Archive for September, 2006

There are some questions I get almost every day and I never have good answers or even resources to find those answers.

Today our very own Mark Scacco emails me a list of articles he has written over the past year or so for industry magazines POB ( http://www.pobonline.com/)  and Site Prep (http://www.siteprepmag.com/) , and I found that each one of them hit the spot.  See links below to download your own copy of each article.
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If you’ve paid attention, Dan and Dave have been hinting that Vault wouldn’t be the only girl at the dance for long. Dan just posted his first blog entry, and it looks like we’ll have options soon. Read the rest of this entry »

A tip for the roadwarriors, parents, coffee and other beverage drinkers out there. Read the rest of this entry »

Just say no to null structures.  Make yourself a “null” structure from a simple part.

After working with my pal SLL (a fellow in the small sisterhood that married into a name that ends in “BERT”) and seeing the crazy stuff that null structures can do to a drawing– I have come up with a new system for helping your water system to behave.

Add a simple cylinder part to your water parts catalog and apply a style that is a no show that omits masking (as in my previous post) keeps things locked down- no weirdness, micropipes or glitchy stuff that comes with null structure roulette.

I leave mine visible while I design, then freeze them.  This helps me see where joints are so I can add more later.  Apply the same style technique that I mentioned in Water Networks Part I

Next post- profiles.

 

If you have ever seen me on the road, you know I have an “I LOVE ENGINEERING” bumpsticker.  This is a great source of amusement for friends and family and occasionally gets a honk or two on the highway.

The other day, I needed a self esteem boost, so I went to fix a plotter at my friend’s firm- a small environmentally focused firm that also does some really nice land development projects.  People are always glad to see someone who can fix the plotter. 

So my friend, who had lost a few proposals that week and felt unappreciated, looked at me and said “How can you keep that sticker on your car?  This business just stinks sometimes.” 
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I am trying to come up with a nice arsenal of pipe labels to help some clients optimize sewer design in tricky terrain.  My portfolio has some new images of what I have come up with so far.  I need your help!  Let me know what might be helpful to know if you were doing such a project.

    Project 7- Monkeying with Pipes

 

If you’d like to subscribe to my photostream feed (getting the latest Dana portfolio shots in your RSS inbox hot of the press!) you can subscribe using this Feed

 

You can always make an parcel reference in a station offset label, but sometimes parcels are too much headache to manage topologically speaking. So, when in doubt, keep it simple.

The question came up on the DG today- how can I get an area label for a driveway that also calls out the station of the driveway?

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With the conversion to Wordpress compete, you’ve surely noticed some changes around the place. Time for a few more. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it Mark Scacco from Engineered Efficiency gave a webcast last Friday called the CAD Manager Primer. It covered many of the fine and not so fine points you as CAD managers need to be aware of when looking to deploy Civil 3D in your office. Mark is following that up by hosting an interactive chat session over on the Autodesk civil community site, so join Mark on Thursday at 10am PDT here. Bring your questions and pick Mark’s brain.

One of the most boring and lengthy jobs that a surveyor can do is writing legal descriptions. Legal descriptions are the bane of the surveyor’s existence. If you were to ask for a legal description on a particular parcel definition from 20 different surveyors, they would all look different. Each surveyor has his or her own way that they want the legal to read. The same information is there, but the phrasing is different everywhere. To date, there has been no really good way to automate the writing of legal descriptions. LandXML Reporting does a fair job, but editing the XSL style sheets is difficult at best, and requires a working knowledge of the XML language. So far, I’ve never found a really, really good legal description writer. However, that changed over the weekend.

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