boom boom boom boom

From SFGATE: (03-28) 12:15 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Shoppers in San Francisco's Union Square got a shock this morning when a manhole cover on Grant Avenue blew off and sailed into the air. No one was injured by the blast, which was caused by the failure of an underground power cable at about 9:45 a.m., said Brian Swanson, spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The cover landed a few feet from the hole, he said. Grant Avenue between Post Street and Campton Place is still closed. No power was lost, but repairs to the cable are expected to continue until tonight. - Will Kane

And it's not the first one either. PG&E is not having a good time of it recently. I'm surprised there is not a google app of exploding manholes, a free walking tour of exploding manholes, or the ever popular hipster treasure hunt of exploding manholes.

Revit Architecture 2011

I should probably go and get certified.

It shouldn't take too much effort, I'll need to go look up a few things and practice a little for the professional section of the exam. And then I should be good to go.

Reminder

Another Whine, You Know While I'm Here

Still learning about pivot tables, do we spent an hour working on pivot tables or do we spend 5 minutes on pivot tables, 40 minutes on formating a report because its cool if the date is right justified, and 15 minutes talking about the teacher's dog?

Training and a Note to Self

I'm sitting in a class at the local city college, keeping my MS Access toasty warm, watching teachers teach and students study.

I've done my own bit of teaching software applications, not Access, but fairly complex programs to a wide range of levels of users, not completely unlike this scenario. I hope I do not teach in this way.

As an example of what I would consider a poor method of learning is the kind of rote intructions we are following with the regard to pivot tables. I know how to create a pivot table in Access and Excel but the majority of the class do not. I'm nort sure the majoroty of the class know what a pivot table is or what it does and the teacher is doing nothing to explain.

The teacher simply instruts the students to go to database tools, view the relationships, add the junction and additional tables, create the links between primary keys, but doesn't explain why, she simply keeps repeating that this is difficult stuff.

Obviously its difficult(-ish), but there's no need to make it more difficult to remember steps by not explaining why these steps are taken. There is no way to better way to prevent students from missing steps than explaining why a step needs to be taken and what the effects will be on future steps should a step be missed.

Augi World February

As you all are probably aware, AutoCAD® Civil 3D® is built on top of Autodesk® Map 3D®, and Map 3D is built on top of AutoCAD®, so Civil 3D has all of its own functionality plus the functions of the other two separate pieces of software.

Now Civil 3D can’t really be used without using some of the commands and functions of AutoCAD. We still draw basic objects, we still plot and use layers. The list of AutoCAD tools is enormous in itself, and then we add all of the civil-specific functions and we have an enormous number of tools at our disposal. This leads me to the biggest reason why we tend to overlook all of the

Map functions at our disposal: We may be overwhelmed with tools and commands, even before we start to explore all of the functionality that Map has to offer!

Civil 3D Guide to 10 Map 3D Tools

• Tool 1 – Coordinates
  
• Tool 2 – Drawing Cleanup
  
• Tool 3 – Inserting Raster Images
  
• Tool 4 – Source Drawing Queries
  
• Tool 5 – Attribute Data
  
• Tool 6 – Object Classification
  
• Tool 7 – Stylizing features
  
• Tool 8 – Map Import
  
• Tool 9 – Map Books
  
• Tool 10 – Feature Object Data
  

Really? I mean, really? There are Civil 3D Users who do not, and do not know how to use Map 3D. Next you'll be telling me there are Civil Engineers who do not know how to to use Civil 3D (or InRoads, or both).

Gentlemen, put away those slide rules, for we have a new tool, its called a c-a-l-c-u-l-a-t-o-r.

Happy New Year