Head on over to the SolidWorks Forums and join in on Gerald Davis’ post on the future of CAD.

CAD Forecast – partly cloudy

Gerald has spent a considerable amount of time to post his thoughts on the topic.  Very interesting reading.  I hope that it is a seed for some well reasoned and thoughtful discussion on the Future of CAD over on the SolidWorks forum. Be sure to read Gerald’s pdf’s he has attached to his post as well.

He sums up my feelings very well with his statement:

“I’m resisting change.  I’m demanding change.  I just want the new thing to be the same as the old thing only different.”

I am looking forward to the discussion over on the forums.

Cheers,

Anna

Over the holidays we had a hard drive crash on our workstation.  Went out to dinner and when we came back the workstation had blue screened.  I tried to restart the system and it would try to boot Windows but it would get about 15-30 seconds into the process and just stop with the hard drive head clicking away.

Not a pleasant sound.  This was Len’s computer and even though we had an external backup drive the system had not been backed up regularly.  Yeah, yeah, I should know better.  But I grew complacent over the years in that this was the first time I ever had a hard drive fail.

So now what do we do?  I was pretty confident that we could get to our data, since Windows would try to launch.  It was like the data was there but the system was running across some corrupt sectors on the drive and could not complete the boot into the operating system.

It was time to call in professional help.  I did some research on the internet and consulted with a few IT professionals that I know and decided to send my hard drive to Drive Savers in Novato, CA.

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Are we all glad 2009 and the decade of the 00′s are in our rear view mirror?  For many folks 2009 was quite a tumultuous year.

At Auer, 2009 started with a bit of trepidation as we knew there was some pain we would endure with the economic meltdown in 2008.  2009 started out with some belt tightening, with the knowledge that the first half of 2009 would see a decrease in sales.  We were positioned well to weather the storm clouds, the sleepless nights came from not knowing how long the storm clouds would linger.

Fortunately, as hoped, the second half of 2009 picked up nicely with sales and profits.  Not a banner year, but very respectable considering the pain still being felt by many businesses.  We were able to purchase some new equipment and hire a few more people in the second half of 2009.

I spent a lot of my time in 2009 training.  We hired a new tool designer into our engineering department mid-year.  I will be working with him for the next couple of years to teach him all things Auer to be able to take over my responsibilities with our semi-conductor media transport line of products that we market.  We have so many types of products we have designed over the last 25 years that it will take that long for our new designer to get a feel for the many types of ways we are able to help our customers with their manufacturing processes.

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