I’ve gotten around to contributing an article to the Code Project community. Writing articles and whatnot has always been on my //TODO: list, but until now, I’ve only had articles published on my blog (not counting the RSS Bandit user documentation)

Ian Griffiths points out why he doesn’t like configuration section handlers much, and one of the primary reasons is how they require extra “cruft” in order to tell .NET about the handler. I have to agree for the most part. I’ve always wanted a #region tag for the App.config file just to hide that junk away, but that’s pretty much a cop out. Cyrus points out how the C# team was ambivalent about even having a region tag in the IDE.

Brad Wilson (thanks!) pointed me to this hilarious 404 File Not Found page. Give it a second to kick in (I promise, no zombies will scream). It has my favorite (and as far as I’m concerned, the funniest) character on the web, Mr. Strong Bad himself. If you haven’t acquainted yourself with Strong Bad, now is the time!

Today I ran into an annoying nuance of the StringDictionary class (located in the System.Collections.Specialized namespace so as not to be confused with the other imposter string dictionaries). It’s not a bug, but I feel the API for it could have been slightly better on this minor point.

UPDATE: In ASP.NET 2.0, there’s an even easier approach that supercedes this one. I wrote about it here.

For the uninitiated, a 404 message is a page that tells you that the file you requested cannot be found. Apparently, this site decided to have fun with it.

It’s funny to me that this makes the news.

So I’m definitely going to see this movie this Friday. Regarding the reviews I posted on Saturday, Koba makes the following good point in my comments section:

Xamlon, Inc announces that Adam Kinney, aka Mr. Longhorn Blogs, has joined their team.

We went camping in Sequoia National Park a couple of weekends ago, a weekend which happened to coincide with our first anniversary! Somehow I convinced my lovely wife that a weekend of camping in the woods among the bears is much preferable to a stay at a nice hotel resort. I mean who wants to be pampered and massaged?

I found a nice tip for selecting random rows from within a SQL Server 2000 database. Well actually, pseudorandom. Since my undergraduate thesis was on the topic of pseudorandom number generation, I might as well be precise. For some reason, my non-geek friends find it awfully funny when I mention pseudorandom numbers.

I found this scathing review on Slate of Michael Moore and his upcoming flick, Fahrenheit 9/11 I have yet to see the movie but plan to soon. It’s good to read a critical review to make sure I have a balanced view of the movie.

We recently saw Margaret Cho try out some new material in Claremont. I think she’s absolutely hilarious and poignant. Some say she relies way too much on her Korean mother, but having a Korean mother myself, I think she’s spot on with the impression.

Plug-ins are a powerful way for users to dynamically enhance the functionality of an installed application. Is there a high priority feature you want that is low priority for the developers? Perhaps you can write a plug-in.

Regarding Syntax Highlighting, Daniel Turini pointed out that SnippetCompiler has the ability to export code to the clipboard (and to a file) as HTML.