You know, I should REALLY read more carefully these days.   I didn’t know that the “5 Things” were supposed to be CAD-related, so I went all “Oprah” on my readers last night.   James called me out as king of all dorks, so I hastily deleted that post.    Alas, now no one will know what my one true love in life is (in case you’re wondering, it’s paperwork….inside joke there).

So, without further ado (about pretty much nothing) – here’s my 5 CAD Things:

1) My first official CAD package was in no way related to Autodesk.   It was really, really generic CAD.   As a matter of fact, it was called GenericCADD.   The box was white label.   No, really, it was.   Like the pasta my grandmother used to buy at A&P.

2) I’ve actually drawn on a board, which makes me appreciate CAD all that much more.    As a matter of fact, my final exam for my “Engineering Graphics” class in college was to create an assembly drawing of a C-clamp on paper.   Overnight.   There’s a story there…

3) I almost got kicked out of college because of my first and only CAD class.   Long story short, anal instructor thought that my lab partner and I had cheated on our final (originally supposed to be all parts of a C-clamp and then a digital assembly drawing)   This caused me to have to do the board drawing mentioned in #2 – overnight.    Any student who didn’t do the drawing would be reported to the college president for cheating.    Come to find out, a miscreant degenerate in the class had simply hit the plot button again in the lab on the drawing that I had loaded onto the computer.   The instructor apologized, took my nice hand drawing and promised me extra credit on it.   I still made a B in that class.   I hate that guy…

4) Like Dana, I’ve never had a formal class on any Autodesk product, until I started working for a reseller.   Everything I’ve learned about the software, hardware, and networking has been due to a severe personality disorder I call “nerd-mentality” and a good bit of OJT.   Oh, the discussion groups helped me learn more than any class ever could (or so I thought at the time….)

5) This falls under “kinda-sorta CAD related” – in the old days, there used to be a discussion group on the Autodesk server where people just chilled and hung out discussing things around the water cooler.   It was called pn.take5, and a favorite hangout of mine.   Well, some of us got bored back in the day during an Autodesk University (we couldn’t go…) and got a little rambunctious.   Soon after that, Take 5 went away from the Autodesk server.    Our antics were mentioned as to blame…and James used to bug me mercilessly about it before we became friends.

Wow, that wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be.   Not bad!