Month: <span>March 2009</span>

Autodesk to more than triple upgrade prices

As reported at Revit3D.com, next March will see a major change to the way Autodesk prices its upgrades. All upgrades will cost 50% of the full retail price rather than the much smaller percentage that is currently charged. If you upgrade yearly, that means the cost of doing so will be about 3.35 times greater than it is now. Clearly, Autodesk doesn’t want you doing that, and would much prefer you to be tied into the Subscription program, and is introducing some subtle encouragement to nudge you in the right direction. Here is the rationale according to an Autodesk spokesperson: …

Some thoughts on AutoCAD Exchange

I’ve added a link to Autodesk’s new AutoCAD community site, AutoCAD Exchange. As with most things Autodesk, there are pros and cons. Here are my first impressions. I think it looks good in a Vista-black kind of way. I know some of you don’t like the black look in software, but I do. The layout looks a bit cluttered and confused at first, but I’m sure visitors will quickly get used to where to find things. The site appears to be designed around 1024-wide resolution. If you have more than this, as most CAD users do, then there are wide …

Bug watch – mystery insect identified

It appears that the mystery bug was in fact a mole cricket. It appears that these things are poorly understood and I should have passed it on to our local museum. I should definitely not have put it on our lawn, as it appears that these things are quite likely to be the culprit behind the damaged patches on our lawn.

Bug watch – identify this insect

No, not the Bug Watch, just a bug you can watch. Does anybody know what this insect is? It is the second one of these we’ve found in our home in Western Australia. It’s very active and it smells horrible. YouTube Link For those of you who can’t access YouTube, here are some photos of the bug: A higher resolution version of the above picture is available here. This is the bug about to be given its freedom: On release, it buried itself in our lawn: In 25 years in Australia, I had never seen one of these until recently. …

Death to robo-responses!

The responses to Carol Bartz’s blog post are an interesting read, and not just because of the astonishing amount of attention being paid to her language. One person pointed out how irritating it was to be “helped” by Yahoo’s dumb automated “support” system: I have never – repeat, NEVER – had a human response to ANY email or form-submitted help request that I’ve sent to Yahoo! NEVER! All my experience of communicating with Yahoo! customer ’support’ is characterised by exchanges such as: Me: Hi, I need help with Messenger on the Mac Y!: Thankyou for contacting customer support. Here are …

Gaahl’s Tr00 Life Adventures Week 10, and Peter Beste

Time for my own bad Photoshop. Truly, truly awful work here. This is the tenth and last (so far) edition of Gaahl’s Tr00 Life Adventures. Click the thumbnail to see the full size image. This one contains a few in-jokes (e.g. “many Norwegian countries”) from the Mike Portnoy forum community that was the original audience, so much of the original amusement will be lost. I am posting this one mainly to complete the set. The original Gaahl photograph is by Houston documentary photographer Peter Beste, who has this to say on his site: In the last two decades a bizarre …