RobiNZ CAD Blog

A memorable holiday

They now have a Kiwi Cap
Originally uploaded by RobiNZ

I've been off-line while cycling around Viet Nam but I'm now back in New Zealand and catching up with things*.

Will be sharing more of my holiday but, by far, the overwhelming memories I have of Viet Nam are of wonderful people and scooters!

Everywhere you go there are happy smiling faces and the ever present hum, beep beep, of small engined scooters carrying the most incredible loads...

Some of the holiday snaps are now on Flickr


* Have released some comments which were being held and turned off moderation. If you posted/emailed a question will be in touch as I get the chance.

RobiNZ @ Autodesk University 2007 - A day across the bay...

Today I travelled across the bay to Larkspur to meet with Michael Scherotter. I arrived at the ferry terminal to find the first one left about 90 minutes later than I thought so thanks to Michael for rearranging his schedule at short notice. It was a grey day so the ferry trip scenery wasn’t spectacular but I spent about half the trip getting a lesson in aerodynamics. A solitary gull worked out it could get a free ride across the bay by gliding in the “slipstream” just off the stern of the ferry. It was like one of those nature documentaries showing bird flight close-up as was within a metre or two of the stern, doing 10–15 knots, for 20–30 minutes without flapping it’s wings once. It reminded me of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the fable about a gull who was fascinated by flight, which I read years ago. It was a strange mystical book and I must admit I found Richard Bach’s books on his real aviation life as a barnstormer far better.

Last time I did this trip I visited Michael at the Mindjet Office (MindManager) near the ferry terminal. I got to know Michael via his blogging for Mindjet and was impressed by his enthusiasm for combining technologies to create new solutions. He developed a prototype combining MindManager and Autodesk DWF which was of interest to me. It was great to see him again and learn about his current role as a “Synergist” for Microsoft. It’s great to he’s still “Combining Software in Amazing Ways” and excited about using new combinations of technologies to help people solve problems. As you can imagine there are lots of technologies at Microsoft to keep him busy!

Synergist Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/default.aspx

I wandered back to the hotel via downtown at dusk looking at some of the architecture, including The Transamerica Pyramid, and Christmas decorations. Tomorrow  it’s off to Vegas, to get ready for Autodesk University.

     

    

RobiNZ @ Autodesk University 2007 - San Francisco

I arrived here Friday and the weather was very similar to Auckland. When I left Auckland was experiencing an early summer and San Francisco is having a late one!

I had a late, very late, lunch or early dinner with Helga who I met on an Adventure South cycle trip. It was great to see her again. After dinner we checked out a recent art installation in the form of a huge spider!

Today I rented a bike and went around the bay cycle trail, over Golden Gate Bridge, which I’d done before but was happy to repeat. It’s a stunning structure and not to be missed, especially on a bicycle. Last time I’d spent too much time time exploring the south side, towards Ocean Beach & Golden Gate park, and had to rush to meet the ferry at Sausalito. This time I explored the Marin Headlands, towards Rodeo Beach, then carried on past Sausalito around Richardson Bay to Tiburon. It was a great ride on a near perfect day. It was strange riding a bike without the clip in pedals I’m used to at home and remembering to ride on the wrong (right) side of the road but had no problems. I thought I was being clever going around to Tiburon as there were hundreds of cyclists waiting for the Sausalito Ferry. It wasn’t as busy at Tiburon but then the Ferry carried on to pickup the mob at Sausalito before returning to the city. First on meant last off, not so clever eh!

       

There’s more photos here

I know what it means, to miss New Orleans, nearly...

It was ironic that I chose the Qantas/American Airlines option over Air New Zealand/United for the trip to New Orleans because the timing and connections in the USA worked out better (and it was cheaper!). The plan was to arrive late Tuesday night, have a peaceful nights sleep to recover from 21 hours of flying, a leisurely morning, maybe a look around, then wander across the road for the conference kickoff at 3pm Wednesday.

Qantas did their part, Auckland to L.A., fine but then things started to go wrong…

Leaving Auckland about 6pm Tuesday means arriving in L.A. about 13 hours later at 10am Tuesday (thanks to the dateline). I was heading for Dallas, then New Orleans but found my anticipated 4 hour stopover extended to 5 hours due to rough weather at Dallas. Then after several additional 1 hour delays all the flights through Dallas were cancelled as thunder storms had settled in for the evening and the airport was closed.

That meant a frantic call (so glad I had a charged cell-phone) to re-book with seemingly all of America flying that way doing the same. The lines at the terminal counters and free-phones were hours long. While I was on the phone planes were filling up so fast they were losing seats in the time it took to ask if the route was OK then confirm. At one stage I was going to via San Francisco, Washington DC(?), Orlando then New Orleans but that evaporated and the next best offer was “sometime Saturday”. Not much use for a conference on Wed/Thur, a Jazz Fest on Friday/Saturday and when I was leaving on Sunday! 

It wasn’t anyones fault and the American Airlines call centre were great trying all sorts of alternatives over more than 30 minutes to get me there on time. Thankfully a single seat came free on a flight that would work so I went from L.A. (about 10pm) to Miami, sat around there till 11am, then back to New Orleans. It added a couple of thousand kilometres flying & the result was the planned 21-hour trek actually took 39 hours, 18 of them sitting around in airports! Luckily I had taken a good book but I didn’t expect to read the whole thing on the way there! 

I got to New Orleans less than 1 hour before the conference started, just time check-in, have a shower and get to the venue which was in another hotel a short walk away. I nearly missed New Orleans, but am glad I didn’t!

The rest of the photos are here.

Tags: New+Orleans

A short holiday from blogging

I had a bit of un-connected, from everything, time this week. Click thru to the “What I got up to on my holiday post” for a few photos…

New Zealand from the Space Station

Excuse the cross posting but I think this image of New Zealand, NASA’s picture of the day, justifies it!

RobiNZ Personal Blog: Stunning Space Station view of New Zealand
Has details and link to Hi-Res Version

Trip Route Mapping with MindManager & Microsoft Virtual Earth

Mindjet Labs will soon (Monday 31/7/06 US Pacific) release an extension that allows you to easily find route information while planning travel thanks to a clever combination of MindManager & Microsoft Virtual Earth.  The process uses MindManager topics and relationships to specify the route and it’s easy to do;

• Create two topic with addresses or place names in the topic text.

• Draw a relationship from one topic to the other, with the arrow specifying the direction of the route.

• Select the relationship, right-click and select Get Route from the context menu.

• In a few seconds, a callout topic will appear with a hyperlink to the Microsoft Virtual Earth map

• Click the hyperlink to view the map and the driving directions.

Since Microsoft recently added our street data to Virtual Earth it works well in New Zealand. How cool is that for planning your next holiday… or business trip!

Update 30–07–2006: Trevor Claiborne has posted a neat video demo to The Student Tablet PC Blog

Korean Trip Photos Online

I've just posted my Photos from the Seoul Trip

http://rcd.typepad.com/photos/travel_2006_seoul/index.html

Can you help with some local knowledge?

• What is this (cool) building?
• Why would this map in the COEX Mall show New Zealand & Aussie at the top?

Autodesk + Skidmore, Owings & Merrill BIM Presentation

Today I’m heading to Seoul, South Korea, to hear how Skidmore, Owings & Merrill are applying BIM techniques to projects like The Freedom Tower and other significant buildings around the globe. It will be an interesting trip. If any readers are attending it would be great to meet up, contact me via the Blog Email Me link or COEX Intercontinental.

• Agenda
  • Transforming Building Process: Ideas Realised
    • Phil Bernstein, Vice President, Industry Strategy & Relations, Autodesk Inc.
  • Realising the Freedom Tower: Pioneering Process Change
  • If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a visualisation is worth a million
    • Darren Rizza, Associate AIA, Firmwide Director of Digital Design, SOM

Disclosure: Travel & Accommodation provided by Autodesk Building Solutions Division, Asia Pacific.

Auckland to Seoul?

Will be interesting, especially given recent events…

Auckland to Seoul 9595 km  324° true – unless dodging missiles

Visual Power Points: Learning from Down Under

Presentation Zen uses recent Aussie and Kiwi tourism promotion videos to introduce the impact of applying bold images and “The rule of Thirds”, a photographers favourite, to improve presentations.

The comments on the “100% Pure” are interesting to read. I’ve seen it screening on Discovery and wondered what sort of impact it has when you don’t already live here!

Presentation Zen: The power of the visual: Learning from Down Under promotion videos

Back to Orlando?

It’s more than bizarre that only a couple of months after making the 28,000km return journey to Orlando for AU 2005 I’m about to do it again.

Advanced Visual Technology are a U.K. based company and their first ever user conference is at Disney Resort – The Yacht Club. It’s on Crescent Lake, near Disney's BoardWalk, and just a few minutes walk from the AU 2005 Venue!

It’s a small world after all.

What to do - 10 Hours between flights at L.A. International....

I’m soon off to another conference which happens to be at “The Yacht Club” – about 300 metres from the AU Venue in Orlando.

Any ideas on how to fill a 10 Hour gap between flights at L.A. International?

It will be 12 hours to get there followed by another 5 hours to Orlando…

On my way to Autodesk University in Orlando

Blogging will be a bit tricky for the next few weeks as will be travelling without a computer.I’m attending Autodesk University in Orlando.

If possible I will be posting to the CAD Autodesk University category on my CAD Blog and adding photos to the Travel 2005 (Autodesk University Trip) Photo gallery.

If you are going, see you there!

Standards New Zealand to adopt XML

Standards NZ are moving to XML format. They have their catalogue now as PDF and in a database format with its own viewer but the move to XML is interesting. For AEC perhaps this means there will be potential to integrate & reference standards information directly in the relevant BIM object style/family.

Computerworld - Standards body to adopt XML

Standards New Zealand, the body that oversees the development of industry standards, is to convert its catalogue of more than 3,000 standards to XML…

San Francisco Day 2: Biked the Bridge

Apparently it was cold this morning but I don't know as slept in. About 10am I picked up a rental bike and headed for Golden Gate. Needed some film so popped into a camera shop near where I'm staying. The Chinese owner asked if I was Kiwi and it turns out his brother runs a superette in St Heliers, Auckland where I top up for "fuel" on some of my bike rides. Small world.

Anyway, with my usual luck, the bike got (out of a zillion rental bikes) started creaking a little when I put pressure on the pedal. No problem, i thought, they do that for miles. About 2.5 km later the entire crank and pedal dropped off. The creaking was not a loose crank as it appeared the bolt had failed....

After a nice walk around the waterfront pushing and scooting the one pedal bike I got back and set out again with a thoroughly checked new bike - no problems this time!

I headed out to the bridge but then over the hill to El Chimino, then through the Golden Gate Park (saw a bison), back through Presidio and headed over the hill to the bridge. The wind of the last few days meant no smog/fog and it was stunning. Got some great photos but not digital so will have to wait till I get home to see them - H'mmm Digital SLR....

Then rolled down the hill to Sausalito, had a lovely Gelato ($10NZ though), and jumped on the ferry home. By this time the winds had gone westerly and the fog that SF is famous for had started to roll in. According to my Garmin I biked, walked and scooted 52km today so think I've earned dinner tonight!

NZ GPS Maps

Brent's New Zealand Street Maps for Garmin GPS are now available via his new site.
I use them with my Garmin Legend and Mapsource software but they also come with a DOS loader if you don’t have Mapsource. Until Brent made these available Garmin Worldmap was the only up-loadable mapping for Garmin GPS in NZ. Compare the level of detail in the screenshot from Worldmap with Brent’s Street Map (Version 3).
The street data is based on the LINZ database and with the assistance of partners at Where Are We Brent is also adding extra Points of Interest and other data. The older versions are still available to use with low memory GPS. The Legends 8mb memory can hold all the street maps for NZ. Adding the search data (find streets and intersections, POI) reduces this to about 1/2 of NZ. You can decide what to take as the data is split into different map sections so this isnt a big deal

NZ GPS Maps Website

GPS NZ Mapping

Own a Garmin GPS?
For a fantastic New Zealand road map suitable for Garmin units look at NZ GPS Maps Website
Thanks to some wonderful work by Brent this is a great resource for NZ land based GPS use.
I took my Etrex Legend for a 5500 km drive and about 300km cycle around the South Island using this map extensively. Even the most remote roads were accurate. I didn't even get lost in Christchurch!