New Dells, CSWA/CSWP and my garden?

All the new computer equipment is here from Dell now...$70,000 worth. We set up one of the workstations and the 24” monitor is awesome. The installer will be here next week to get everything up and running. Note to myself: Don’t forget to do the SolidWorks license transfers.

My brother is a professional IT person. I spent last night helping (mostly watching) him fix a slew of problems at the company that my wife works at. What a mess! I just thought the network problems at Byers were bad. One of their servers is running Windows NT4 and only has a 6 GB hard drive.

If you have any thought of taking advantage of the free CSWP or CSWA test you need to be reminded that this offer ends on the 30^th. SolidProfessor has a course to help you prepare for it. See Matt’s blog on this subject for more info and the way to get 50% off the price.

I did my first harvest from the garden last night: 3 grape tomatoes, 4 zucchini and 2 crooked neck squash. I’ve been cutting basil and lettuce for weeks but this was the first real veggies to come from the garden. I believe I’m going to have a good crop this year. The squash and zucchini are loaded with blooms and I have little green tomatoes coming out of my ears. Another note to self: Don’t waste the garden space on strawberries; you must need an acre or more planted to get any amount at all.

Running on empty

Running on empty

If you haven’t noticed I will fill you in. It seems that I’ve hit a sort of writer’s block. I’ve been racking my mind to come up with things to write about the last few days. I perused the engineering magazines that came in last week thinking I would find some ideas but nothing interested me enough to write about. If there is anyone interested in doing a guest blog let me know.

We have a project I just started working on at Byers this week. It could be an interesting project if we ever get enough design parameters to get going on it. But due to our confidentiality agreement I can’t really write much about it. Suffice to say that a rather large international company has bought out another company and is in the process of moving the manufacture of the company’s product to the US. Our part in all this is to reverse engineer the handling systems to US standards. Because of the scope and the time limits involved we will be bringing in outside engineering to assist.

One thing that is going on here that might interest only me is the possibility of major computer and network infrastructure upgrades. Our in house IT head has been discussing our options with Dell. This will be the 1^st time since the Digital Equipment days that we are looking to one vendor for all our IT needs. Most of the PCs here don’t need to be CAD capable but with these upgrades the basic PCs will be more powerful that our current CAD stations. The workstations will be Dell Precisions built up with good quadro video cards and 4GB ram. Like I said, I’m excited! The one thing I’m not excited about is the fact that management is leaning towards Vista over XP. Their reasoning is that we will have to make the change eventually so we might as well do it now. Being a guy who reads all the computer magazines and listens to the tech podcasts I can say true fully that this scares the crap out of me.

Is there anyone out there using Vista? What’s the verdict?