Since the last time I wrote here about racing, there has been one more national, where I finished 4th again. Not good…

This weekend is another regional/national at Pueblo Motorsports park. This is the last national of the year in our division. I was out testing on Friday, and had nothing but problems – it was over 100 degrees, and my car was having serious vapor-lock problems. My crew got those ironed out by the end of the day, we think – cross your fingers!

Today was the regional. It was a bit cooler, probably in the 90’s, and 17 cars in the field. Practice this morning was a little rough – I was 4th fastest, but about 1.5 seconds off the fastest time (yikes). This was on some crappy tires that I should probably have just thrown away. Anyway, I changed tires and made a small setup change for qualifying, and qualified on the pole by 0.2 seconds – a nice change, the way the weekend had started! The race went well – I led flag to flag, winning by probably 5 or 10 seconds.

So tomorrow is the national. I haven’t finished better than 4th the last two national races, which has all but killed my chances to win the Rocky Mountain division. It’s not over, though – if I do well tomorrow, I’m still in the running if I head out of division to pick up a few more points. I put on stickers (new tires, that is) for tomorrow, which are usually very fast at this track. John and Kim (the two drivers ahead of me in the national points for our division) also put on new sets…so we’ll see how it goes!

Ted posted a few days ago about how he met Dave Winer last week:

As I mentioned in my blog last week, I briefly met Dave Winer at OSCON last week. I have to admit being a little nervous about it, because I offended Dave earlier in a thoughtless way. But Dave paid me about the best compliment that he could have: “Oh, yeah, I read your blog all the time”. [Ted Leung on the air]

I almost met Dave last week at the Applied XML Conference (which was excellent by the way – I might post more comments later). On the Friday of the conference, I figure I’ll introduce myself to him, since we’ve talked via email a couple of times but never met in person. So during a break between sessions, I wander over to him, and this is how it went:

Greg: “Hi, Dave, I’m Greg Rei…”

Dave: “Not now.” (doesn’t look up, but sticks hand up toward me, in “talk to the hand” style). “I’m writing.”

Greg: (thinking that’s strange, but ok…) “Ok, no pr…”

Dave: (hand up again) “I can’t, not now. Sorry. Sorry.”

Uh, yeah – whatever. I’m not sure, but I think this is what he was writing at the time. At least it was something important – heh.

I have mixed feelings about this post:

Here’s some of the crap that’s caught my attention in the blogosphere and in the news using NewsGator in Outlook. Love this app.

So far so good.

If anyone has a cracked version, let me know.

Yikes! Now of course I’m very happy he likes NewsGator. But it seems pretty ballsy to ask for a crack on his weblog. Especially when we could email him (email on his site), IM him (also on his site), or look up his mailing address, phone number, and alternate email from his domain registration. Come on, it’s only $29. :-)

Mr. SageOne, if you remove that sentence from your post, I will remove this post if you ask. :-)

Well, after some more research (thanks again to everyone who responded!), it seems that the following registry key is occasionally not getting created:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
\Uninstall\{B888BA11-6DF7-499D-8D98-F6B87AFA2359}

The key is supposed to be created by the windows installer engine, and if this key is missing, the remove button will be disabled/missing (depending on the OS).

This seems to happen on approximately 1-2% of installations, and there doesn’t seem to be any other obvious things in common. And, on an affected machine, removing NewsGator and then reinstalling it will bring things back to normal.

InstallShield support has been less than helpful, although I kind of understand since I can’t reproduce this problem on any of our test systems here, with a huge number of different configurations. And getting a log file is problematic – by the time I know a machine has a problem, re-running the installer won’t have the problem again…so we can’t get a log of it happening.

Any installer experts out there have any ideas?

So who else is going to the Applied XML Conference this week?