HEEP 2011 Day Two

Busy day today at HEEP full slate of presentations on 3 separate tracks.  Started the morning learning about Wisconsin DOT Move to model based design and ended it with my 2nd presentation of the day titled "Engineering Technology of the future - Today (or why isn't anyone selling this stuff?).  In between I gave a presentation on social Media and DOTs, attended several sessions on using LIDAR and point clouds, along with cloud computing and aerial surveying.

I think the two best ones (other than mine) were the Wisconsin presentation and the Caltrans presentation on their use of LIDAR.  Say what you want about Caltrans but I they seem to know how to use technology.  Off to a Bentley forum in a few minutes so check back in later in the week for more info.

Day One HEEP 2011

The first day of the the 51st annual HEEP meeting is done at least the official meeting part.  The vendor reception starts in about a half hour followed by the hospitality room where the real exchange of information takes place.

While attendance is down a bit this year,  partly due to state budget and travel restriction, along with the need to have a passport to travel to Canada we still have 16 states and provinces represented, along with 6 countries. Not to bad for a down year.  As usual the real technical sessions start on Tuesday.  Today was devoted to organization business, student presentations and meeting with vendors.

 I will say that this years crop of students gave the best presentations that I have seen in my past 23 years of attending HEEP.  Congratulation to them all on their presentation skills and topics.  While we won't know the winner until Thursday they should all be proud of the their efforts.  The results of the competition and more information about the presentations will be posted on the HEEP website next week ( www.heep.org). If you weren't able to attend this year you can follow some of the action with twitter at the #heep hastag.  That's it for now (off to the vendor hall).

What have you done with CADD Lately?

So what have you done with CADD today?  I’ll bet no one has asked you that question in a while.   Which is a shame because it is a question that we need to ask and answer continually?  CADD (and notice I use the double D’s) is an acronym for Computer Aided DESIGN & Drafting.  Twenty some years ago CADD was a new and exciting field that held (in my opinion) great promise and adventure.  Yes I meant adventure because CADD was going to free the engineers and designers to explore new and exciting designs and alternatives.  It was going to as I once wrote turn us into Leonardo Di Vinci. 

Unfortunately it didn’t quite turn out that way.  It seems if you look around CADD became just an electronic pencil.  Yes it did give us a quick way to produce cross-sections and it made all of our lettering readable but it didn’t create more designs or even less paper (my best guess we use at least 3-5 times more sheets of paper than we did before CADD).  This might not be so bad if we were creating 3-5 times more designs and design options but alas we aren’t.

The paper issue points out one simple thing that everyone could do with CADD but generally don’t.  That is review, mark up and distribute information electronically rather than always producing a hard copy then distributing it.  Unfortunately old habits die hard. 

MicroStation has hundreds of commands how many do you use, 10, 20 maybe even 30?  That unfortunately just scratches the surface of the product.  With the most recent SS1 version Bentley moved around some commands along with adding new menus and palettes.  Rather than complain about the changes (which is our first reaction) think of it as a chance to explore the MicroStation interface and learn some new tricks.  Try out some new commands, open up the MicroStation Help file and see what’s new and how you might use them to do your work in a different way.

The next time someone asks you what you have done with CADD I hope you can tell them about something new you have discovered.  

(note: this post will also appear in the Nov. Issue of the NCDOT CADD News [but I liked so much after writing it] that I thought it would make a good blog post hope you enjoy it too.)

One condo, four people and eight computers

It dawned on me this morning that my family has brought on vacation  1 laptop, 3 net books and and 4 smart phones with us on vacation.  In other words we have 8 computers for 4 people.  It seems like just yesterday we were sharing one PC in the basement with a dial up connection.  Now we each have a wireless computer and 3g connected smart phone. So I guess you could say we are a "connected" family.  The last time we were all on vacation together we took turns checking email on my wife's old dell 2600 laptop.  Now I use my phone more for email and text messaging than I do for phone calls.   So are we a normal/modern family? or an high tech anomaly?  What do you think?

Note from Frankfurt, Germany

I'm a bit closer too home.  Made it to Frankfurt without any trouble and out to the holiday inn express just about as easily.  Funny I had to go to Germany to stay at a holiday Inn express but now that I am a priority club member maybe I can get the state rate in NC.

While I was at dinner (outside) I started to notice all the jets overhead and how different it was just a couple of days ago when you saw none in the European skies.  Funny thing is that this is the second time this has happened to me.  On 911 I was also out of the country attending the International HEEP meeting in St. Johns, Canada.

 It is really eerie when you rely on airplanes to handle long distance travel and they aren't available. It is also very eerie when you look into the sky and don't see any planes for a few days. I think we seriously need to look at a more diverse and integrated transportation systems that allow one part to fail without total disrupting the others.  Now what that system looks like I'm not sure but I think we need to start figuring it out especially in the US.

Thought I would post that thought before I forgot it.  That's it for now.

Last Morning in Austria

The weekend is here and my journey home begins. Got up a little before 7 showered went out got some cash from the ATM and got a coffee and sausage McMuffin at Mcdonalds.  Gotta say I really like the Austrian sausage McMuffin.  

Plan on  checking out of the hotel around11:00 am and take bus #27 to the airport.  Then it is an Austrian Airlines commuter flight (os265) to Frankfort.  My flight home is scheduled to leave tomorrow (Sunday) at 11:20 can't wait.  Was going to hang out at the airport tonight but Jeanie found a Holiday Inn express a little ways from around so I made a reservation and will get a good nights sleep before getting up early and getting to the airport (don't want to miss my flight).  So it looks like this little adventure is about over.

Spent yesterday wondering alone around Salzburg picked up a few last minute things had one last
"bier" at the Augusltiner beer garden (love that place). I will post the pictures I took on Picasaweb shortly. Wandered  back to the hotel stopping at a electronic store and few other shops just to look around.

 Then back to hotel room to pack and talk Jeanie via Google voice chat which works surprising well and is "free".  The video chat is nice too.  Can't say enough about  gmail and its tools, they have made this little adventure a lot better than it would of been otherwise.  That's it for this post next one will hopefully come the comfort of home rather than a hotel room.