Would like to
thank you all for the kind messages and warm wishes. It has been a difficult
time and I am still struggling to get back normality, trying to get back into
routine.
About 12 weeks
ago my father has passed away and I have been blown to pieces to a point where
I didn’t felt like doing anything. I didn’t want to go back to work and I had
to push myself really hard to do the usual, chores and routine.
The only thing
that made sense and that kept me going was my family, playing with my son and spending
as much time with them as I could.
Here is my son
Aiden, 18 months old now.
 |
| Cheeky monkey |
While being a
contractor helps you keep active and prevents you from getting dull or
complacent, it also means you need to carry on no matter what; no work, no pay.
I had to keep going and provide for my family but it was really difficult at
times.
I need to thank
my friends, family and colleagues for support and understanding. This wasn’t
totally unexpected but he really was a special person who has positively
influenced everyone around him.
I haven’t been
totally absent and I have been in contact with Autodesk on various subjects,
one being Tube and Pipe. We have a plan forward and while I’ve gathered another
60 ideas on T&P it’s best we split the overhaul post and create individual
requests for each one of them.
The original
plan was to keep it all as a single entry and make the developers get the full
picture but the negative comments are turning users away from T&P. What we
need to understand is that some of my requests are referring to Inventor in
general, others are my own imagination, and some of them are not to be found in
any other pipe design software. While I wish my car had screen-in-screen
mirrors and self adjusting dash lights it doesn’t make it a bad car and it’s
certainly no indication on the performance of the vehicle.
Long time ago
(about 13 years to be more exact) I have asked and older/experienced colleague
what is the best CAD software and while it all depends on discipline / product /
design you are doing his answer was far simpler:
“The best CAD software
is THE ONE YOU KNOW”.
My reply is a
simple comparison on my work place. The design office in am in Veolia is one of
the few that uses Autodesk Inventor; default recommended package throughout the
group is ProE/Creo but there are also Aveva PDMS users as well. This makes us
one of the most productive offices as well because Inventor gives us the speed
and flexibility to work in ways other cannot. For some of our projects we only
get 5-10 hours design time and that includes, P&ID, plant layout,
renderings, along with saving and sending in various formats, setting up the
projects, drawing register, etc.
On the other
extreme I am currently working on a project with equipment from ProE, vessels
from SolidEdge, skids from SolidWorks, building components from Revit and Tekla
via .ifc conversions, sketches from Autocad and I am adding Tube and Pipe with
Autodesk Inventor. I then export it to A360 Glue (sort of navisworks in the
cloud) via Navisworks Mange. Forgot to mention that the building has ReCap
scans and we have imported the point clouds in Inventor for validating pipe
routing and clearing clashes.
Other departments will need more time to setup the project and the libraries while we’ve finished the entire
job.
Yes Inventor has
room for improvement but the more users there are the better the software will
get so don’t just discard it based on a list form a lunatic that has nothing
better to do with his time and he posts all sort of crazy requests on Idea Station.
So what now?
Will try and ease in, find my balance, one step at a time and see if I can get
up to running speed again.
ADS.
