In the Pipes

Girl in Oz, again

So I'm back in Australia again.  This makes it my third trip to Australia in 18 months.  It's no Amsterdam, but I am finding that I am starting to appreciate this place. I'm learning new words: Stubby. Punter. Wild rocket. I verified that water from the bath drains counter-clockwise. I feel I should apologize to previous bosses about my years of refusing to travel down under. So if anyone sees Rich, tell him I'm sorry!   

My hotel room is right on the beach - beautiful to look out at the Pacific when I get down time in the room. It's odd to be looking east over the Pacific and not west like we do from California. This morning there were surfers and dolphins visible from my window, as well a ships in the distance queuing to load up on coal. Although after a while of watching the waves crash I remember that I'm irrationally afraid of whales (too many Jonah stories in my childhood or something), and close the curtains.  It is a fun phobia to have, particularly that year or two I worked offshore oil rigs.

Anyway, this time I'm here to teach a seminar to first year engineering students at University of Newcastle.  I am amazed at how fast these students pick up software.  Rarely have a had a class that everyone kept up as I introduced entirely new software concepts - but this group of 40 stay right with me, and sometimes get rather a bit ahead.  They remind me of some annoying Whitney Houston song or something.  It certainly is a different experience for me to talk to university students -  they are so quick with the technology, but clearly have no idea what I mean when I start using industry terms like loop or spec or pig.  (I did spend some time defining the pig for the class.)   

It's a 12 hour course on P&ID, and I took the liberty of expanding the scope to cover the broader topic of Plant design - discussing the FEED stage, PDFs, P&IDs, 3D detailed design, Orthos & Isos, procurement, fabrication and construction.  When I studied engineering we never had much of the "real world" sort of overview.  I'm hoping at least some of it sinks in. This is is the first University where we present Autodesk Plant software, although we do have intentions to get it into other institutions.  If you happen to know of others that may be interesting in such a session, please let me know.

Las Vegas Blues

So I just got back from a brief three days in Las Vegas. I'm finally figuring out how to enjoy that town - for the first time I was considering rescheduling my flight to stay longer. Usually at the end of a Vegas conference I'm worn out and more than ready to leave. Not so this time.  This time I'm a bit sad that it is all over. I was staying at THEhotel, which had a cafe called THEcafe and a lounge called THElounge. And stickers on the toilet paper rolls in the room that said THE TP. THEVegas is an odd town.

The OTC conference was great - people were there from all over - I'm a bit of an outsider for this event as it is geared to the business development and sales side of Autodesk's business. (I was there to give some technical training.) Sales is just a different world than what I see most days working inside the Autodesk tower walls. I know I'm repeating myself from previous posts, but I find it very interesting to get the perspective from the field. 

The conference started with an opening session where Carl Bass talked about Autodesk as a company.  (Actually it started with a mini-performance from the Blue Man Group. Once the crowd was hyped up, then Carl took the stage.) Carl discussed world trends such as globalization, worldwide development of new infrastructure, increasing sensitivity to environmental impact, and the increasing ubiquity of digital data. These trends impact what & how our customers design, sparking more and more interest in digital prototyping tools. (Yes I took notes.)  Obviously the increasing demands for infrastructure leads to significant opportunity in for those of us in Plant. Carl also pointed out some cool work being done by Autodesk clients - work like as creating iconic Olympic structures in Beijing or supporting the Easter island mapping project.

 

Our Plant industry sessions included interesting things such as integrating external databases with P&ID, preview of our 3D Piping application, and using Navisworks to walk through a Plant model. Navisworks - what a cool acquisition; I look forward to taking advantage of it in the future. And then the training session was lively and well received.

That's it for now.  Oh, and happy Pi day 2008.

Out and about

Yep, I know it has been couple weeks since I last posted.  I went all the way to Singapore and back - and a trip like that really eats into my energy.  You might think - as my boss does - that 20 hours on a plane (each way) and I would get a lot of work done, but for some reason that is never the case.  I did read all 731 pages of Dan Simmons' Ilium, which was rather good but would have been better if I had actually read Homer's Illiad. (His Hyperion was better IMHO.)  But I did not get a chance to blog.  I couldn't think of anything to say that didn't involve whining about how long the flight was or marveling at the quality of service offered by Singapore Airlines, even in coach.  I was in Singapore for just a short four day trip.  I did some P&ID training for a customer and also trained some folks from a reseller we have there.

I'm back now, and recovered.  Things are moving quickly on the Plant Team.  We released AutoCAD P&ID 2009 Beta 2 back around February 10th, but we aren't stopping for a breather.   We are, as always, moving ahead with new designs on all product lines.  Building software here goes through several phases:  a research phase when customer and business requirements are defined and understood, a design phase when software specifications are created, and a development phase when the software is coded to the specifications.   My features are all in the development phase right now - it's nice to watch a plan come together! 

I expect to be showing some early betas to "the real world" in the upcoming months.  If you are interested in becoming part of usability studies, definitely let us know!  (I'd be especially interested if you are an Isogen user.)  Usability studies involve meeting with us (either live or virtually) and working though a loose script with beta software.  We observe your efforts and listen to your feedback - this gives us a good idea of what works and what doesn't.  As a designer, I find it unbelievably frustrating to watch these sort of studies, but they certainly do point out the strengths and weaknesses in any design.  Anyway, if you are interested, please let us know by signing up at the Autodesk Usability site.  You can indicate interest in testing any Autodesk product, but for Plant purposes, please pick AutoCAD P&ID or AutoCAD Plant 3D.  Or, if you prefer, you can just email me ([email protected])

Next week, I'm off to Las Vegas for One Team Conference (OTC), Autodesk's annual event that brings together thousands of sales employees and channel partners for several days of intensive business planning, networking and skill building.  No, I'm not joining sales - I'm quite happy in design thank you.  I am participating at OTC by providing training on new AutoCAD P&ID features.  That reminds me. . . I need to go install the latest P&ID build.

Singapore Update

I'm in Singapore on my way to Sydney.  Yes, yes, I know it isn't on the way from San Francisco. But it's only 8 flight hours out of the way, so why not!  I'm here seeing some clients, and moreover interfacing with the Autodesk Plant Solutions team here.  A distributed workforce has its advantages, but it is always nice to have face to face interactions.  I feel lucky to be able to get to know the Singapore team in person.

Some of the designers here took me to dinner:  fried baby squid is much tastier than I ever would have imagined.  Ditto for steamed grouper, even if it was smiling at me funny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I met up with some more of the Plant team at the Marriot bar -- and lasted about 3 songs into the 80's cover band that was playing.  When's the last time you heard Toto's Africa performed live?  How about Journey's Small Town Girl?

I'm on to Sydney tomorrow -- we have a trade show of sorts.  I actually don't know too many of the details - I figure it will all become clear when I get there. 

Shopping update: The Bang Olufsen store in Singapore didn't carry the cables (see my last post).  It was a long shot anyway, to expect a 1975 vintage cable to be in stock. 

I also went shopping at Mustafa's , which has the appeal of being open 24 hours - just the thing when you are jet lagged and keeping weird hours.  What could be better than shopping at 3 AM? I bought some strange balm that is good for: "Cold and Flu Headache, Muscular Pains, Miner Abdominal Pains, Inset and Mosquito Bites, Travel Sickness".  I bought it because I like the box.  I passed on the medicinal oil that contained Dragons Blood.  Next time. And I bought some Indian style clothes that I likely won't wear, some temporary tattoos that I'll likely not use, and another pair of gloves which I don't need.  Jet lagged shopping does that to a girl.