It has been quite an eventful week here in North Alabama.  For me it all started with an early morning wake up call last Wednesday of intense lightning and thunder.  Those storms were just the beginning of what turned out to be one of the worst severe weather disasters in US history. We spent much of the afternoon and evening hours taking cover under the desks in our office.  Mid afternoon we lost power and didn’t get it back for 4 days.

All of our family made it through safe and sound and we were VERY fortunate to not have any damage from the storms, but there are MANY here in North Alabama who weren’t so lucky.  Many homes across the region were flattened by EF4 and EF5 tornados.  The community is pulling together and is doing an amazing job in disaster relief.  Since I’m BY FAR not the best writer in my family, I’m going to send  you over to my wife’s site to learn more about what has happened and how you can help if you feel so inclined.

Tornadoes – Your Help is Needed  – Southern Plate

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For the first time in this site’s existence, I had to take a break.  The last two years have brought MANY exciting changes in what I do everyday which has resulted in much LESS free time for Blogging.  So with the new year upon us and SolidWorks World 2011 coming up next week, I’m excited to get things going again and hopefully won’t have to take such a long hiatus again.  I’m not going to bore you to death for too long, but I’ve had some interesting things going on that I’ll briefly share with you.

Many of you who follow my me on Twitter know about the incredible journey my wife has been on for about the last two years.  You don’t really hear me talk about it much publicly, but that doesn’t reflect at all of how incredible proud our family is of her and the wonderful things she has gotten to share with her readers both through her website and her newly released book.  In particular, the response from the SolidWorks Community has been awesome. Thanks to everyone for their support!

It hasn’t been the only change over the last two years.  In March of 2009, I was fortunate enough to take part in a historic project for the company I work for (Dynetics).  In a joint effort with NASA, we began work on FASTSAT-HSV01.  FASTSAT stands for Fast Affordable Science and Technology Satellite.  It was a new venture for our company and I had an incredible amount to learn in a small amount of time.  Our amazing team designed and built the satellite in record time and this past November it was launched aboard STP-S26.  FASTSAT is now in orbit and performing science operations.  It was an incredible experience that really can’t be put into words.  My work in that field continues today as we ready for future opportunities and missions.  I’ll get to share one mission in particular with you later this week.

I’ve also been working on a team with a rather large task of implementing PLM & PDM solutions which does involve SolidWorks Enterprise PDM.  I have been pretty hands on with the EPDM implementation and setup and have been VERY pleased with our progress!

So with all this going on…don’t think for a second that I haven’t been watching the CAD World closely.  I find it fascinating watching all the CAD companies trying to jockey themselves in position for future CAD platforms.  Some companies have changed their name, some have mixed old with new, and some are in the process of starting from a “clean sheet of paper”.  I’ll have a SolidWorks World Preview post later this week that talks a little bit about the “New SolidWorks” or SolidWorks V6 as it has been dubbed by some.  After being “shocked” with cloud news at SolidWorks World last year, things are moving along and hopefully we will get another preview of the new platform next week.  There are many interesting conversations going on about it…but until we see details, it will remain largely a discussion point with many opinions and predictions only.

Well, that’s it for now….stay tuned…more to come!

Related posts:

1. Announcements to look for at SolidWorks World 2011
2. Arrival at SolidWorks World 2011
3. SolidWorks World 2011 General Session Tuesday
4. SolidWorks World Monday General Session

The What’s New Guide (PDF) has been posted to my What’s New Guides page. If you missed the post a few months back this is the page I created that hosts EVERY What’s New guide that SolidWorks has ever produced!  You can even check out some User Guides from the first releases of SolidWorks (Before What’s New Guides existed).

Stay tuned…MUCH more on SolidWorks 2010 is on the way!

Related posts:

1. SolidWorks What’s New Guides! – Yes, ALL of Them!
2. SolidWorks 2007 Pre-Release 1 is available!
3. Up Next: SolidWorks 2010 Beta
4. SolidWorks 2010 Beta Details
5. SolidWorks 2010 Enhancement Highlights

I’ve got some REALLY exciting stuff in the works for the site.  We are rapidly approaching SolidWorks 2010 Beta 1 release.  I’ll have some specific updates on that hopefully later this week.  You can bet as soon as the NDA is lifted you’ll be able to catch highlights of LOTS of new features here!

I’ve gotten some really nice comments and e-mails about the posted What’s New Guides.  I’m glad that many folks are finding the information useful.  I really didn’t know what the reaction would.  I’m pleasantly surprised to see that many folks think that having them ALL available for download from one site is as good of an idea as I thought it would be.

The work I am doing nowdays has taken me FAR away from the complex curvy parts I’ve grown accustomed to doing but has really opened my eyes to some areas of SolidWorks that I haven’t utilized lately.  With this I’ve got some new posts in mind to share some of my latest experiences with the software.

I’ve gotten my new Dell M6400 and am really pleased so far.  It came loaded with Windows XP pro 32 bit but NOW has Windows Vista 64 bit loaded!  I’ll share more about that saga later on.  I’ll just say this…I LOVE not having to worry about running out of memory anymore!! 

Stay tuned….more to come!

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Have you ever wished that you could turn back time and look at what previous versions of SolidWorks looked like?  Perhaps you have a customer who is a few versions back and you can’t quite remember if they have access to one of the newer features.  Perhaps you are just plain curious and would like to see how far the software has come.  Nevertheless, until today, I have been unable to find a single website where you can download legacy documentation for ALL versions of SolidWorks.  I’m happy to announce that I’ve added a new page to the site which allows you to take as step back in time.  The What’s New Guides page contains ALL of the available SolidWorks What’s New Guides!   This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and thanks to some help from SolidWorks Corp. and my good buddy Rich Hall, this idea is now a reality.  I turns out that the What’s New Guides only date back to SolidWorks 98Plus (in electronic form).  To cover the first couple of versions of SolidWorks, I have provided the User Guides.  (Some of which were not available in electronic form, so the data was taken directly from the Help files.)

Now, is this page going to increase your productivity at work?  No..probably not.  That is unless you are on a REALLY old version of SolidWorks and you catch a whiff of some of the new features in some of the latest What’s New Guides.  The main intention of this is to provide a little history for ALL SolidWorks users (new and old).  If you are a CAD History Buff…you are really gonna love this.  Check it out and let me know what you think!

Stay tuned….more to come!

Related posts:

1. What’s New in SolidWorks 2010 Guide Posted
2. I’m BAAACCKK!

Today marks the next phase of my site changeover to WordPress which started back at the beginning of August.  I’m proud to present to you a brand new site layout which I think takes this site beyond being “just a Blog”.  I have upgraded the site to a WordPress Premium theme in an effort to make it easier to explore the content of the site without having to depend solely on searches and category lists.

Browsing the site is pretty self explanatory, but there are a few new features I would like to point out specifically.  On the Home page you will always find the “Latest” post at the top.  This feature is also reflected on single post pages or category views.  Next to the Latest post area is perhaps my favorite new feature of the site which is a scrolling carousel of ALL of the articles in this site containing video content!  It is a simple category sort, so If you would rather see the video posts in a larger list, you can simply click on the “SolidWorks Video Tip” link just above the carousel or select that category from the category pull down in the sidebar.

Just below the Header area are the top five categories of the site (Excluding SolidWorks Video Tips since it is featured above).  The rest of the categories pages can be accessed from the Category pull down in the sidebar.  Just below the top five categories is the “Recent Posts” area.  There you will find EVERY post from newest to oldest.  There is also a REALLY handy page navigation bar at the bottom of the “Recent Posts” area.

I have recently taken on webmaster duties for Southern Plate, my wife’s recipe tutorial site.  Just after we got her site migrated from Blogger to WordPress, we started looking at some premium themes for both her site and mine.  She found this theme and we purchased it with the thought that it could serve both of our sites well.  Her site was the first to be implemented since she gets MUCH more traffic than me.  After a VERY SMOOTH implementation of the theme to her site last week, it was a no brainer to move forward and get this site migrated ASAP.

I’d like to hear YOUR thoughts on the new site design so drop me a Comment and let me know what you think.  This site is ALWAYS a work in progress and if you think there are additional things I can to do to improve it, let me know.

Stay tuned….more to come!

Related posts:

1. ALL NEW SITE & HOST!!
2. Blog Content Research