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.