On Sunday, Tom and I (and his Dad and Uncle) went out 4-wheeling near Argentine Pass, which is about an hour west of Denver. His uncle (a geologist) was quite excited about the whole thing and was glued to the topo map we had with us. He pointed out that the place we stopped for lunch, which was right about 13,000 feet elevation, was right on the continental divide.

Now, I’ve probably been to places on the divide a hundred times, but I never consciously realized it at the time.

I thought it was pretty cool. I dumped out some water where I was eating a sandwich, which might eventually (if you’re very optimistic) make it into the Pacific ocean. Then I walked about 20 feet, and dumped out some more water that might someday see the Atlantic ocean. (I know, I know, it will never make it, but that’s not the point!)

The upcoming 1.3 version of NewsGator fully supports relative links. I’m writing this here to make sure I haven’t missed anything…input is appreciated. 1.3 beta testers – what is written here does not reflect your latest code.

When resolving all links, including <link> and similar elements, and content links (description, content:encoded, atom:content), xml:base behavior is used. The xml:base attribute may appear anywhere in the input document, and the rules will be followed according to the spec. Which means, of course, that multiple xml:base attributes can be used, applying to different parts of the document.

For content elements, in the case where no applicable xml:base is found, links will be resolved relative to the <link> URI (or <guid> if @isPermaLink=”true”).

Well, I was hoping not to have to do this, but it appears it’s inevitable. Here’s the comment policy for my weblog:

I reserve the exclusive right to delete any comment left here. Reasons a comment might get deleted (this is not an exhaustive list):

• The comment contains flames or attacks on me or others, as determined solely by me.
• The comment is obviously off-topic.
• The comment contains offensive language.
• The comment promotes illegal activities such as copyright infringement, software piracy, cracking, etc. Note that discussion of these activities is fine; promotion is not.

Chris and Tomas talk about their digital music experiences:

Chris replays his poor experience buying music online with www.buymusic.com. All I can say is: I’m a happy EMusic customer now.

Granted, I only joined a couple of weeks ago, but it couldn’t be easier, it has no stupid DRM to deal with, and the music collection is great. Then again, I just happen to like much of the bands they were offering, and I think their rock/metal selection has quite a few wonderful bands. Heck, two of my last discoverings there include Tristania and Vintersong, both of which I found great! [Commonality]

I’ve been using PressPlay for a couple of months now, for $9.95/mo. It actually works really well for me, so far. I get unlimited streaming, which I use whenever I’m sitting at my desk (which is unfortunately something like 12 hours/day!). The streams are full-length, 96kbps encoded. I can also download as many songs as I like, with the catch that they will no longer be playable after I cancel my subscription.

I can also purchase “portable” downloads, which I can use on other devices and which will continue to work after my subscription lapses, for about $1 per song.

All in all, it seems like a great deal, and it works for me. It lets me listen to some music I’ve never heard of, looking for new stuff I might like. And I don’t worry about not “owning” my music, as some folks have complained about; if I really like something, I tend to just buy the CD.

Another great day on Sunday. Tires felt great, car felt great, driver felt great – leading to another pole (by 0.2 seconds over 2nd, and about a second over 3rd). During the race, there was some heavy pressure – another car was within 2 seconds of me for the first 15 laps or so, but finally he went off and lost 15 seconds or so…so I ended up leading flag to flag again. Woo-hoo!

Unfortunately, despite this win, my hopes for winning the division are pretty slim. You’re only allowed to keep your best 6 races, so I have to start dropping points. The bottom line is, I’d have to go out-of-division twice. Of those two races, I’d have to win one, and at least finish on the podium in the other one. Not impossible, but not extremely likely either! I haven’t made a final decision, but I think I’ll “cool the tires” so to speak until heading for Mid-Ohio to prepare for the runoffs.

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?