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Even for 3D CAD (which I do) use, even two 19" screens is stretching things a bit. Pun unintended. When intensely focusing on detail you can easily get neck pain from side-to-side head motion. At home I use a 30" 2560x1600 panel and that's a bit better (it replaced 2-19"s and 2-22"s in a quad setup) but still takes a lot of movement.

Has anyone else noticed printing getting smaller these days or are my 50 year-old Mark One Eyeballs deteriorating along with the rest of me?

And who cares about thousands of years of technical drawing (the predecessor of software code writing nerdism), it's dead now.

http://www.pipingdesign.com/FridayFunnies/drafting/album/

in many IT groups, the preferred infrastructure for the non-IT personnel would be un unplugged PC in a locked room

I just got a new dedicated server for my sites, one of which will be running Slash. Here's a photo the hosting company sent me of it. I demand to have my locked room!

Please explain this "paper" and "pencil" you speak of. Is it some kind of new software combo? Does it run on Linux?

Sincerely,

The Ultimate Tool

If they only drew a few pictures

Like, with the ultimate tool?

In pipeline operations often a line pig is used to separate different flowing fluids. Disclaimer: I am a piping designer.

I work from home [...] on a triplehead workstation in my living room.

Dude, that's so lame nowadays. Dual screens were trendy 4 years ago and then Matrox upped the ante to 3 with the Parhelia. Really cool graphics geeks have four monitors now!

Joking aside, the quad setup is not all that great as the desk surface is too high to comfortably view the upper screens and I'm not ready to shell out for a 30" Apple or Dell (although doing so would supposedly get SLI to work).

I work in a refinery, where security is extremely prohibitive towards cameras and camera phones.

Yeah, like industrial spies/terrorists would be able to figure out what's happening in something like this. That linked image is a pretty low-density one as far as process piping spaghetti goes. I like to think of this type of organized mess as very big 3D motherboard circuitry except that the "wires" contain multiple fluids rather than electricity and require tons of steel and concrete for support.

No real need to apologize. I'm a CAD graphics guy and my latest tax-deductible toy is:

http://pipingdesign.com/photos/quad_display2.jpg

I think I've gone too far with the multiple screen thing.

just love this new development. Warning, PDF.

The "tower" you refer to is actually the cold box column where the cryogenic separation happens; the actual cooling of the gases occurs in less-tall, heavy-duty heat exchangers. I used to design the piping guts for these things, it's pretty interesting. See http://www.pipingdesign.com/cv/O2plant.html for a long-range photo of a typical plant.

Like this?

Plumbers don't typically do that type of work though, piping designers and engineers do. Plumbers need to have good, site-specific troubleshooting skills and a lot of manual skills/knowledge. I wouldn't group them with burger-flippers.

Please forgive me for plugging my own site below.

Boring crap

...spend some time looking up the Wabash River repowering project (Terre Haute, IN).

Cool. If that's the one I think it is, I worked on the ASU for it. There's an aerial photo of it here.

(Here I get to plug my own site, sort of)

Does CAD Degrade Drawing Quality? compiles a few weeks' worth of reader comments about computers, engineering and current events. The original source of the comments (reprinted with permission) are from Ralph Grabowski's upFront.eZine, which is a weekly newsletter all about the CAD industry.

People use portals, not their ISP's homepage- the predecessor to portals.

I wonder how many people create their own home page (assuming they can HTML enough to do so). Mine looks like this.

hundreds will see it before the server is fried. if you don't want people to read something- get it posted on /.

Just yesterday some were recommending hosting companies for websites in order to avoid the slashdot effect (low cost, big pipes, able to handle temporary massive traffic).

For example, try to Slashdot this ==> http://www.pipingdesign.com

OK, so maybe I'm trolling for month-end hits. The site is hosted at nexcess.net, a great service.

...like one with a crosshair attachment for clicking on specific points of a blueprintfor CAD input

We used to call them "digitizer pucks" or just "digitizers". They were used in conjunction with ~11"x17" digitizer tablets that had a clear plastic sheet protecting a printed-out icon menu system for commonly-used engineering symbols.

Some of the high-end, proprietary CAD systems such as PDS and PDMS (for piping design, that is) had much larger digitizing tablets, twin 21" monitors and were horrendously expensive. This was about 20 years ago.

I'm not "knower of all things CAD", but I think virtually all current CAD systems use onscreen menus (or for the customizers/fast finger guys, keyboard shortcuts).

You could place a "blueprint" on top of one of these and trace, but typically this was not the case.

Paul
Piping Design Central

I don't know about others, but my browser is set to display a home made custom start page that resides on my hard disk.