No politics spoken here!

No politics spoken here!

Things are finally starting to calm down at the Cox household.  The last few weeks have been a blur of activity.  From refurbishing sixteen computers to trying to get the yard work done has been a struggle.  There was some mention by my wife of having my nose in a computer screen for the last three weeks.  But all that is finally behind me now.  The Shelby HAMfest has come and gone and I managed to sell all the computers but three.  I still have a bunch of 20” CRT monitors that are in excellent shape if anyone is interested…I will make you a deal on one or two or three or…

 

The HAMfest was great.  The new location is better as far as the facilities but some of the older people were complaining about how spread out it was.  If you have never been to an event like this I suggest you try one out.  Whether you’re into HAM radio or computers you will find a bunch of people with like interests who are just dying to strike up a conversation.  Last year I took my Commodore SX64 and a bunch of people stop by to reminisce about their Commodore 64 days.  This year my brother took some token-ring switches and had similar results.  BTW – neither the SX64 or the token ring gear sold but we did get a lot of traffic to our table because of them.

 

During the process of setting up the PCs for sale I learned a lot about Linux and in particular Ubuntu Desktop.  I’m tempted to set up one of the left over machines in my house just to see if I can make it do all that I typically do on a Windows machine.  With a little searching around the web and a bit of under the hood tweaking I believe that this can be a windows alternative.  Excluding SolidWorks of course! In fact on the new build of my ‘regular’ desktop machine I installed OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.  I’m wondering if there is a way to hook the OpenOffice spread sheet into SolidWorks instead of Excel, this will be my next project.  I did temporarily install Outlook just to get my contacts imported.  Does anyone know of an alternative that can sync your contacts with your pocket PC?  I’m not worried about the email since I use Google’s Gmail almost exclusively now since I just found out that I can add my Pop3 accounts to it.

 

In response to comments made on some of the blog entries I would like to thank the ones who read and responded.  The situation concerning the ‘limited user’ status on the CAD machines at Byers has now been lifted with yours truly being responsible for the computers in the CAD department.  Whoever said that I should just keep bugging the IT manager about this was right.

 

Thanks for all the tips on the imported sheet metal part.  I foresee someday SolidWorks recognizing a sheet metal part and making the necessary adjustments to the dumb solid on its own.  This is what I meant by ‘Smarter SolidWorks’.  I do wish that when you comment on the blog that you would leave enough information so that I will know who you are.  I removed the requirement that you be logged in to comment to make it easier for all of ya’ll but please in the spirit of community tell me who you are.