Raymond Chen is an old school MSFT guy (as in from the Windows 95 days) and he has a bunch of entries on his blog gives the history behind some common and not so common Windows annoyances. My favorites have been Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map? and Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?. The entry on Hardware backwards compatibility is another good one.

I'm now inspired to do my part to give "why" behind an annoyance that faces Windows users. A number of people have emailed me to complain that when they try to download RSS Bandit they end up with a 0Kb zip file on their hard drive at the end of the download attempt. Well, this is due to a bug in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0. The workaround for this problem is described in Microsoft KnowledgeBase Article 308090

More below on the growing iPod mania on my team, an XQuery birds-of-a-feather at the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference, writing technical books and blogs being quoted by the press.

The major news services (e.g. Reuters) are agog with the news that the deaths of two U.S. soldiers in Iraq on Tuesday pushed the death toll to 140 since May 1, when Bush declared major fighting over. This is greater than the U.S. toll of 138 dead between the March 20 start of the war and May 1. Some would have expected this news to encourage the current US administration to keep a low profile with regards to comments about the War On Terrorism^TM but in fact not only is GW's resolve as strong as ever he has hinted at more preemptive strikes against "known enemies". Definitely someone from the "The Best Defence is a Good Offence" school of thought.

Random observations below on Yahoo and Rolling Stone's adoption of RSS, supposed Outlook viruses, Python on the .NET framework and more.

Download it here. New features and bug fixes described below.

It's been an interesting weekend so far. Yesterday after watching hundreds of people walk past my bedroom window I decided to investigate and found myself at the Seattle Hempfest which bills itself as the planet's largest marijuana policy reform rally. I half expected to see people surreptitiously hitting blunts or rolling up joints but instead it was more like the typical Seattle festival with lots of people milling about and lots of people selling cheap crap. Only this time the cheap crap had a hemp theme (pipes, hemp clothing, weed leaf jewellery, etc).

I also went to see the show, Puppetry of the Penis: The Ancient Art of Genital Origami last night. It was a pretty entertaining show and was a lot funnier than I expected. It was amazing just how many different shapes those guys could bend themeselves into (the Loch Ness monster, a hamburger, roller skates, the baby kangaroo, etc) and there even was some audience participation. Before the show started there was a comedienne who warmed up the crowd for about 30 minutes and there was a heckler behind me who made a wise ass comment after almost every joke she cracked. I was worried that I'd have to clock him if he continued when the actual show started but the "dick tricks" were entertaining enough to shut him up for the duration of the show.

More below on the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, flies in urinals, and interviewing with Google.

I was browsing Clay Bennett's editorial cartoons and came across a few images that are definitely instances of a picture being worth a thousand words. The one that resounded with me the most was this cartoon about Affirmative Action.

More below on Christina Aguilera's newest video, Idi Amin's death, more RSS Bandit sightings on shareware sites, thoughts on using job listings for industrial espionage and other stuff.

RSS Bandit on WebAtack.com - 3.5 stars

I just lost a few weeks worth of changes to RSS Bandit because I overwrote one of my files with one I got from Torsten without realizing Torsten had modified an old version of the file. If I was still using Emacs all I'd have to do is grab the RssHandler.cs~ file and I'd be back in business.

RSS Bandit 1.1 on About.com

Jon Udell wrote

Shouldn't we then substitute XML for RSS 2.0 in that sentence, and say there is no consistent way to interpret material from other namespaces in any XML document, period?

I just picked up Three Six Mafia's latest album, Da Unbreakables. There is a collaboration with Lil' Flip about riding in a car with spinners which reminds me that I need to start looking to see what it would cost to put some rims on the car. Anyone know any good stores in the Puget Sound Area?

Randomness below on Phil Ringnalda's post about the fact that in the blogosphere there is no they and some pet peeves.

As promised to some folks last week, below are my comments on the most recent version of the Atom API which is part of PieEchoNechoAtomThe Project With No Name.