Comments(106)I feel good - I knew that I would now
A little ode to James Brown. So I read this on the Revit Augi Forum last night (thread 22442) and it made me feel really good so I thought I’d post it;
I happen to teach Architectural drafting at the college level. I can tell you from experience that everyone, thus far, is speaking the truth - as I’ve experienced it. Yes, the professional world is frustrated that current graduates understand the technology (software) more than they do how a building actually goes together.
I teach my students AutoCAD and ADT because it’s a mandate by our local professionals. However, in the students’ last semester, they complete a medium-sized commercial project using Revit. WOW! What a difference. Throughout the AutoCAD and ADT projects, I get questions about connecting “lines” and “How do you want this line to look?”.
As soon as we start the Revit project, the entire atmosphere changes. Revit is forcing the students to think about the construction of the building; the connection of the pieces and the purpose of the elements. They begin asking me “How does this steel-stud wall connect to the precast exterior wall?”. No more questions about lines, arcs and circles. The students, when they begin using Revit, begin thinking about the building as a building and not a collection of linework. They are forced to think about connections and assemblies instead of “fudging” around them as a CAD application allows you to do.
Free XP 2005 OS
If you have a tablet PC, here is where you can download the free upgrade to XP Tablet 2005 from Microsoft.
Last day at Autodesk
Today is my last day on the Revit team at Autodesk. Wow - six years have just flown by. During that time, Sue and I had 2 kids and moved twice. Change is good, but I don’t think we want to move anymore 
In cleaning out my office, I am compelled into re-quoting this item I found on another blog somewhere;
Malcolm Gladwell, Tipping Point author and general pied piper of intellectuals everywhere, wrote a New Yorker article in 2002 explaining a similar phenomenon: why our desks are messy. Gladwell writes:
“But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd […] argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use. “The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay.”
Interesting, but not helpful now that it’s all in boxes…(insert George Carlin’s rant on ’stuff’)
Anyway, it’s bittersweet to leave the great product design team for Revit. But, I’d trust those guys with my life…they will continue to do great things. You know who you are…Change is good.
Bizzarre
Sometime, when you need some entertainment, type “.NET” in as a search term in Google images and see what you get. Page through it to get to the more interesting stuff. (Hint: I was looking for a logo - when you get to the violin images p6-7, let me know)
