Tutorial for Annotation Scaling Setup

Do you need to develop some new skills in setting up Annotation Scaling with AutoCAD 2008?

Well, this nifty little tutorial, available for download from the Autodesk website, could be just what you need to get started.

Download and unzip the following...

Setup Drawings for Scaling Annotations in AutoCAD 2008

You'll see an instructional pdf, as well as a sample file.

There are other tutorials available for:
Multileaders
Tables
and the
Dashboard (but, you've probably already seen me cover that one)

Enjoy!

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CAD/Design/Engineering/Architecture Salary Survey 2007 Available!

Looks like the 2007 Annual AUGI Salary Survey is all live and raring to go!

AUGIWorld Magazine

In this issue of AUGIWorld I rundown some basic demographics of the AUGI membership, and give average pay by geographic region for job titles and industries, pay by education and experience, along with a little commentary.
(download just the survey here)



AUGI's First Official Podcast!

In my first-ever podcast, I give a rundown of some industry highlights and give some advice on how to ask for a raise.



And a little extra

Head over to the archive pages to find the additional documents that I've posted so far. I plan to add to these a little and will make an announcement here once I've got additional documents ready.

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Will Urban Planning Change Drastically in the Future?

What will the cities of the future be like?

Will environmental, energy, social climate transform into something very different from what we're experiencing today?

While I'm sure this is an oft-debated topic among some in our industry (design & construction), it's not one I'd spent a great deal of time pondering. Most of us are normally concerned with keeping what we've got and building what we need next with some well-researched, but, quasi-vague concepts of the future of a small area.

The other day, I was cruising around LinkedIn (a professional networking site... that is blocked by my IT guys at work, so you may want to wait until you go home to check it out) when a journalist solicited options on 'What Does the City of the Future Look Like?'

My knee-jerk reaction was that, due to energy concerns, as well as social factors, we'd spread out a little more, reforming into smaller communities.

We'd have an urban hub where shipping, manufacturing, services and transport would be centered, surrounded by many smaller towns. Transport wouldn't be necessary within the communities, because they'd only be a few blocks long, and you could walk to any local merchants, or take a train into the service hub.

On the train into the larger city, you'd pass by wind and solar farms, where energy is generated for your ride, as well as for your home; in addition to other community bubbles.

What about working, I don't want to take the train in every day?
Well, that's no problem since all white collar jobs have been reorganized to be telecommuting positions. Virtual meetings will be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing due to cameras, projectors and microphones.

What do you think? Am I off my rocker? Are those proponents of hyperstructures more in tune with future trends?

Share your thoughts, insight, education or whatever else you have in the comments section, or on your blog and link back. I'd love to absorb more viewpoints on this interesting topic.

Some (somewhat unrelated, but) thought-provoking articles:
Massive Change and the City
Massive Change - Design of the World
Futurist - Cities and the Future
A Tale of New Cities
Ghost Cities of 2100
Your Imminent Robotic Future

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Interesting Job Advertisement

When reading the local paper today, I happened to notice an interesting job solicitation listed in the sidebar:

When I shared this find with my pals and expressed a little baffled amusement, my friend, Sam, states the obvious employment expectations 'Must be able to Fix drinks'.

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Autodesk Products Retiring on March 14th include AutoCAD 2005

Here is a list of products being retired in mid-March, 2008.

That means that they will no longer be eligible for upgrades, you'd have to buy a whole new seat the next time you want a new version, and new updates/fixes won't be posted on the Autodesk website for them (you'll still be able to find and download existing updates though).

See here for additional details.

Vanilla

• AutoCAD LT® 2005
• AutoCAD® 2005

Civil / GIS

• Autodesk® Land Desktop 2005
• Autodesk Map 3D® 2005
• Autodesk® Raster Design 2005

Architecture

• Autodesk® Architectural Desktop 2005

Media and Entertainment

• Autodesk® VIZ 2005
• Autodesk® 3Ds Max® 7

Manufacturing

• AutoCAD® Mechanical 2005
• AutoCAD® Electrical 2005
• Autodesk Inventor® Series 9

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Dirty Jobs is in St. Louis

Yes, that title is, in fact, grammatically correct.

The popular Discovery Channel show, which has star Mike Rowe working in various dirty jobs around the country, is back in St. Louis. Tonight's episode shows "Mike Rowe get dirty in St. Louis as he works with a river barge demolition team and then melts down the scrap steel into molten metal."

Cool, huh?

I first saw mention of the episode on the Post Dispatch's website, StLToday.com, in a story titled 'Barging In'.

Times like this almost make me wish I had cable. But, let's face it, I don't get away from the pc enough to watch enough television to make the expense worth it.
If I really feel the need to veg, I can just pull up joost.

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FMDesktop tip: Keep it clean

FMDesktop's Facility Manager component is a CAFM program, but, we should remember that a CAFM program is primarily a database. One which is being constantly written to.

FMDesktop can be selected for a couple of different database backends, but, in my case, I chose MS Access, since that is what I'm currently using for other purposes, and where I've gotten my training.

So, I just wanted to post a little housekeeping tip for FMD. Check out your database file through Windows Explorer (FMData.mdb).

Open up the mdb file with Access, select Tools > Database Utilities > Compact and Repair Database (we AutoCAD users can think of this operation as being similar to the 'Purge' command).

You can see that after I run this utility to tidy things up, I've shrunk my file to less than a quarter of it's previous size.

I try to remember to do this every couple of weeks, but, you might want to make it a weekly event if you access your database frequently.

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Apologies to my E-Mail subscribers?

Awhile back, there was a problem during the Blogger upgrades, where most of my posts and all of my tags and new formatting went missing.

Blogger, wonderful folks that they are, restored my posts, but, not the rest of my changes. I had gone back to re-tag many of my posts, and my husband redid my site formatting.

But, any posts that hadn't been edited do not have any tags or the new tools (such as an 'email this' and 'subscribe to this post' and 'search for related content in this sphere'). So, I am going back and republishing each post to enable these capabilities.

I sincerely apologize if this causes them to be resent to my email subscribers (I'm not sure if those are sent out upon publishing/re-publishing, or upon initial posting), please bear with me. I believe I'm almost halfway through the update at this point.

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Engineering Movies and TV Shows Online

Check this out... 72 TV shows and over 200 movies relating to or about Engineering! Including my favorite, Extreme Engineering. Sweet.

Find out more about Fancast on their FAQ page... sorry, I'd summarize it for you, but, I'm about to go watch some episodes of CSI.

Here's a list of full episodes you can watch online.

EDIT: This is a cute parody I just saw, instead of 'Gangster's Paradise' it's 'Engineering Paradise'  
( http://youtu.be/Y0DxmthvkKU ) 

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