Mastering AutoCAD 2013 and AutoCAD LT 2013

The complete tutorial and reference to the world's leading CAD program, Mastering AutoCAD 2013 and AutoCAD LT 2013, is available and I helped to update it!  This book (1200 pages) covers everything in AutoCAD 2013 and AutoCAD LT 2013.  Mastering AutoCAD 2013 is the Autodesk Official Training Guide and Autodesk Certification Preparation manual for AutoCAD 2013.  It is published by Sybex, an imprint of Wiley, and is available in Paper Back or eBook.  It is fully illustrated and comes with a CD containing example files and bonus material.

Practical Jokes in AutoCAD

This is a true and funny story.  Have you ever played a practical joke on somebody that was using AutoCAD?  Like, turn off the PICKFIRST variable?  Or press CTRL+0 as you were casually walking by their workstation?  How about altering their PGP file?  Last weekend, while I was working on my next training video, I scripted and recorded a section on how to edit the PGP file in AutoCAD.  The PGP file defines the command aliases for AutoCAD.  It lets everyone know that if you type L on the command line, that AutoCAD will start the LINE command.  In the video I suggested that you play a trick on somebody and change it so that every time they type L, the Plot Manager opens!  Today, working on my videos again, I kept typing L and the plot manager opens!  It took me three tries until I remembered what i did, to myself!  that might have been the first time I played an AutoCAD trick on myself!

Happy CADDING!

AutoCAD Fundamentals Training Video now Available

AutoCAD Fundamentals

AutoCAD Fundamentals

AutoCAD is an industry standard design and documentation software program that is easy to learn, but complex to master. In this video training CD, expert author Brian Benton takes you through the fundamentals of AutoCAD and gives you the tools you need to be on your way to becoming a fully functioning AutoCAD user. Starting with the basics of installation, Brian quickly teaches you the basics, and then dives right into applying them, with a chapter project that reviews everything you have learned in each section. Using a hands on approach, Brian allows you to more quickly learn how to apply the material, increasing your retention and understanding of AutoCAD. By the completion of this over 9.5 hour tutorial, you will be familiar and comfortable with AutoCAD, and capable of drawing, decorating and annotating an AutoCAD project. Also included are work files to allow you to work along side the author, and further understand what he is showing you, step by step.

Click here to Purchase this training Video

What You Will Learn

Google Sketchup Model Your Town Competition

I'm a CAD guy. I know, it's hard to believe, but I am. I love making things in CAD, it's how I roll. 3D CAD is very cool too. I also like Google. I use several of their products. One that I haven't used as much is Google Sketchup. I've toyed with it a bit here and there over the years but I have never done any serious work with it. Until now!

I have decided to through my hat in the ring in Google's latest competition, Model Your Town. Essentially this contest is a brilliant way for Google to increase their meager 3D Building content on Google earth for free! Or for at least at the cost of a party for the winner, some press, and a $10,000 tax deduction in the form of a check to the winners home town school! It's a great idea.

Modelers basically have until March 1st to submit their models. they have to be simple enough for Google Earth, yet accurate. they also have to have realistic photo renderings on them. So they have to actually look like the buildings from your town. And, you have to provide meta data for each building.

Easy enough right? If it were just one or two buildings then it would be a piece of cake. Or if it were just random CAD Gurus from here and there, I'd have a huge shot at winning! After all, I've been using CAD for 16 years now! But it seems that cities from all over the world are getting into it! Not to mention that big architectural firms are jumping in too! At last count, it seems that there are at least 200+ entries at the time I am writing this!

The good news is that you can form a team to do your work. So, my son and i are teaming up on this project to try and win 10 grand for the school in our town. It also seems that other teams consist of Architectural firms, or what you might call "experts". We are feeling a bit like David amongst several world wide Goliaths here, but that's ok with us because David one with a single stone.

Spot's Trip to San Francisco

Well, as you may have read I spent a few days in San Francisco last week. When I got there, I found a note in my bag from my daughter. She added a little toy lizard, named Spot, and asked me to take pictures of him on "his" trip. So I did and here they are.

In his first picture shown, Spot is sitting on the ledge of the balcony from his room. This view is looking towards the bay at the ferry station in downtown San Francisco. Spot enjoyed his stay there and looks forward to going back.


The next picture shows Spot looking out the window at the same view. He enjoyed looking out at the city of San Francisco.
On the left, Spot is looking out yet another window at his hotel towards downtown San Fran. The picture he took is a little blurry, but in his defense, it was raining that day, as it was most days he was there.


You can see the busy lifestyles that many San Franciscians (spell check doesn't know what to do with that word) live. Spot comes from a little town, so he was fascinated by the "big city." But he loved it and wants to visit again.









It was raining a lot on Spot's trip, but he braved some of the elements on his last day. He didn't know where he wanted to go so he checked out a local map. Should he go to the Golden Gate Bridge or visit "The Rock"?
Before he set out on the town, Spot needed nourishment. He loved all of the local shops and restaurants. There were so many that he had difficulty choosing. He settled for a nice place that wasn't as busy as some of the others. He was not disappointed.
There were so many things to see just outside the hotel. The city has several pieces of art on display for visitors to see and enjoy. This is but one of them.




Spot hitched a ride with me on my visit to Autodesk's office in San Francisco. He met several other "lizard" folk and quickly made new friends. The picture on the left is Spot's new friend. He didn't get his/her name, but it is one of the exhibits on display in Autodesk's office. There are many, but Spot particularly enjoyed seeing this giant Lego block Dinosaur. It is a fine work of engineering and tons of fun to create.








Spot made a second friend at the office. During our tour of the Autodesk Labs products, we met and made a new friend on their Touch Screen Display. We were able to interface with this fascinating technology using Autodesk Mudbox to manipulate a model of a lizard. Spot couldn't reach the screen to try it himself, but he cheered me on when I manipulated the model and when I changed it's colors, etc. Touch technology is fantastic and exciting. It holds a lot of potential for thhe design world.

Well, the rain finally got to spot. He's a lizzard and prefers the dry heat, not the soggyness of a constant drizzle. In fact, for a minute, it strated to rain very hard and he needed to check his e-mail. He uses Mozilla by the way, evidently it's a lizzard thing.

He also likes coffie, so we ducked into a local Starbucks for some shelter and a mocha. It wasn't hard to find a Starbucks because as Donnie gladfelter said "there's one at the top and bottom of every hill, and in the middle." We kept getting lost because of them. We thought we were walking in circles because every corner had a Starbucks. Spot thought he was walking in circles and kept seeing the same one over and over again, but he wasn't. One word of advise when visting San Francisco, don't use Starbucks as a landmark!




Spot wants to thank you all ofr sharing his trip pictures with him. He had a great time and wants to visit again.

I am the (a) chosen One!!

No, I'm not Neo from the Matrix. Nor am I miraculously imbued with a higher midichlorian count than Master Yoda (though I am looking for a second opinion on that one). The gracious, or perhaps the delusional (at least slightly confused), people at Autodesk have chosen me to be a Speaker at Autodesk University 2008! YAY ME!! To bad for the class attendees!

Enough about me, lets talk about my class. The class name is "Creating and Maintaining a CAD Manual." Pretty deep huh? This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. Standards, CAD Standards; You know them, love them, hate them, and crave them all at the same time. We won't look at creating a standard, but instead we will look at taking the standards you already have and organize them. Perhaps a few standards will be needed here and there, but for the most part, some sort of standard or rule of thumb are already set in place.

My class will be help on Thursday (December 4th) at 8:15 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. I hope you are all morning people! Somebody please bring me a Starbucks! Venti!! Sign up for my class. If I don't have at least 20 people register Autodesk will cancel my class!! We don't want that. By we I mean me and my wife. For teaching a class, Autodesk lets me in for free!! Oh the power!! But if my class is canceled, well, there goes the perks and all of a sudden I have to pay to get in!! OUCH!! To me its only money, I can always make more.

Anyway, I am very excited to be going to AU and to be Speaking. If you aren't going then shame on you. If you are, then come to my class. We'll hang out, have fun, talk CAD, whatever. After class you can buy me lunch!! Just kidding.

Happy CADDING!!!

Cadalyst Magazine Luanches CAD Tip Web site!

CAD-a-Blog Exclusive!

Cadalyst Magazine will be launching a new feature, CAD Tips. This is a collection of all of their CAD Tips they have received over the years! Right now it is still in Beta, but will be released around the 9th of July to the public. Upon it’s unveiling, there will be nearly 1800 tips available to browse and search through. These tips come from the Hot Tip Harry column. Cadalyst has plans to add their other tips on a later date.

This new feature will work similarly to a wiki, but not exactly. You will be able to add your own tips, comment and tag other tips, etc. Many of them have LISP or VBA files that you can download and use. The nice thing about this website is that all of the tips will be in one place making it easier to find them.

I am very familiar with the content of this project as I was fortunate enough to be able to work with Cadalyst on it. I helped with the initial tagging of the tips, and other CAD related concepts. I started to tag the newest tips and worked my way back in time. It was very interesting to see the needs and wants of CAD users and how they approached solving different issues. Many of the tips and routines preformed tasks that Autodesk later added to AutoCAD as a main feature. My favorite tip, and one of the oldest, that I came across was a tip on how to take care of Plotter Pins!!! Do any of you use a pin plotter today? Most of the older tips seemed to help in aligning text (remember when all we had was DTEXT?)

Because of my involvement, Cadalyst has given me the go ahead to let CAD-a-Blog readers in on this new secret a few days earlier than the rest of the world! The site is up and running. Just go to it, sign up (it’s free) and take a look. Rank some tips, tag some tips, submit your own, etc. Keep in mind that it is still in Beta Form and you might run into a few snags. If you do, feel free to e-mail those issues to: webmaster@cadalyst.com

Before I forget, here is the address for the new site: http://cadtips.cadalyst.com/

Enjoy this bit of news and enjoy it before the rest of the world does!

Subscribe to CAD-a-Blog

Several readers of CAD-a-Blog already subscribe to it's feed or e-mail alerts. Other readers have found us by accident, or word of mouth, or more accurately, word of shared links! This is great, I welcome everyone to the blog. Come early and come often. Leave a comment, send me an e-mail, I love to hear from you.

If you are interested in receiving alerts and feed notifications whenever a blog entry is posted, use the items below to sign up. It's free, it's easy, and there are lots of great tips about AutoCAD, Impression, and designing in general. So jump on board CAD-a-Blog. Sign up today.

Happy CADDING

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AUGI Article - Design Review (I wrote it)

AUGI was kind enough to post another article of mine. This one talks about Autodesk Design Review. If you are a member of AUGI, click the link. If you aren't a member of AUGI, click the link anyway and join. It's free!!!

If you want to see what's new in Design Review 2009, take a look at my blog where I give it a review.

Happy CADDING!

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Guest Blog for CAD-a Blog

I would like to give a thanks to Shaan Hurley of Autodesk for allowing me to be a guest blogger for his blog, Between the Lines. In case you missed it here is a link, Shaan Hurley.

Shaan is the Technical Marketing Mgr. & Worldwide My Feedback Mgr. at Autodesk ,Inc. He has a great blog that has many useful tips and interesting information. I wanted to say thank you to Shaan. And if there is anyone out there that would like a guest blogger let me know, perhaps I could write something for you.

The most comments that I have received about the guest blog was, "Hey Brian nice post, did you here the Oscar Myer song in Spanish?" I think most people scrolled through my article and immediately picked up on Shaan's postings about the seeing the Wiener mobile.

Oh well, how can only expect to compete with that right?

Happy CADDING?

The Back of My Head!!

Lynn Allen posted a picture of her presentation at my LUG on her blog today

http://lynn.blogs.com/lynn_allens_blog/

I'm in the picture, top left area, but all you can see is the back of my head. Lynn is up front, very tinny in the picture.

Check out this Holiday Movie staring my cad crew. Enjoy.

Non-Crappy Starring You! eCards on JibJab

Seeing as there is a trend to create our CAD User Simpson Avatar, I, like the good lemming that I am, have joined in on the "fun." the biggest problem is that I think this avatar is better looking than I am.

My First Post

So I did it. I have started a blog. Why? Why not. I am trying to start something new for me here. I don't know much but I know CAD. I am good with computers (good enough anyway to be dangerous.) I am trying to establish myself as a technical writer. I have found many resources on the internet that I hope will help me.
I have no idea how often I will post something here. If I am lucky, every day! I think that's a little ambitious. In reality if I can post once to twice a week i will be very happy. If I can get some decent traffic through here that will be even better.
If you read my brief bio on the side bar there, then you know I have been using AutoCAD for a while now. When I first started everyone in the engineering department called me "kid." I was 19 years old at the time. Now I am 33 (I had to think about that for a second) and the "old timer." In my office here I have the most cad experience. Everywhere else I worked the users had similar experience. I enjoy this position. I give advise and instruction daily. That's why I am the Senior Engineering CAD Tech where I work. Basically I am the CAD Manager here without the title. I manage people, the software, standards, etc. I had the distinct pleasure of leading the team that created the company's first CAD Standards Manual. That was fun, let me tell you. No really, it was. I enjoyed it. I think I enjoy being able to say that I lead the team. It does wonders for my ego.

I could go on forever (you will see) so I'll stop now before I make one monstrous blog and have nothing else to say.