DBUG Meeting notes for meeting :

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Signature Architects, Inc.
150 Coolidge Road, Suite 250
Berlin, MA 01503
P: (978) 562-1661
mike@signaturearchitects.com

HOSTS:     Michael Smith, Brian Howland, Stephen Preble
                  Neil Blanchard, Tina Fancher


DBUG,

Twenty five brave souls bore the biting firey winds on a bitterly cold january night to eschew what they could learn about their DataCAD software at Signature Architects....   Just kidding... I don't remember how many people were there, the room was full, and I enjoyed the meeting so much I was lax in my responsibilities to take notes.   What I CAN tell you is that, once again, it amazes me how much more we can learn even when we are long time users of DataCAD and the many other programs we discuss.  AIA credits aside, I strongly recommend to all my colleagues to enjoy learning in this user-group type of format as it is fun and collegial.  I regret that I will miss the meeting in March because I need to be, um, somewhere else.

What I HAVE done though, to try to be a responsible upcoming DBUG host, is to post the wonderful and extensive notes that Mike Smith, Brian Howland, Stephen Preble, Neil Blanchard, and Tina Fancher of Signature Architects handed out night  onto a web site at :

http://www.architecturalcadd.com/seminars/DBUG_January_Handout.htm
and
http://www.architecturalcadd.com/seminars/DBUG-ACE.htm
also found at :
http://world.std.com/~eshu/dbug/Jan06Handout1.pdf

Given that those notes run some 8 pages, and given that I usually send out the DBUG meeting notices to another 200 firms beyond the official list Evan Shu provides me, this way of approaching the meeting-write-up issue this time may even save a small tree or two.

What I did gather, highlight-wise, from the meeting was that the SelectionSet (Groups) thing has changed in the recent DataCAD version.  I hadn't noticed, as this is a feature I rarely use.  When you DO need to mask for something such as colors across layers, or select just the purple things on layer yaya (something you frequently need to do to sift out poorly done AutoCAD drawing imports), then this is a very important feature.  In fact, in troubleshooting in AutoCAD offices, one of the solutions I have used is to transfer the drawings to DataCAD specifically to use this feature, to solve their problem.  Anyway, how you use it has changed in some subtle ways, so I encourage you to look at their article and try it out.

I had seen, in their upcoming agenda, something about the Unix operating system, and HAD thought I would not find that interesting -  goes to show, perhaps you cannot judge a DBUG meeting by its agenda cover.  Turns out that Smith et al had had major system crashes due to vigorous viruses and two different solutions I would really regard as "utilities" that every office should have around, are great system recovery type disks (and have the Linux OS version of unix more or less visible under the cover).

Apparently they spent huge amounts of time researching and recovering from the corruptions on their systems, which would not even start up into Windows.  What they did for us is do-all-the-work and created two different "recovery CDs" which they handed out to us all at the meeting.  Thank you, thank you.   They consist of the "Knoppix Boot CD" and the "Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" each of which have various pros and cons you will read in their full article.

Everybody should have these two CDs, just in case.  I overheard someone at the meeting even ask Evan Shu if it were possible to add it to the CheapTricksWare offerings.  I don't know.

Finally, Mike Smith show us how he is joining those of us in the entrepreneurial ecommerce world of CADD support with his brilliant idea of having a kind of online forum where people can freely get and share their architectural detail drawings done in CADD.  His business is called the AEC CAD Exhange, which you can find at http://www.aeccadexchange.com  (where he is still beta testing and designing it) for a kind of preview of what he is doing.  The idea is that people would join for free, contribute some of their drawings, and then be able to browse, download, and use some of the other detail drawings they find there.  GML