End-of-Year Quiet Zone

Hope Christmas was enjoyed by those celebrating it. I'm back from vacation. Two weeks off work, one week of time away. Return to the office on Wednesday.

A driving trip was a good break from the regular grind. Put new snow tires all around on the car and they served me well. Noticed that other drivers still like to play a version of leap-frog when passing. I'd pass, move back to the right lane and keep going. Several minutes later that vehicle would pass me, move into the right lane and slow down. Years ago that happened too frequently and became aggravating. I put to put an end to it just like the last time by passing and kept going for several minutes more to put much more distance between us.

I still find it odd that after passing a semi-tractor trailer, people will return to the right lane immediately in front of the tractor apparently under the assumption it could stop quickly should a problem arise. I try to make sure I can see the entire front of the tractor in the rear-view mirror before returning to the right lane. Simple recognition of vehicle mass I guess. And, yes, I use my turn signal.

Waiting for me when I returned was the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO computer. I coughed up the change for the Give One, Get One deal. Darn thing arrived the day after I left on the trip. Unpacked it and let it sit for several hours to come up to room temperature before inserting the battery and plugging in the charger. Not much there: the PC, battery, charger and a couple information sheets. All other data is online.

I have to say the XO computer is truly cute in a toy sort of way. Obviously intentional to make it attractive the intended audience comprised of children. Messed with it a bit last night but testing it will be interesting. Heavier that I expected and the visual appearance gives me the impression it would be lightweight, perhaps the result of the toy-like look. I plan to put a SD memory card in the slot and give it a try as a ebook device. Also plan to use at a couple restaurants I frequent to check email and surf the Inet. I expect many comments.

When I get back to the office, a 13-story apartment building (100+ units) and a restaurant design await me...plus all the projects under construction having the customary field issues.

Happy New Year all!

Office Monitor

A convenient subject while I'm off the clock this week. The office monitor I use is a Dell 2407WFP which replaced a Dell 19" CRT from 2002 when we last updated. The monitor replacement process began several months ago when, after removing my single vision office glasses and taking a close look at the CRT, I realized the display had gone fuzzy.

No amount of futzing with the adjustments would improve the view. I brought in a 19" flat panel Envision monitor with 1600x1200 resolution I had purchased from CompUSA online for $200 after rebates (got them all) and checked the display. What a difference! Dramatic to say the least and considerably easier to read.

Within a week, I sent out a email to two, maybe three, of the corporate partners requesting the a new monitor. I went with the Dell because 1) the price was reduced by about $100 from normal and 2) we're a Dell shop and other manufacturers might get a negative response from corporate managers and the IT team.

One partner stopped by to query me about the request, asking why I needed a new monitor when the one I had looked just fine. "Uh...that's my newly purchase monitor from home I brought in compare the appearance with the old one and verify need for replacement. The old one is sitting on a table outside the server room." A bit of discussion occurred before the new Dell monitor accepted.

With the replacement of computers recently, all the new machines came with a 19" LCD running 1280x1024 max resolution to supplement the old 19" CRT Dell monitors. I kept the Dell flat panel monitor and opted out of a second LCD -- not enough desk space. I have not yet looked at one of those dual monitor setups. Comparing an old CRT with the beam focus going sour against a new LCD is a losing battle. CRT bad, LCD good.

The electrical design staff can make use of the dual monitor setup as they are frequently editing electrical panel schedules while viewing and changing drawing files. I couldn't see a benefit for myself although I edit equipment schedules while modifying drawings. Clicking between two programs on a single large screen is no different to me that sliding a mouse between two screens.

Getting the Envision LCD back home got me in gear to clear out the old equipment to recycle and get the monitor into regular use. Sure made the PC desk a lot cleaner as it replaced a 19" long-tube Gateway CRT.

Now back to slacking off.

Vacation or Workation

Not really all that much with AutoCAD 2008 at this point. Been getting much more into using Publish and Sheet Sets. We frequently need to issue milestone sets of plans, sometimes far too frequently, so Publish and Sheet Set functions are slick. (The DD, CD, 50%, 75%, 90%, etc., high percentage issues aggravate and make me laugh especially when they're frequent, like 75%/85%/95%CD issues at weekly intervals or worse yet in the same week.)

The quad-core machines are doing fine. No real concensus on whether they're faster. (Yeah, that sounds sick.) No one volunteered blathering comments about having a fast PC. I ask a coworker about it and he said he didn't think it was much faster than the old single core. Our standard image installation has AutoCAD WhipThread setting at 3 so all the machines should be good but a few have had some hiccups in other areas. Need to check they for setup on their RamDisk.

Snagged an updated version of AcroPlot that will run under WinVista. Supposedly we're on the list to be notified when such is available but on a whim I did a Google Search and found it. Not sure why we were not notified but that's not my concern at this time. I installed it and the thing simply worked fairly well. It admittedly was not a final product still it helped.

As is common with some software, you make a few test runs, adjust the settings until they're want you want and never touch them again. Did that with AcroPlot under WinXP and when doing the WinVista version, I wish I'd had a config file available from the old version. Nonetheless, trial-and-error got me through. This update test version came at the right time. Lots of PDF plotting to do on projects where the mechanical drawings ran between 12-45 sheets. AcroPlot is a simply darn good at what it does. One thing I never did get it to do right was plot the Plot View in the only Layout tab. Not critical at this point. I did do a DWF plot run for those that wanted scaled hardcopy.

Off for the rest of the year on vacation. Don't have VPN access to the office network so I copied and bound a set of mechanical drawings for several projects for offloading to an external hard drive I could keep with me. In the post-lunch, three-hours-later hindsight, I should have run a DWF set of plans on each project. Less HD space and I could have had a single file of clustered sheets on each project. Live and learn.

Use, Learn, Train

After a couple weeks of using the program, I was in an AutoCAD 2008 training class today. Seemed teh better way to deal with it since it generated more interaction with people. Mostly composed of designers and engineers to learn a bit about what is different from AutoCAD 2004. Only lasted a couple hours. The instructor confirmed what I suspected on some issues and gave me more insight on others. Several functions I'll need to explore in more depth. Only one and a half pages of notes, mostly single line, with several lines indicating "(explore)" after a command or feature.

Fortunately, all of our shortcut keys, LISP routines and other tricks work although many required tweaking to comply with the particulars of AutoCAD 2008.

Now I'm waiting for the word to go on the next project so I can make use of this newfound knowledge.