short attention span, number 998

space shuttle processing and assembly, via boing boing. looking at those, it’s no wonder that it’ll cost thousands of jobs to retire it. but it’s still amazing, and i still hate the idea that we don’t have anything better than it ready now, the idea that it’s not that important to put humans in space, on other planets. maybe if we are facing recession, or even depression, it’ll be a pretty inexpensive excuse to create jobs that can’t be outsourced, in an area where american expertise is still preeminent. compared with the cost of running a war, it’s a bargain, and leaves plenty of money to fight the disease of the month.

it pains me to say it, but pro/e’s sketcher is just plain broken, and not as good as solidworks’. i can make something more quickly in the sketcher in pro/engineer, but when i click done, it generally ain’t done. in solidworks, after i’ve finished it, i have much more confidence that what i see on the screen is representative of my design intent. in pro/e, basically since early builds of 2001, the sketcher’s use edge and trim functions have grown increasingly more broken. in far too many cases, if you pick a use-edge of say, a circular body, and draw a line across it, then trim it down to a ‘d’ shape, after you click the done button, it will reveal that the trimmed corners are not in fact aligned to each other, and that what you have is not a closed section of two entities, but two wholly separate and floating entities that only look like they’re touching. this was not always so. at this point, the routine is to take use-edged entities after trimming them, and drag them so they’re short of touching, then manually apply a constraint to stitch them up. this is unspeakably annoying.

office 2008 has left me scratching my head so far. i rely on it at work a fair bit considering my ‘new’ computer is only partially functional. it can do CAD or it can print things, for instance, but one has to log in as two different people to have that work. so as with so many other things, i just do it on my lappy. i’ve come to rely on word’s notebook view as a replacement for my physical notebook, in the past few months. basically, i realized that though i might be better or worse at writing things down (this, like so many other things, varied inversely with how busy i was, guess what today is), i didn’t always go back to look for stuff, and seldom found it anyway. maybe those were linked. so far, this is better. a problem, however, is that of how poorly word 2008 plays with leopard. spaces confuses the shit out of it, and this is terrible. i’ve had to chase the document across the screen way too many times, and this causes it to get confused about its window focus as well, like when it’s the frontmost application, and can’t be made the frontmost window until you switch back and forth to another. or when the act of saving puts it behind a safari window or something. seems to me they should have ironed it out by now. it’s also slow to start, slow to switch to, and a memory hog. i want to embrace it, i really do, but it’s not up to snuff right now. maybe evernote (email me for a beta invite) will displace it (voodoopad, yojimbo, and omnioutliner all have tried).

i’ll go to hell for saying this, especially since the month has just started, but between the magnetic ribbons, ubiquitous puzzle pieces, and overcooked news coverage, i’m frankly a little sick of hearing about autism. there are lots of bad things that happen to people. that’s one of them. but at this point, the overexposure has made me feel like, if two people came knocking on my door for a donation, i’d give my money to the other guy, who probably needs the help more. i’m a bad person who likes to kick puppies.

although when i do kick puppies, i would probably toeball them. look the fuck out, bssc, the dreaded toeball is dialed in and i’m dropping it on people’s heads at will. it’s only a matter of time before my erratic aim returns and i shank the ball at obtuse angles again, but for now, people are actually deferring to me on free kicks. which is frightening.