Gotta be a bot

Sometimes my pageview stats look like this:

That guy's a fast reader, huh?

"It's the best animated movie since Toy Story 3!"

What does that mean, the best since Toy Story 3?

I think it means Not as good as Toy Story 3.

Sounds like. Doesn't seem to matter what they say in commercials anymore. Just as long as they're animated when they say it.

Isn't it time?

I get a message like this almost every time I quit AutoCAD:

Isn't it time for AutoCAD to give more intelligible error messages?

NOPRINT

In AutoCAD, I use layers with abandon.

I also use paperspace, which lots of people don't.

I have a layer with .50 lineweight that I use for drawing borders on A-size sketches. But for some reason when I put a "viewport" on that layer, it doesn't come out as a nice heavy line. So I have to put a "rectangle" on the page to get the border the way I want.

Long story short, I ended up setting my "viewport" layer so that it does not print.

That worked for a while, couple years maybe. But I found that there were sometimes things other than viewports that I wanted not to print. Notes to myself about the job, for example. So I set up a layer named NOPRINT. Eventually I started putting viewports on the NOPRINT layer, like any other thing I didn't want to print. So then I didn't need to create the "viewport" layer anymore.

The end of Google as we know it

Here ya go. I Googled hat algebra:

And clicked the second link:

Now I'm thinking, maybe Google is the new Bing.

Installing AutoCAD 2013, a memoir

Somebody at work was installing the AutoCAD upgrade the other day. A couple questions came up, and I dug out my notes from when I installed that upgrade. What follows is the first page of those notes.

wed 9 may 2012
10:45 put disk in -- 64 bit ACAD 2013
it appears to be reading it

10:48 light is still on, cd drive still making noises, no response on screen yet.

10:53 silent, no light.
open the folder
doubleclick SETUP.EXE
setup initializing...

11:00 still initializing...

11:08 a menu appears:
--> install (the default)
--> create deployment
--> install tools and utilities
choose the default: INSTALL install on this computer

nope, it is a 32 bit machine
I need to use the other disk.

11:14 initializing...

11:40 still initializing...

12:00 ditto

12:23 ditto

[and from page 4 of my notes:]

3:45 pm
I have successfully installed [it]
click finish
restart computer

"Improvements"

In Windows XP and even Windows 98, you could right-click on the upper-left corner of a window, and from the menu that opened you could select search (or, in 98, find) to search just the files and folders listed in that window. That's a lot faster than searching the whole hard drive.

Can't do that in Vista or 7.

Or you could right-click on a folder in the open window and search the folder you clicked. Can't do that either, any more.

Oh, and another thing

New to AutoCAD 2013, blocks and external references now have a visible, selectable border after you crop them with XCLIP. This border appears as additional lines in the drawing. It clutters things up.

Why would they do that, anyway? The purpose of cropping a block is to eliminate unnecessary stuff from your drawing. Yes, and then they add an unnecessary box around the part you wanted to be visible.

Yes, you can turn off the visibility of that border. But doing so only creates a more frustrating problem, because you cannot turn off the selectability of that border. You think you are clicking in a blank space on the drawing, and you end up selecting the block you cropped!

They fixed that

In AutoCAD 2012 I could use the mouse wheel to zoom in on a detail and, if I got too close, zoom out one click and zoom in one click, and the detail would be just a bit smaller on the screen. It was an excellent use for the mouse wheel.

AutoCAD 2013 fixed that. Now when you zoom out one click the detail gets smaller, yes. But then when you zoom in one click, the retail return to the same size it was before you zoomed out.

Doesn't work in AutoCAD

In Excel you can select multiple worksheets, then click print and print them all. Doesn't work in AutoCAD. Only the visible paperspace tab prints.

In Windows you can right-click on an excel file, click print, and print the file you clicked on. This works, even if you have a different Excel file already open. Doesn't work in AutoCAD. AutoCAD just re-prints the drawing that's already open.

For the record: Apparently you can't buy Excel, you have to buy Office. The price ranges from $119.99 to $499.99, depending which version you get.

You can upgrade AutoCAD for $1995 or buy it for $3995.