Rick Herrick Central - Hi there.

I present this as a service to anyone looking into Skype service.

Skype sucks.  I'm still using it, mainly because there's nothing else that I know of to replace it.  The technology is fine, calls are clear (as long as your machine doesn't crap out on network traffic like my work desktop does), ease of use is OK (their contact management is retarded, but not un-usable).

But their documentation is crap, their interfaces are crap, their customer service is beyond crap, they're just freaking miserable.

Yes, that title is pretty much just a truism.  But this really takes some nerve.  One of the biggest legal failures in American history, the man who tortured both the word and the spirit of the law in efforts to justify the unjustifiable, torture itself, has the nerve, the audacity, to denigrate Sonia Sotomayor.  It's like John Wayne Gacy criticizing someone's clown abilities.

So the U.K. has blocked Michael Savage from entering the country.  And Savage is outraged:

...I said, "She said this is the kind of behavior we won't tolerate... For my speech? The country where the Magna Carta was created?"

Update: The problem was really because of the .NET settings file.  See below.

Most outrageous sentence ever?  You decide!

Eye can haz Giants games?

Via Andrew Sullivan, Justin Fox does a take-down of Paul Krugman's position as factual arbiter amongst a certain segment of the commentariat.  Now, I'm a big fan of Paul Krugman, both of his mainstream writing for public consumption and some of his more academic work.  Not the hardcore academic economics (I studied political science and public policy, not economics), but his longer policy pieces.  And my reaction to some of Krugman's recent statements and people's reactions to those statements has been similar to Fox's.  Krugman has been unrelentingly negative about just about everything the Obama Administration has done.  Lord knows there are many things to be negative about, but lately I've felt that he's gotten pretty shrill and kneejerk.  That doesn't mean he's not right about some things, but it also makes me question his emotional investment in some of these issues.  Unfortunately, many, especially on the left side of the ledger, trot out his encomiums as if they were handed down on stone tablets.  These are conversation stoppers: I'm not free to disagree because Krugman has spoken.

Update: I found a situation in which it seems you must deploy your supporting code for unit tests and explicitly deploy external configuration files.  Read below for more information.

It's pretty simple to create external configuration files in .NET 2.0 and later.  There are some issues with this capacity however:

• The external configuration file must be referenced by relative path, not absolute.
• Visual Studio doesn't copy the external configuration file by default when building.  You must specify this yourself by setting the Copy always value for the Copy to Output Directory property for the file.  Note that I tried this with Copy if newer and that doesn't seem to work.

This is entitled "FROM A READER, an amusing parody."  Never mind the asinine and juvenile names for each of the "Botchmen" (I'm totally cool with asinine and juvenile things, I still think "Beavis and Butthead" is one of the funniest shows ever).  But the idea that it's the Obama Administration that's botched the economy, lo these 50 days into their reign, and not the previous eight-plus years of stupidity, cronyism, and mismanagement (and I don't absolve the Clinton Administration

I was working on some ways of setting up custom data in .NET configuration files and came across these helpful posts from Eric Eicke. This gave me almost what I needed—the ability to read stuff out of the inner text of a block, such as <element>this stuff</element>—but I also needed to be able to read attributes on the actual XML element itself, that is <element this="stuff">not this stuff</element>.