Between the Lines

Final Week Push and Getting High Altitude

I'm entering my final week of sabbatical (6 week vacation) and please ignore the bad example of me in the office writing this while on my sabbatical, but my fav backpacking and outdoor gear shop Next Adventure is a couple blocks away and I needed to say hi to colleagues and post this. The last 5 weeks have been filled with some amazing adventures some solo, some with friends, and some with my 3 kids all over Oregon. I will... Read more →

Start Training for the AU5K!

First, congratulations to all the speakers that were notified this week that they will be speaking at Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas! Thousands of proposals were submitted and the quality and competition for the event were top notch. Thank you to all that wrote and submitted a proposal. Thanks to last years attendees survey feedback, my Autodesk University 5K “AU5K” is once again happening for Autodesk University 2018. The morning run is an attendee favorite. This run started small... Read more →

Inventor Tip: Frame Generator Custom Notch

This Autodesk Inventor tip was submitted by Peter Barker. Whilst the ‘Notch’ tool available within Inventor’s Frame Generator is very powerful, it doesn’t always give us the exact shape we would like to manufacture. Take a look at the example below: The default notch of the circled area would give us the following profile: But would we really cut the Frame end to that shape? Maybe not intentionally! More likely we would want something simpler such as this: This can... Read more →

Time-lapse of Construction

Autodesk just celebrated their grand opening of the Portland Oregon office last month. It was a construction journey to take the old historic building and celebrate its past and build out its future. The project was successfully orchestrated and completed by several contractors and architecture firms, several Autodesk employees, and of course lots and lots of Autodesk software because the contractors and architects are also Autodesk customers. Here is a time-lapse photo sequence showing the build out of our 4th... Read more →

Hurry Up and Vote for AU 2018 Classes

The deadline for voting on Autodesk University 2018 classes is this Friday, July 13th. You have the opportunity to help select which speakers and classes will be available when registration begins August 8. Vote for AU 2018 Classes Autodesk University 2018 is November 13-15, in Las Vegas. I hope to see you there. Read more →

Throwback Thursday – AutoCAD R13 C4a was Good

My longtime colleague and programming guru Kean Walmsley wrote a great blog post talking about why AutoCAD R13 was painful, but it had to happen to re-architect the product. A brief history of rearchitecting AutoCAD (or the importance of R13) I was a customer of R13 and suffered on the heels of a rock solid AutoCAD R12 until the patch R13c4a was released. R13c4a was what the initial release should have been. I joined the company January 1998 when we... Read more →

Autodesk Portland Office

The last week before my sabbatical started, Stacy Doyle of Autodesk PR and myself gave a tour to a Cathy a reporter from the Portland Business Journal of the new Autodesk Portland office. The article turned out really nice with 35 good photos including cameos of me as well as puppies and our high school summer interns. My apologies to Jay Grossman for bringing a reporter through our quiet library space where employees can relax, and for the reporters typo... Read more →

Sabbatical Week One

Greetings following my first week of sabbatical, and what a week it was! First thing I did was that I went looking for a new personal laptop to take on my adventures, since my MacBook from 2011 was not very peppy anymore and I didn't want to take my work laptop out on outdoor adventures and my iPad doesn't cut it. I looked all around for something that had dedicated graphics and performance as well looked nice and lots of... Read more →