Autodesk University 2024 - The Old Revit Gang

 

Yesterday I made a quick road trip to San Diego to attend a breakfast gathering of the "old Revit gang" that were attending this year's Autodesk University. Jim Balding, center in red kneeling, organized it all. He expected 15 people might actually be able to attend we nearly doubled that number.

Some of these people helped create Revit from nothing, used Revit very very early, are still working on Revit or with Autodesk now as well as either working in or have created their own companies inspired by and to do things that enhance what Revit does...or some combination of all of the above. Put the names of the people you know/recognize in the comments. It's a test, haha.

While wandering the conference after our breakfast meeting, I got to see many other people, who have meant a great deal to me through the years. Later that evening I also got to briefly catch up with an old friend who was mixing the audio for the evening's entertainment, Counting Crows. It was a great day!

My hats off to you all, keep on keep on!

Radio Buttons

Software developers have a lot of tools to manage how we interact with their handiwork. Radio Buttons are one such tool or concept.

They are NOT named because of their shape or appearance.

The name is derived from the way radio station selection worked on car radios, more consistent with older car radios perhaps than current technology (image found at Web Developer AtlanticBT).

For what it is worth, if you do an image search for "radio button" you won't see anything car or radio related, just a lot of examples of software using this radio button concept. If you search for "car radio button" you'll probably find the image I found above.

When you press a button for your favorite station whatever station was selected gives way to your new selection, only one station can play at a time. The same is true for these so called Radio Buttons in Revit. Whenever you encounter a button like these only one can be selected at a time.

How's that for a little pursuit of trivia?

Personal Revit Milestone

I got an email asking about AutoCAD support the other day which set me thinking. I realized that I have been using Revit for as long as I used AutoCAD day to day. My journey with AutoCAD started in 1994 with R12 on DOS. I stopped seriously using it (ACAD/ADT) in 2003 and switched over to Revit. So that's nine years with AutoCAD and nine with Revit. Technically I was using Revit since 2000, but for this I am not counting the first two years since it wasn't my full time work. Some overlap existed naturally, but I've reached the "tipping point".

1K Run

I started this blog on November 19th of 2004 with a really exciting post stating my curiosity about blogging and deciding to dabble. Tonight as I was trying to catch up on nearly a hundred blog posts by more than a dozen other bloggers I noticed that this blog has 999 subscribers. Just one more reader to subscribe and push this blog to the 1K mark. As of tonight, this post is number 881 since then.

I'm flattered that so many have subscribed. I was flattered when it was just 5, 50...100. There have been times when I've been busy and my dedication flagged. I get apathetic or uninspired routinely like anyone else. Ultimately the fact that there are people who like the blog keeps me coming back to it.

Thanks for the ride! I had no idea when I started it how much fun it could really be. All the best!!

Off Topic - Twitter Data Comparisons

I've been reading a thread at Linked In (in the BIM Experts group) lately that started out with the premise that people who use/chose Revit only did so because of the influence of Autodesk and that they most likely already used one of their products, namely AutoCAD. The assumption is that if they hadn't been stuck or biased for this selection and had given other applications a fair chance...they'd have chosen something other than Revit. The thread was started by an ArchiCAD proponent and it is the software most represented by other responses, other than Revit. One person supports Bentley's products in the discussion. Technically there are only a handful of respondents and naturally everyone believes they are correct.

I stayed out of the discussion except when the subject of using Remote Desktop Server technology like discussed in the "BIM and the Cloud" article was brought up. It was published at AECBytes and mentioned in an earlier post. It's my opinion that the way it was mentioned, as it relates to Revit, in the thread wasn't accurate. It's my opinion that every aspect of a firm's technology infrastructure stands to benefit from the technology and that it also supports scattered Revit project teams and staff is a win/win.

This evening I was reading the post at the Harvard Business Blog post regarding Twitter and data visualization. I thought I'd use these four Twitter data mining tools to see how Revit and Archicad compare in the Twitterverse. I don't think they are particularly meaningful or even useful, but they make nice images? All four of these examples are hosted at Neoformix. The site title reads, "Discovering and Illustrating Patterns in Data".

This is from Twitter Venn. Use three words to see how they stack up in tweets. ArchiCAD includes the acronym CAD so I'm not sure how much is the complete word or just factoring CAD. I'm not trying to discount the product but the other two words are harder to find used in other common usage. BIM clearly is hotter! The image remind me of a microscope's view of bacteria on a slide and if so clearly BIM is a more active virus.

This one is from Twitter Spectrum. Enter two values and see the related terms found for each keyword. Interesting that NEW is part of the Revit collection and PASSIVE is part of ArchiCAD, though I suspect it isn't passive, as in the opposite of aggressive, rather passive solar energy. I suppose that ArchiCAD proponents might agree that the marketing of the product has been passive considering how quickly Revit has grown in less than half its lifespan.

This one is from TwitArcs. Enter two keywords and see the arcs created by the tweets for each. Clearly Revit wins this comparison though from the few arcs on the other side it appears that they are referring to CAD.

The last two are from Twitter Stream Graphs. These use one keyword and provides the results from the last 1,000 posts. Not sure what to garner from these two though, pretty pictures!

I suppose the title of the blog indicates which side of the fence I fell on? Added this a couple days later. After reading Seth Godin's post, Moving the Line which product has been more successful in the role of "zealot"?

Bad Math and Construction

I was recently in a client's office that was having some equipment related issues in their men's bathroom. This involved some ceiling and wall alteration. While I was in the bathroom at one point I noticed this where some wall tile had been removed.

The correction is mine (red rectangle), in pencil naturally, I don't want to be accused of vandalism!

The last time I checked a calculator 40 + 56 = 96, not 106. When you add 29 to 96 you get 125, not 135. At least the harder multiplication of 14 x 4 = 56 is correct. I'm terrible at math...really bad...but even I caught this error. That's really bad when Mr. OpEd catches your math error!!

Well, maybe they were just building in a percentage for waste?

Off Topic: Videos of Curtain Walls are Most Popular

Last fall I posted two videos about curtain wall techniques, one about louver panels and the other about butt glazing at corners. I posted the louver video on September 11th and it has been watched 1220 times as of tonight making it the most watched video of those that I've posted so far. The butt glazing video was posted on October 13th and it has been watched 909 times putting it in second place.

The third and fourth place videos are about stairs, both about Dutch winder stairs, 745 and 633 views respectively. The race between these four videos seems to have settled into a steady pace...1,2,3 & 4 as they haven't changed their pecking order since.

I wrote about this back in November just a bit before attending Autodesk University. A comment by Elisa suggested that they'd hit 1K before AU. In fact the louver panel video did crest 1k a day or so after AU. I didn't figure out how to award a prize sorry. I also mentioned that there were 734 subscribers and that's risen to 837 as of tonight. Slow and steady...that's me, Mr. Turtle in "this race", whatever race this is. 8-)

I know this sort of trivia is probably meaningless to anyone other than me but I find it interesting to see how these short little videos attract attention. I suppose if the videos were about someone falling exotically down a mountainside while skiing I'd have a million views by now but then I'm not going for a wide audience with a blog about Revit...am I? That's all the trivia I'll indulge in for now, thanks!

Structure - Travelogue

I try not to dabble or indulge my personal stuff on this blog too much, apart from Revit being my personal thing, but I was wandering around downtown Billings, Montana (Big Sky Country) the last couple of evenings and passed this structure a couple times. The second time by, tonight, I felt compelled to snap a couple of "pitchurs".


This structure is known as Sky Point and I was pleasantly surprised to find it on Wikipedia. My client informed me of the name so that certainly helped my Google search effort! The structure has a couple of "leaves" that can swing out to fully cover the street intersection. It is in its compact state in the "pitchurs"...


So whose going to model it in Revit Structure for "fun"?

Fun facts:
Tallest column: 73 Feet
2 Shortest columns: 28 Feet
Sails: 3
Completed: April 2002
Dedicated: May 2002

One more for the road...