Why am I getting an XMLHttpRequest Exception 101 when attempting to use AJAX to retieve a text file in HTML5 page with javascript?

Hi:

I'm new to the world of HTML5, Javascript, jquery and AJAX.
I'm trying to recreate a simple example from a tutorial I found online.
The example is supposed to grab the contents from a text file on the local disk
and populate the contents of a div with the text.

I keep running into the following exception:
------------------------------------------------------------
Uncaught Error: NETWORK_ERR: XMLHttpRequest Exception 101

I see the exception occur on the Send().
I'm debugging using the Chrome debugging tools.
I'm breaking on the .send(null) line.
I hit F10.
I wait and nothing happens. I hit F10 again and I see the error.

I've tried setting asynch flag to both true and false on the .open(), but I get the same results.

It's not clear what I'm doing wrong and I have no idea on how to debug this issue.
Is it a permissions thing? I'm attempting to run this in Chrome.

Here is the snippet of javascript:
--------------------------------------------

            var xhrObject = new XMLHttpRequest();
           
            if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
                xhrObject = new XMLHttpRequest();
            }
            else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
                xhrObject = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
            }


            function populateTextContentDiv(){
             
                var externalTextFile = "TextContentSample.txt";
               
                // if we can use AJAX
                 if(xhrObject) {
                 
                    // create a new variable that traverses the DOM and finds the <div> tag we put into our second parameter
                    var pageText = document.getElementById("TextContent");
                   
                    // use AJAX to place a text file we put in our first parameter
                    xhrObject.open("GET", externalTextFile, true);
                   
                    // if our AJAX variable found our data and the server is ready to send it out, bundle our data as a text string
                     xhrObject.onreadystatechange = function () {
                        if(xhrObject.readyState == 4 && xhrObject.status == 200) {
                            pageText.innerHTML = xhrObject.responseText;
                        }
                    }
                     
                    // send our data out
                     xhrObject.send(null);
                 }                
            }