The Slow Lane

In my last post I mentioned I was updating some software. At work we use Autodesk Inventor 2008 for our 3D design & modeling. I was applying Service Packs 1 & 2 to that and the AutoCAD that comes bundled with Inventor. I am the CAD manager for my small little group and had disributed the service packs to the other users and managed not to install them for myself. After the program kept crashing while trying to a simple task I decided to check for hot fixes for the issue. That is when I realized that I wasn’t up to date with the service packs. And wouldn’t you know it after updating the problem went away. Stay up to date people.

Shortly thereafter, and now at home, my Windows XP laptop told me that Service Pack 3 was availible and it would like to update it. Service Pack 2 for Win XP included a lot of big changes so I did some Google searches and read around at winsupersite.com about it first. There isn’t any drastic changes in it, mostly a round up of hot fixes. But one unintended side effect is that the update wiped out my patched uxtheme.dll file. No more custom skins until I re-patch it, which I haven’t yet. Also when it rebooted with Win95 looking windows I went into the display properties and reset the Theme back to WinXP. What I should have done is reset the Apperance because resetting the Theme cleared out my custom icons. And my trial of Icon Packager was up a long time ago. So I’m back to a stock looking WinXP for a while. Boo. Hopefully someone else reads this and doesn’t make the same mistake.

And speaking of updates there is two pckages of software I like to use on my Windows computers that always seem to have updates. To the point where it is annoying. Filezilla (an FTP client) and Paint.NET (a lighweight graphics program). It seems like everytime I go to use these programs there is an update availible. Can’t you limit this to once every three months or something. Both come with one click updaters which is nice. Filezilla’s update is fairly quick and painless. But Paint.NET’s takes forever. It’s always stuck on “Optimizing for your computer”. What does it have to optimize for 5 minutes? It’s a 3 or 4 meg program. Must be related to the .NET framework.

Why don’t I try to get some blogging in while waiting for some software updates to install on my computer. This is a big and special “must do” event for the Philadelphia Region each year and this year no different. In fact we upped our game as far as I am concerned. However due to a scheduling conflict with the Northeast Divisional (we announced the date first) and being late with the final details and opening registration we had less then stellar turnout. The team rallied and came up with an alternative format that would fill in the day and keep everyone happy. Instead of 7 runs for the weekend we were looking at 9, with potential for a few more. It didn’t work out all that rosy for me though.

Saturday morning I showed up, checked in, got teched, and walked the course just like any other autocross. But three quarters of the way through my first heat work assignment Irene called me and told me that her wrist was in great pain and she needed to go to the hospital. She had injured it a few weeks ago. It appeared to be a mild sprain. We still don’t know why it got aggravated like it did. But that was the end to my autocrossing that day. Shame cause the course looked very technical and challenging.

Sunday my bad luck continued. The safety strap for my video camera goes into the trunk and around the truck lid torsion spring. While setting that up I placed my keys in the truck and then shut it! Insert failblog.org picture here. I didn’t discover this fact until They were telling us to get ready to run. My poor co-driver had to find a last minute ride, for the second day in a row. I couldn’t believe what I had done, I was devastated. One of my competitors George, realized that his friend and region volunteer Pat was on his way in and lives near me. He was able to stop by my apartment and pick up the spare key from Irene, who couldn’t drive b/c of the splint on her wrist. Thanks Pat!

Pat showed up with my keys with just enough time in the heat for me to hot lap my four runs. That was one lucky thing about the day as it started raining 10 minutes after the heat ended. The region had some more bad luck with our timing & scoring software, AXWare, when someone ran a command that had some unintended consequences for our two day event. Despite three of us working on the problem through most of the lunch break the error was unrecoverable and we had to go back to the old days of writing down times directly from the timer box on paper. I have to say that everything went better then I thought it would with the manual timekeeping. Competitively I ended up loosing to both Doug and George in a lesser prepared car by a few tenths. That really bummed me out too as I thought I had beat Doug (again).

Instead of pictures I offer you a video of my run!