It's a sunny, cloudless, cold this morning in San Antonio Texas. Up at 6:30am after an all-day series of flights to cross the continent. The Marriott hotel chain made the brilliant decision to locate two hotels across the street from each other, both named Marriott River---. One is the Riverfront, the other the Riverside. Naturally, taxi drivers don't know the difference and so tourists end up being told by the registration desk to "go across the street" to the other one. In the morning, I ask a hotel employee how to get to the convention center. He doesn't know, and says he doesn't want to misdirect me. Thoughtful fellow.
And so it is that I am reporting Day 1 on Day 2. As fellow journalist Randall Newton put it, we're doing a lot of listening, not a lot of writing.
General Session
Former SolidWorks ceo Jeff Ray welcomed us one last time to SolidWorks World and to his home town of San Antonio. He introduced the senior design engineer of Schramm, who made the drill rig used to locate the Chilean miners, as well as the secondary "Plan B" rescue tunnel. Another SolidWorks customer designed the pneumatic drill that chipped away at the rock. Halfway through, the drill failed because the rock was harder than expected. The broken bit had to be retrieved; a new bit was designed on site with SolidWorks, and then three days later a new drill bit arrive from the USA. Sunglasses provided to rescued miners were by Oakley, another SolidWorks customer. Interesting how the disaster turned into a feel-good marketing event.
Next up was DesignMatters, a company that wonders how to design something that's hard to use incorrectly. In this case, a blue LED light to combat infant jaundice: just one child fits in, so that two don't fit (results in cross infection), lights shine from above and below, and the units is controlled with two buttons.
And then the highlight: the flight commander of Apollo 13, which suffered the explosion 55 hours into the journey to the moon. It was pretty amazing to hear first-hand from the man whose words were made famous by the movie, "Houston, we have a problem."
Also interesting to hear: In the Mercury era, NASA had 100 mathematician women who were called "computers." They spent all day with calculators determining the Mercury flight route, graphing it out. NASA did have three mainframes, but two of them were at IBM, because IBM did not trust NASA to run them properly.
We also heard of the Apollo 1 disaster, which caused the deaths of three astronauts by fire. NASA then implemented their new "There is no place for failure" approach. 27 was the average age of the flight team that got Apollo 11 to the surface of the moon with 17 seconds of fuel left. (They almost decided to not land.) Apollo 12 was struck by lighting during take off, shutting down the entire spacecraft except for booster rockets. They had two minutes to figure out how to solve the problem or else abort the mission. Found an obscure switch that turned telemetry back on.
During Apollo 13's take off, one engine stopped working. When the crew was 200,000 miles from earth, 50,000 miles from moon, the thermal switch malfunctioned, allowing a spark to explode the liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The two elements were combined to create electricity, water, and oxygen for the crew. Later, we heard about the six things that happened to cause the accident, starting with a contractor's decision to save money by changing the electrical system from 28 volts to 80 volts -- but forgetting to upgrade a thermostat.
(Here's irony: on my flight to San Antonio, I watched Capricorn One, the movie where NASA fakes a flight to Mars.)
Software
During two keynote sessions, we have heard nothing about SolidWorks, the software. So far, it has just been Dassault products:
- DraftSight, that's been downloaded lots.
- Post3D, a new name for old software that uses creepy avatars to navigate 3D environments. Matt Lombard has been talking about it at www.dezignstuff.com/blog/?p=4456.
- And a kind of apology from the new ceo of SolidWorks for how foggily the SolidWorks-on-the-cloud messaging was handled over the last year. "We read your blogs, and we read the comments on your blogs." There will always be a locally-installed version of SolidWorks, he promised, although I thought I detected an escape clause: "as market conditions dictate." (Paraphrased wording.) This makes sense, for should the number of non-cloud users drop to a few thousand, then it would make no sense to continue updating it.
Each general session has started off with a clever movie that has a western guy and gal seemingly having a shoot-out in the Texan desert. Then they whip out their hands to design paintball guns on invisible CAD systems that seem to sit in the air in front of them. When done designing, they reach into the vaporous system, pull out paint guns, and plaster the side of a building with "SolidWorks World 2011."
Well, apparently we will hear about SolidWorks 2012 on Day 3. I look forward to that.
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