Frustration with Autodesk University Registration

After spending more time with the AU registration website and helping others from my office use it, I’m feeling a little embarrassed about my comments from the other day. Although I really liked being able to build my schedule so easily, I’m getting really frustrated with the login problems the site seems to be having. The praise I posted in the survey they presented seems a little too glowing for the experience I’ve had since then.

Shortly after signing up I learned that a few other guys from my office were also given approval to go, so we got together to look at the class schedule and get everyone signed up. I had lots of positive remarks about how easy the registration website was and recommended that everyone check it out. Upon doing so we ended up in what seemed like an infinite loop of trying to login, getting bumped out, trying again, loosing the session, and so on. After about 6-8 tries, we finally made it into the system, found a class to enroll in, and clicked the button to get on the list. Suddenly we were logged out again and had to go through the whole process over again. It’s been that way ever since and quite frankly some of us are about ready to pull our hair out.

Perhaps its something with our firewall, or who knows what else, but something’s definately gone wrong there. Some bold red text on the login page states that pressing the back button can cause problems as well, which seems to indicate they have some kind of problem preserving the session. I seem to remember having similar problems with some of the sites we’ve developed in-house, but they were soon resolved with some attention paid to the way a session was stored on the server. Whatever it is, I hope they can get it figured out soon – the site is great, but it’s really frustrating to use when you can’t stay logged in.

Healing Field @ Temple Square, Busy Week for SLC

With the American Legion Convention here in town this week, there’s currently a Healing Field setup on Temple Square with hundreds of flags. I went down yesterday during lunch and took a photo or two.

Looks like Utah may be in the news a lot this week, what with the arrest of Warren Jeffs, Secretaries Rumsfeld and Rice speaking today, multiple rallies planned for tomorrow, including one with Cindy Sheehan. This could be interesting.

Registering for Autodesk University

I just finished registering for my classes at Autodesk University. Looks like it’s going to be a busy week. I’ve signed up for a total of 14 courses, and will be learning about stuff ranging from BIM (Building Information Modelling) to website development with DWF drawings, to programming AutoCAD with .NET. I think it’ll be a worthwhile trip.

I thought I’d mention how much I liked the scheduling interface they used. Every time I’ve put together a class schedule like this in the past, it’s been complicated and usually the website is not very helpful. For AU they had a handy little schedule that you simply clicked open spaces, and chose from a list of available course. A survey popped up at the end and I tried to post some comments about how helpful I found this.

One thing was a little disappointing, though – I guess I waited a little too long to get myself registered because by time I finally had everyone’s approval (boss, wife, etc…) the Venetian was full and they were scheduling rooms in the Flamingo instead. I clicked the option to be put on the waiting list, though, so maybe there’s still a chance…..we’ll see.

Troubles in Northern Ireland

A Windows Live Local collection posted yesterday to the location sharing website, PassThePoi, really caught my attention. “History of Northern Ireland’s Troubles” identifies the locations of several key events in the history of that country and included extra information, photos and links about them all. It’s a fascinating way to learn things, and this has been one of many collections that I’ve enjoyed from that site.

Having served an LDS mission in Ireland, I found this collection particularly interesting because it finally answered some questions I had about some of the things I saw over there. For example, for three months I was in the city Londonderry (or Derry, depending on who you talk to), and lived less than a mile away from the Bogside neighborhood. As we walked around the city, we saw many murals depicting what had happened there, and occasionally people would bring up bits of the story, or the resulting conflict, in our conversations with them. I was fascinated by the history, but never really understood it as much as I’d like to, as our focus was obviously on something else at the time.

After looking through this collection, and reading about “Battle of the Bogside” and “Bloody Sunday,” it all finally started to come together. I had no idea that it had all started right there….that Bogside was essentially the flashpoint that sparked much of the troubles that Ulster was still suffering from. I’m grateful for all the helpful information that people have compiled, in Wikipedia articles and Flickr photo clusters especially, to help folks like me piece all this together.

For two short weeks of my mission, I was assigned to the beautiful town of Omagh. I remember walking up and down those streets and having some very interesting gospel discussions with the people there. In August of 1998, shortly after returning home, I watched in horror the news reports of the bombing that took place there in the city center, in what looked to be an area that I had passed by several times only months before. I was glad to learn, however, that this event was somewhat of a turning point in the troubles – that people condemned the act, rather than retaliating against it. It’s great to see that Northern Ireland seems to be moving on. I realize that there are still some wrinkles that are yet to be worked out, and that there will probably still be issues, but it seems that for the most part, things are better. I can only hope that I might be able to return there someday and enjoy that beautiful country and all it’s amazing scenery and fascinating people once again.

Testing Windows Live Writer

The new Windows Live Writer tool that Microsoft released this weekend looks promising. I read about it this evening on Mike Torres’ blog and decided to download it and give it a try – in fact I’m using it now to write this post. So far I’m really liking it and will probably start using it for all my posts for both this blog as well as a personal/family blog I have on Windows Live Spaces. I’ve used tools like this before, such as w.Bloggar, a tool written by Robert McLaws called VisualBlogger and even the new blogging feature that’s built into Word 2007, and all have been really quite helpful. I’ll give this one a try and see how well it works.

One thing that I’m really excited about is the API possibilities that Mike Torres talked about, including the ability to have a plugin that enables drag & drop adding of photos stored on Flickr. Whenever I include Flickr pictures like that now, it usually involves a lot of hand-coded HTML in order to get it to show up the way I want it. I hope that plug-in gets written pretty soon. In the meantime, I’ll keep using the tool and see how well it works – I’m thinking it just might save me a bunch of time & frustration.

Amazing HDR Photography

While browsing through Flickr’s “interestingness” pages this evening, enjoying all the amazing photography featured in there, I came upon a term that I hadn’t ever seen before: HDR. All the really amazing sunset photos, for example, were tagged with it, so naturally I was curious.

With a little help from Wikipedia, I learned that HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and is a set of techniques for allowing for a wider, more dynamic range of exposure, thus causing the varying intensities between sunlight and dark shadows to be more accurately represented. Basically, it’s like taking a series of bracketed photos (where you take the same photo repeatedly, over and under-exposing by at least one stop in each direction) and instead of simply picking the best-looking one, you use software to intelligently merge together all the best bits of the whole set. You tend to end up drawing out more of the dark darks, and the bright lights, and get an even more stunning representation of color that way.  LifeOfAGeek has a better explanation and a tutorial of how to create an HDR image in Adobe Photoshop CS2 here.

It’s been a several months since I’ve spent this much time perusing Flickr, but I’m surprised that this new technique has gained so much popularity since then. (Although, it’s also very possible that I just didn’t notice it before….LOL.) Nevertheless, I’m now subscribed to the Flickr RSS feed for photos tagged with HDR, and will definitely want to go try taking some of my own sometime soon.  In the mean time, there’s also a ton of great HDR samples in Trey Ratcliff’s “The Variety of HDR Photography” photoset to enjoy.

Autodesk University

I’ve been getting emails and reading various comments on blogs about the upcoming Autodesk University (AU), to be held this year at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas from November 28th to December 1st. Apparently early-bird registration opened this week, and course offerings and schedules have recently been made available on their website. It looks like it’s going to be another great event.

I learned about AU only three or so years ago and have wanted to attend ever since. It’s an event where users of Autodesk products (AutoCAD, Revit, Architectural Desktop, VIZ, Building Systems, etc.) get together for training, networking, new product announcements, etcetera. Like any large conference, it looks like a lot of fun (just take a look at Shaan Hurley’s photos from last year, which was held in Orlando Florida). On years I haven’t attended, I’ve usually watched closely all the info that gets blogged about, and have usually found it pretty interesting. I’m not sure if there’s $$$ in the budget for me to go this year either, but I think it would be a great experience. Already there’s been a bunch of talk around the office about who might be able to go.

If I do end up going, one thing I’ll be looking into with interest is how people have reacted to Autodesk’s decision to change the DWG format once again for their 2007 product line. Our office has hesitated to adopt these because of problems sharing effectively sharing files created in them with anyone else who doesn’t have version 2007. Sure, you can convert drawings to an earlier format using DWG TrueConvert, but if you’ve used any intelligent objects such as walls, doors, windows, intelligent schedules, etc., they’ll be converted to plain geometry. To me that’s just a big waste of time & effort.

I’ve heard complaints that this has been the case for a few earlier releases as well, and I suppose it’s just part of adding new features to the product, but I still wish there was a better way. I really like the approach that Microsoft has taken with the new file format they’re introducing for Office 12 – they’ve actually released a compatibility pack for earlier versions that enable them to use the new format. I realize I’m probably just dreaming when I wish Autodesk would follow suit and do something like that with their CAD products, I guess it doesn’t hurt to dream.

Another New Blog

Here’s yet another WordPress blog – I’ve set it up thinking that I’d like to start blogging again.  I have ideas for posts on a variety of different topics such as web programming, databases, interesting ways my church is using the web, CAD and other design tools, and so forth.  I like the features that WordPress has to offer, so I thought I’d give it a try.  Stay tuned….