Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Autodesk University 2011 - 01

How typical, the night before the first day of classes I find myself heading back to the room at 3 AM. The night closed with me having an animated discussion with guys from Spain, Scotland and England, whose favorite teams range from Barcelona, Manchester United and Chelsea, regarding our desire to see the offside rules in futbol revised. I happen to like the quality of play with Barcelona and I agree that we’d see more productive games if say, the penalty box defined where offside could occur. There are so many situations where a player being offside isn’t really a factor, not a goal scoring, unfair advantage at least. Oh right, AU...

Also last night I met Hideki who made his own custom “fan” that asks “Why Change” on one side and on the reverse shows all the different software that might motivate you to consider doing so. Steve Shell helps him display it in these photos.



Next AUGI Board member Bill Davis shows off his massive collection of AU ribbons. They make him lean forward under the weight.


I dragged myself out of bed to make it to the General Session and Keynote presentation at 8 AM. I was just 10 minutes late which really meant I didn’t have to stand in a long line to get in, but there weren’t many seats. Ran into Steve Shell on the way so we hung out and watched the show together. We saw very interesting presentations ranging from a 27 year old talking about his moon rover project to long time “Reviteer” Jeffery McGrew discussing the things that he’s been doing with his own company Because We Can and wrapped up with a talk with Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine.

My first session was Jeffrey’s “Five Common Pitfalls of Digital Fabrication”. He continued where he left off with his presentation earlier and it was quite enjoyable. His company has done fun and interesting work since embarking on his own. I enjoyed his comment, “Computers can smell fear and false promises by software vendors”. He said that in the context of our needing to test the workflow and methods we use to make sure data transitions properly from one software application to another. In other words don’t rely on the claims made, test and verify.

Time for lunch! Well I spent most of my available lunch time being intrigued by a puzzler set up by Revit QA staff, one called “Where’s my Chair”. They’ve provided thirty six views that you can’t see “your” chair in and it’s up to you to figure out why, fairly diabolical things they’ve chosen to do. If you are at AU be sure to stop by and tackle one or all of the puzzlers. Just keep in mind that they are not necessarily playing “fair”.


When I sat down in Jeffery’s class I had a sudden thought that I’d see Scott Womack’s smiling face wander in. Then I remembered that’s not to be, as he passed away recently. It’s a real loss for the Revit community at AUGI, his work place…and of course his family and friends. His pal Rick caught up with me to reiterate how much the Revit community meant to Scott. He is and will be missed.

I missed my next session to deal with some work stuff so I’m hoping the handout does the job w/o hearing the session in person. Then I was off to the Ask the Experts session with Revit MEP authors Paul Aubin, Darryl McClelland, Martin J. Schmidt and Gregg Stanley. Unfortunately this session turned out to be mostly apologetic, "yeah we know about that issue", "sorry, no way to really do that yet", "you should consider applying for the alpha/beta program"...

The exhibition hall opened up tonight and there is a plethora of firms to visit. I did a couple passes to just get a sense of who, what and where. Then I started to visit some and naturally ran into folks too. I left the exhibition hall when it closed chatting with Cyril Verley (CDV Systems).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

maybee if these conventions didn't resembles star trek conventions, we could have more intuitive, user friendly version of REVIT instead of the clunky over functional engineering software that currently ships under the guise of "design suite"

Anonymous said...

ps...kudos for posting...I thought for sure I'd get edited. At least you know people who don't even like revit follow your blog (daily at that) and find most of what's posted useful and informative.
Keep it up.