Anna's SolidMuse

SolidWorks Austin O'Malley Adds More Insight On The New Technology Shown At SWW 2010

For those of you that may not read the SolidWorks Blog there is a post by Austin O'Malley on the new technology that was shown at SolidWorks World 2010.  Mr. O'Malley is Executive Vice President of Research and Development for SolidWorks.

This is a must read for anyone wishing to get a bit more insight on the new technology that was shown.  The picture is still very fuzzy but there are a few nuggets of information that are interesting.

http://blogs.solidworks.com/solidworksblog/2010/02/more-on-the-new-technology-shown-at-solidworks-world-2010-1.html

Cheers,

Anna

Auer Precision at MDM West 2010, Anaheim, CA

Thought I would get a little advertising in for my company today, Auer Precision.  If you are at the MDM West show, this week in Anaheim, be sure to stop by our booth and say Hello.

This year we are showcasing our new Microfluidics Applications Lab.  With the lab we will be able to offer our customers quick turn-around of stamped prototypes of their diagnostic test strips with our ballistic press systems.

We have one of ballistic presses in our booth for everyone to take a look at.

Our booth number is 2959.  Look forward to meeting you.

Gerald Davis, CAD Forecast - Partly Cloudy

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

Hard Drive Crash, Data Gone Forever..... Maybe Not

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.

After a call to Drive Savers and having them explain their pricing policy, I decided to send my drive in to see if they could recover the data.  It wasn't going to be cheap.  However, the data we had on the drive was important enough to attempt to recover.

Since our data wasn't super mission critical, that needed to be recovered overnight, we went with the economy plan that would take about a week after they received the drive.  The quote was between $700 - $2400.  The variables in cost were what they needed to do to the drive to be able to read data and how much time they spent to recover as much data as they possibly could from the drive.  OUCH!!!  But we wanted the data from the drive.

There were several possibilities on what could be wrong with the drive, it could be corruption in the firmware, failure of the mechanical components or possibly a failure of the board circuitry.  Drive Savers would take the drive, and in their clean room, diagnose the problem and do a repair at their facility.

They sent me an empty box, with foam for the drive, instructions on how to securely pack the drive and a pre-addressed Fedex shipper label.  I packaged up the drive and sent it off.   Along the way I received regular e-mail notifications on where the drive was and when it arrived at their facility.  After they had it for a day I received a phone call with their assessment of the drive failure mode and what their level of confidence was in being able to recover data from the drive.

It was looking pretty good.  The hard drive read/write head had been slowly failing and scattering bad bits of data onto the drive.  They would be able to rebuild the drive head and then do an assessment of how much data they could recover.  At this point I gave them the go ahead to repair the drive and OK'ed the not to exceed quote they had previously given me.  The more data they recovered the more it was going to cost.

After another day or two I received a call to let me know they were very confident they could recover most of the data on the drive, in the range of 90-95%, possibly more.  The Master File Table was intact and they had software tools to be able to pull data from the drive.  It would take a few days, but I would soon be getting notification that the repair work was done and my hard drive, along with my recovered data on a backup USB drive, would be on its way back to me.

This little reminder of why you need to backup your data regularly lightened my wallet by $2400.  It appears that Drive Savers was able to recover all of the data files we had that were really important.  I was very lucky.

If you are still with me now in this tale what are the take aways.   Number One.... Backup, Backup, Backup.  You never know when a drive will decide to fail possibly taking your valuable data with it.  Number Two.... Don't assume that your hard drive is now a brick, there are companies that can recover your data.  If the data is valuable and mission critical to your business, get professional help.  There is a good chance that data can be recovered from the drive.

Backup early and backup often....

Anna

2009... In The Rear View Mirror

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.

Personally 2009 was a year of big anniversaries.  It was my 10th year working for Auer Precision.  It is the longest I have ever worked for the same company.  I plan to be at Auer for many more years to come.  It is truly a great company to work for.

2009 also marked my 30th year in the drafting and design field.  It is hard to imagine I have been gainfully employed in this field that long.  I have been fortunate to work for great companies through the years.  I still love the work I do everyday.

I also turned 50 this year.  I am fortunate to have my health and a great relationship with a very special guy.  I have much to be thankful for in my personal life.

In 2009, I made a number of investments in software.  Adding SolidWorks Professional, AutoCAD LT 2010, HyperShot, Modo 401 and HDR Light Studio to my personal software portfolio.

Looking forward to 2010, I plan to build a 3D scanner for some reverse engineering projects.

Another one of my goals for 2010 is to learn how to use Modo 401's rendering tools to their full extent.

With SolidWorks World 2010 coming up in a few weeks I am going to get a chance to work on both my 3D scanner and Modo 401 projects.

I am thinking 2010 is looking to be a pretty good year.

See you at SWW2010,

Anna 

Matt Lombard's "SolidWorks Administration Bible"

Matt Lombard has just released his fourth book in his SolidWorks Bible series from Wiley Publishing.

Matt's new book, the SolidWorks Administration Bible, covers the essentials anyone charged with administering SolidWorks in a production engineering environment needs to know to be successful.

I ordered my copy of the book last weekend and it arrived just in time for me to spend the weekend giving it a read.  The book comes in at 550 plus pages and covers an extensive list of topics that a CAD administrator needs to know to keep their engineering department up and running with their SolidWorks software implementation.

Wiley Publishing has the table of contents posted here: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/64/04705372/0470537264-1.pdf

In Matt's usual style this is not a book for beginners.  It is not a step by step, push this button tutorial.  Matt assumes the reader of the book will be an experienced SolidWorks user or IT professional who has been tasked with getting their company's SolidWorks implementation up and running smoothly for their users.

The book offers plenty of practical advice and recommendations, with the pro and con reasoning behind the recommendations.  Much of this advice is based on Matt's actual experience in the industry in helping companies get SolidWorks up and running.

From my perspective as a design engineer using SolidWorks the better part of everyday, who also wears the CAD admin hat for my company, Matt covers all the key topics in a well organized, easy to read style.  This book should be essential reading for anyone who has the duties of SolidWorks CAD administrator.

You can purchase the book from Amazon, or better yet, head over to Matt's blog and purchase the book directly from him.  The links for purchasing the book are at the bottom of the right sidebar at Matt's blog.  http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=2754

Cheers,

Anna

I Won A Space Navigator!!!

Last week I had a nice surprise when I found out I had won a 3Dconnexion Space Navigator.  A few weeks earlier I had participated in www.spaceclaiming.com's CAD Test 2009.  The contest sponsored by NovEdge and SpaceClaiming.com had each contestant answer a list of about 10 multiple choice questions of CAD trivia.

Not sure how many people participated in the CAD quiz, but about 30% of the participants answered all the questions correctly.  Lot's of real CAD geeks out there.  The NovEdge folks put all the 100%'ers in a hat and pulled a name at random.

What do you know, they managed to pull my name out of the hat.  I think that is the first time I have won anything, ever.  Pretty cool!!!

Late in the week the Space Navigator arrived at the house.  Great service from the folks at NovEdge.

Since I already have a Space Explorer I will be saving the Space Navigator for a future Phoenix SolidWorks User Group meeting raffle. I am sure one of our members will put the Space Navigator to great use.

Thanks NovEdge and SpaceClaiming.com!

Follow Me On Twitter

I decided to get with the program today and set up a Twitter account.  For those who are on Twitter you can follow me at http://twitter.com/solidmuse

There are quite a number of SolidWorks employees and users who are regular tweeters.

All this social networking, web 2.0 stuff, is a bit new to me.  Pretty amazing for as long as I have been playing on the internet.  Time to give Twitter a try and see how I like it.

Happy Tweeting,

Anna

Anna's SolidMuse Has A New Home

I have moved my blog to a new home.  You can now find me at www.solidmuse.com  I am still working on dusting off the cob webs on the new home page.  The change in location will let me keep my links and blog rolls more up to date.  Having web page design as a hobby, I like being able to have a bit more control over the geeky, tech stuff of maintaining a website.  Yeah, I am a bit strange that way.... :-)

I want to give a big shout out to SolidWorks and Richard Doyle for being so kind to host my blog the past few years.

I will be still posting on all things SolidWorks.  Just going to be posting from my own home base.

Cheers,

Anna

Where Has Anna Been This Year

Boy does time fly when you have been insanely busy at work.  This has been an interesting year at Auer Precision and it is hard to believe that it is the middle of August already.  It seems like it was January just last week.

My blog has suffered greatly this year as work priorities have over taken blogging.  We are starting to get caught up at work and my energies are turning to getting some of the things I have learned over the past half year out into, I hope, are interesting blog posts.

First observation I will make is having access to all my work resources thru my VPN connection to the work computers and having my really nice Lenovo Thinkpad to work on is a double edge sword.  It is great to have all the tools I need to be able to work anytime, anywhere.  But being a bit of a work-aholic and pretty conscientious about trying to meet the demands of all our many customers, both internal and external make for a pretty one dimensional personality.

The upside is that I can see the immediate benefits of the hard work at our company and I know it is appreciated and rewarded by the management at Auer.  I have a lot of flexibility and autonomy in my work at Auer, which makes for a very enjoyable work experience that I would not trade for anything.

Glad to be back blogging again and I hope you all find the coming posts useful.

Cheers,

Anna

NPR's Science Friday

My radio station of choice is the local NPR station here in Phoenix and in my usual run for a fast food lunch today I was listening to Ira Flatow's Science Friday.  Today's subject for the show was on Improving Automobile Efficiency.

The show ties in with the energy legislation that is being debated in congress and has been making headlines this past week.  With my home state being Michigan and growing up in the automotive industry I am always interested in what is going on in the industry.  With gas prices at $3.00 a gallon I am looking forward to the day that I can buy an economically priced vehicle that can get 60 plus mile per gallon to drive back and forth to work.

I was intently listening as Ira Flatow was introducing his guests and I was surprised to find out that Anna Jaffe, was one of his guests today.  Those of you who attended SolidWorks World 2007 in Las Vegas will remember Anna from the General Sessions. She is the young MIT student who is co-founder of the Vehicle Design Summit.  This is an effort of college students around the world and other partners to develop a vehicle that gets 100 mpg that is also marketable to the world of automobile comsumers, not just a pie in the sky research project.

SolidWorks is one of the corporate sponsors of this groups effort.  It was great to hear Anna speaking on NPR.  NPR is a great national stage for the work of these young college students.

If you wish to listen to today's show and hear what Anna and the other guests had to say head on over to the Science Friday website at http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200712072 to listen to the audio re-broadcast of today's show.

Cheers......

Is SolidWorks World Worth It For An Independent?

This is the question I got in an e-mail today from one of the independents here in Phoenix.  Translation.... Hey, I am footing the bill myself for SolidWorks World.  Am I going to get a return on my investment in time and hard earned cash if I attend.

It is worth every penny. You will be in the company of 4000 or so of the most committed SolidWorks geeks and gurus. It is the ultimate in user group experiences. Tons of learning opportunities with all of the Breakout Sessions. You will be able to rub elbows and talk directly with SolidWorks people. All the major vendors of hardware, add-ins and modules for SolidWorks will be showing their wares in the Partner Pavilion.

It is an awesome way to network.  Everyone at the conference is an enthusiastic and engaged SolidWorks user.  These are the people you want to meet; exchanging ideas and sharing resources with.  Be sure to go to the special events in the evenings.  It is a great way to let your hair down a bit and have some fun.  You will also make some new friends along the way.

For those that are thinking of attending from the Phoenix Metro area you can help your budget by driving to San Diego.  If you are driving, you can get accommodations that are a bit further away from the convention center, this will also help your budget.

SolidWorks World is also a great motivational week. I am really fired up about SolidWorks, work and life in general after the conference with all the positive vibe from the users in attendance. It is a really great experience. If you sign up by Dec 14th the conference pass is $895, after that it goes up to $995.

Cheers....

SolidWorks 2008 Home Use License

Yippee....  I am finally able to start rolling out SolidWorks 2008 at Auer.

The last piece I needed to have in place was our Home Use Licenses.  We have a network install of six seats of SolidWorks.  Every year we have to fill out a new HUL agreement and send it to our VAR so they in turn can send it to SolidWorks.  SolidWorks then issues a serial number that our home users can utilize for their SolidWorks install.  This serial number will allow us to activate 6 instances of SolidWorks for our home users.  Actually it is the same number as last year, so I suspect that someone at SolidWorks went into their computer system and added the SolidWorks versions that the HUL serial number is valid for.

This was essential to have in place before we rolled out SolidWorks 2008.  I do a lot of work at home in the evenings, along with a couple of our other engineers.  This year was a bit frustrating as we kept getting error messages when doing our installs after being issued our old, new number.  So after a few calls to our VAR and they in turn opening a service ticket with SolidWorks we finally are able to activate our home installs of SolidWorks 2008.

This little bump in the road has got me wondering why do those companies that have SolidWorks Network Licenses have to jump through hoops of filling out the license agreement every year?   In the past I could understand the logic.  Now that SolidWorks has instituted the online license activation process, it seems filling out and faxing in a form is a bit medieval.

The Stand Alone License users do not have to do this.  SolidWorks knows, just like they do for SNL users, who has up to date subscription service.  The Stand Alone license automatically gets a work and home install (2 activations).  Why should the SNL users have to fill out extra paperwork?  It would seem that the number of activations for home could be added at the same time our work install and SNL license data is updated on the server for a new release of SolidWorks.

Filling out and faxing in a paper form is so last century.

Cheers,

Anna

Career Night

Last Wednesday night I had the pleasure of hosting a career night at Auer.  Our IT guy, Jason, is an advisor at his church for their youth ministries group.  One of the areas of focus their ministry group has for their youth is Educational, Personal, and Career Development.

Jason had two young men that had interests in computers, game design and engineering.  Jason asked me if I would like to spend some time with them and show them a bit of what I do at Auer and how I use SolidWorks in the designs we create.

Of course I would be interested in showing the young men some of what we do at Auer.  It was a great opportunity to peak the interest of some young people in the great opportunities that there are in engineering and design.

Jason brought Jared and Nathan to visit in the evening on Wednesday.  Jason also had one of his other youth advisor's DJ along for the visit.

First thing that we did was to head to the first floor where we are assembling our latest ballistic press automation system.  The system is complete and has gone thru a customer final acceptance test.  We are in the last stages of system testing and tweaking before we ship to our customer.  The focus of our conversation was how we took a drawing of the final customer product and a user requirement specification for the machine and used that information to create a complete automation line to stamp the part for the customer.

We basically started with a very small amount of information and requirements from the customer and using all the skills of everyone at the company created a working machine from an empty sheet of paper.

DJ, Jason, Jared and Nathan.

After that we headed back upstairs to my desk and I showed Jared and Nathan the machine they had just looked at downstairs on the computer in SolidWorks.  We talked about some of the skills required to do the work we do in SolidWorks; about the importance of higher education with skills in math, science and technology being essential to the work we do at Auer.

We then fired up one of the other computers we have in engineering and let Jared and Nathan work with SolidWorks a bit on their own.  After we were done with SolidWorks Jason took them for a tour of his area to show them the equipment he works with everyday as Auer's IT Administrator.

Both Jared and Nathan asked great questions and were very attentive during the time they spent with us. Hopefully we have planted the seeds for them to pursue a career in engineering.

It was a fun evening and I hope to have an opportunity to have a career night again in the future.

DJ and Jason in the back. Jared and Nathan trying out SolidWorks

The DVD's Are Here!!!

Yippee!!!  Our SolidWorks 2008 DVD has arrived.

Only one box this year as we consolidated our four stand alone licenses into a network install of five seats of core SolidWorks and one seat of SolidWorks Office Premium earlier this year.

In the case are two dvd's. One contains the x32 version of SolidWorks for both Windows XP and Vista. The other DVD has the x64 version of SolidWorks for Windows XP x64.

No CD's... I am happy to see that.  Doing the CD swap with 6 or 7 CD's was getting a bit old.

What if you do not have a DVD drive on your computer?  These days DVD players are very inexpensive with multiple brands to choose from for under a $100.  All you need is one external DVD drive and you will be ready to roll-out SolidWorks 2008 on any computer in your work group.

All of our new engineering workstations are spec'ed with dvd drives.  For those computers that only have CD drives I will copy the x32 DVD out into a folder on our network and do the install from the network folder.

I am planning to do the rollout of SolidWorks 2008 in December.  Just like last year I need to make sure that our manufacturing areas have SolidWorks 2008 installed and working with the latest version of Esprit 2008 for our wire edm's and CamWorks 2008 for our CNC mills before I rollout SolidWorks 2008 in engineering.

The new wrinkle I need to account for over the 2007 rollout is updating the SNL license files for SolidWorks 2008.  I also need to make sure I have the Home Use Licenses for SolidWorks 2008 in hand before I start the rollout.  Me and a couple of the other engineers work from home on a regular basis and we will need to have our HUL for SolidWorks 2008 so we can get our home installs of SolidWorks up and running along with our installs at Auer.

I am looking to forward to getting the SolidWorks 2008 rollout completed.  There are some nice new features in SolidWorks 2008 that I am anxious to use.  I am also a fan of the new user interface and look forward to working with it.

Cheers...  :-)

 

10 Years Ago, Today....

What were you doing ten years ago in the world of design and drafting?  Where were you working?  What CAD system were you using?   3D, 2D, or still stuck doing manual drafting (Bleck!)?

Matt Lombard and I have been having a bit of an exchange on some of the new SolidWorks 2008 functionality, Rapid Sketch and Instant 3D.  Matt made reference to some of the features that SolidWorks had turned on by default "back in SW97".  Well that got me thinking....

In 1997, I was in Michigan and still working in the automotive industry.  At that time I was a contract cad designer for the GM Truck Group.  Working in a design group that was responsible for the GM full size and S-10 truck platforms.  Don't remember if I was doing interior trim design or sheet metal design then.  I had worked in both disciplines at the Truck Group.

I was using GM's Corporate Graphics System (CGS) for our design work. I had close to ten years of experience using CGS.  UG was just making in roads into the sheet metal and interior design groups, having all ready gained a strong foot hold on the chassis side of the design teams.

CGS was a non-parametric, 3D wire frame and surface modeler.  We would have been working on IBM UNIX workstations.  Spaceballs were standard equipment on our workstations.  Many of the designs we created were starting to be documented using reduced dimension drawings.  Outsourcing design work was starting to show up as we were training engineers/designers from Mexico to take over the maintenance phase of our truck programs.  Netscape was our web browser on our unix workstations. There were still a lot of dumb terminals using GM's proprietary systems around.  Not everyone had a Windows based PC on their desk.  Those that did were using Windows 95 with Lotus Notes for their e-mail client. 

SolidWorks was probably not on my radar other then it was a cool new, Windows based CAD program.  No need for me to look any closer at SolidWorks at that time, as I was well entrenched in the use of the CAD tools that GM provided for us.

Ten years ago seems like a lifetime ago...  The things we take for granted today in the regular course of our day to day activities are simply amazing.  Having been in the business since 1979 (can you say manual drafting....), it is incredible the tools we have available to work with in 2007.  To have powerful programs like Solidworks on our relatively inexpensive Windows PC's creating awesome designs is amazing to me.

What were you doing ten years ago in the world of design?

3Dconnexion 3D Mouse Promo

In conjunction with the release of SolidWorks 2008, 3Dconnexion is offering SolidWorks Subscription Service members a 25% discount on a SpaceNavigator SE, SpaceExplorer, SpacePilot or SpaceTraveler.

I personally own an older Logitech SpaceMouse Plus that I purchased way back when and also a 3Dconnexion SpaceExplorer that I purchased at SolidWorks World 2007 in New Orleans.

I can't even concieve of working with SolidWorks without one of these devices.  I have had the good fortune of always having some type of 6 degree of freedom device to manipulate 3D CAD data on screen.  To have to use SolidWorks without a spaceball is like having my left arm cut-off.

A 25% discount is pretty cool if you have been thinking about getting a spaceball/3D mouse to use with SolidWorks.  The offer ends Dec 14, 2007 and you will need to have your SolidWorks serial number to allow your subscription support to be verified.

Cheers....  :-) 

Engineering Gets To Wear The Sales Hat

I was reading Mike Puckett's blog yesterday and thinking to myself that it is great to hear of his company's success with generating leads and more work for his company and that those leads can be directly attributed to their use of SolidWorks and the networking they have done within the SolidWorks user community.

Today, I got the word that one of the sales prospects that I had a hand in helping to develop had placed a purchase order.  The first of what we hope to be many from them going forward.  It is not often the engineers have a hand in bringing a new customer to the company.  For me personally, I prefer to be the person who stays behind the scenes and am not interested too much in the sales side of the business.  I am much more comfortable in a room full (or more appropriately an online forum) of designers, engineers and fellow SolidWorks CAD geeks talking shop.  So it was a bit of new territory for me to find myself on the other side of the fence selling the capabilities of our company.

I had been chatting with one of our new customer's engineers for many months now at the various SolidWorks user events in the valley.  He has been in the valley for many years and was familiar with our company though it had been ages since he had been to our facility.  Over the course of those discussions about SolidWorks we realized that Auer could probably help them with some parts they needed manufactured.

They have a set of challenging CNC milled parts that their current supplier is having trouble delivering to the quality levels that are required.  The supplier is also pretty high in terms of cost.  I suggested that they come on over to our facility and we would show them what our capabilities are.  The parts they needed manufactured sounded challenging, but I was confident that our CNC operators were up for it as they milled parts with much tighter tolerances and much finer finish specs on a regular basis.  We also believed we could compete very well on price.

We were able to show them our facility, and how we use our SolidWorks math data through our manufacturing processes; from programming the CNC mills to final inspection on the CMM's.  We showed them how we use real-time SPC data collection to control our milling processes; and how the SPC data and final inspection data is stored and quickly retrievable from our databases in whatever format our customer desired.  We also spent time with them demonstrating how we used our document management system to keep all the data and documentation tied together and, if desired by the customer, available to them through their own customer portal within our document management system.

Well, what started as a conversation about SolidWorks at a user group meeting, progressed to the possibility of Auer milling some parts for them. Then after showcasing what our capabilities are, has blossomed into our new customers desire to have us collaborate with them on their longer term goals taking the current product we are going to mill for them and re-designing the parts for high volume production with a combination of stamped and die-cast parts.  Auer will take the lead in working with them and doing the engineering, design, sourcing the die-cast tooling, building the stamping tooling and the manufacture of this set of components.

Pretty cool stuff for this SolidWorks CAD geek.... :-)

Hot Off The Press...

Or at least hot from the ride in the Big Brown Truck all over Phoenix today.  My copy of Matt Lombard's SolidWorks Bible 2007 arrived at my doorstep a few minutes ago.

I can hear you saying, "Hey Anna, that looks like three copies of Matt's new book".  One copy is my personal edition; the other two we will have Matt autograph for the raffle at our Phoenix Metro Area User Group Meeting this Thursday, May 3rd.  Matt will be our special guest speaker and we will be raffling the two copies of his book along with some other cool stuff that SolidWorks sent out for our meeting.

For those folks in the Phoenix area that would like to attend the user group meeting, details and a sign-up form can be found at our user group website, www.phxswug.com.

SolidWorks 2008 Beta, Registration Is Open

Registration for those interested in participating in the SolidWorks 2008 Beta program opened today.  You can register for the program at http://beta.solidworks.com.  Customers that have an active subscription service contract are eligible to participate.  This year the grand prize winner in the Beta Contest will receive a full commercial copy of SolidWorks 2008 Office Premium and a one year subscription service.

The beta forum is open and there is already a bit of buzz from those of us that have been reading the What's New in SolidWorks 2008 pdf.  There are some really great features that we will be able to test and post commentary on in the beta forums.

Wish I could say more, but the NDA's require that we are only able to discuss SolidWorks 2008 on the beta forum.  Want to learn more head on over to http://beta.solidworks.com and register for the program.

See you in the beta forums...