I got the 2-disc version of the Matrix Reloaded soundtrack from Borders on recommendation from Carmen. After listening to the album several times, I must say it is an excellent soundtrack. It is as good, if not better, than the original Matrix soundtrack. I am listening to it even now as I write this review. Disc 1 Session - Linkin Park - Excellent driving techno/industrial instrumental This Is The New Shit - Marilyn Manson - Very good

I recently had a strange experience with IIS 5 and some phantom virtual directories. When I write “phantom virtual directories” I mean that IIS is handling requests for virtual directories that no longer exist. This is a description of the events leading up to this: One of the websites I was working with required two virtual directories, named genericdir and securedir. Both of these directories had their own web.config files. The both used an HttpFilter to handle requests for certain types of files.

I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons I don’t like watching team sports is that I don’t want to develop any sort of identification with a team. When you watch a team – the Chicago Cubs, for instance – you can easily get caught up in the action and start feeling like part of the team (even if you never sit in the dugout). You feel as if the players are friends of yours.

Sort of a disturbing film about a convicted drug dealer (Edward Norton) preparing to check into prison to serve a 7 year term for dealing Russian heroin. The excellent cast includes Rosario Dawson, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Barry Pepper. Hoffman’s role as a preparatory school teacher is of particular interest. This is a Spike Lee “Joint” and as such has numerous scenes which serve no other purpose other than to make a few political statements.

After watching all these Cubs games lately, you can’t help but remember the Old Navy commercials they are showing with the woman walking around with all the guys smiling and winking. After some research I have found out that it is, indeed, Fran Drescher from the television show “The Nanny”. I was shocked, actually, because in the commercial she looks to be about 25 years old. Fran Drescher was actually born in 1957 so that puts her at about 46 years of age.

Anyone reading my site recently knows that I run an Internet radio station called Romance Life Radio on Live365.com. Currently, I have 300 MB of total space for music but only use up about 115 MB. I have lots of room for more songs! Unfortunately, getting new music for the station has required purchasing entire CDs of music for one or two romantic tracks. In general, that is a frustration I think many people have - having to buy a $16 CD for one good song.

Studying for fifth exam of the MCSD.

I passed the Windows application development exam for the MCSD.NET this morning. Not too bad - a lot of emphasis on Trace and Debug, data binding, deployment, and security. I now have only the Solution Architectures exam left to finish. That one is scheduled for Halloween!

I recently worked on a web application where the general philosophy behind exception handling was that every method would catch any exceptions that occurred in the method. The reasoning behind this is that when an exception occurs, its effects would be contained and the executing page would continue to render successfully. When exceptions occurred in this application, certain parts of a page might show up blank while other parts of the page would render normally.

This pretty much sums up how I live my life. My parents will remember that I had a poster on my wall with these rules on it throughout my teenage and college years: If anything can go wrong, Fix it! (To hell with Murphy!) When given a choice – Take Both! Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. Start at the top then work your way up.