First attempt at Autodeskin' it!

I am taking a graduate level Mechanical Engineering course for my Masters degree. Its a 3D Surface Modelling course. A program called AutoDesk Inventor is used to build 3d objects from 2d drawings. I started playing around with it today to figure out how things work in it. The final result is the following drawing:



Hmm..this would look neat on my desk at home..or even in my office (aka a cubicle)

Google your computer

Since I formatted my computer last week I had to reinstall a lot of the software I initially had. I was downloading Google Earth since I like just playing around with it once in a while, and I came across Google Desktop. It brings Google search to your desktop and allows you to search for files on your machine very quickly and efficiently. It has several nice features since you can add several gadgets suchs as weather, news, etc. I took them all off since itll probably just slow down my computer, plus I dont need all these things all the time.

By default the Google Desktops bar will appear on the right of the screen, but it took too much space so I just moved it down to the bottom in the taskbar and then made it more compact by removing all the other unecessary features like the weather.



I also installed a neat virtual desktop called MSVDM and thats what you see in that image next to Google Desktop. This gives you 4 virtual desktops to organize your work on. I am a fan of multiple desktops and alway use it on my Apple laptop and it just makes working on several things less chaotic. For example on one desktop you can have your favorite email program open, and on the next desktop your assignment work, while on the third you have some reference website for your assignment. Switch between desktops by clicking on the desktop number and everything assigned to that desktop will appear while the rest is minimized. That is why it is called virtual, as its really not 4 desktops, but it just behaves as if there were 4.

Where did my summer go?

So summer is officially over now, and its back to school for thousands of students including one new grad student by the name of Nael..yup thats me, I started my studies yesterday, but I had no classes yet. Neither did I have classes today, but everything should kick into 4th gear next week.

I managed to get myself my old undergrad job at UTS again, so Im an SSC again for the 3rd year in a row. Lots of things changed in the labs, mainly BSB and Mills this year. The new labs use ID cards to open after hours, and the best part these new labs open on their own in the morning and close alone at night. Apparently all the labs will be fitted for this which is great! Even better, instructor's id cards can be programmed to open the labs as well, so if an instructor needs the lab open early, they can go ahead and do it themselves!

I met with my supervisor, Dr. Christopher Anand two days ago and talked about my project somewhere. Although I spoke with one of the other grad students, he gave me a better picture of what I am required to do for this project. They are having some visual problems with the software, and the way somethings are drawn and thats where I am to start the project and get familiar with the code base.