With the economy where it is, any free help is greatly appreciated. So if you are an engineer or an architect who works with wood (or would like to if you knew more about it), sign up for any of these webinars by WoodWorks and learn about this great material from the “comfort” of your [...]

Now Autodesk has two green thumbs! In a press release published earlier today, Autodesk has announced that it has acquired ECOTECT. Let’s see how they weave Revit, Green Building Studio and Ecotect together. FYI, here is a description of ECOTECT from the Square 1 website: Ecotect is a comprehensive environmental design tool that covers a [...]

After the “Sustainability vs. Homeland Security” graph from my last post, I somehow feel that I could present another one. This one illustrates visit statistics for one of my course websites. I have 60 students in that class, which is properly reflected in the in-semester weekly number of unique visitors. Look below what happens when [...]

So far I have used SketchUp for a lot of things, but a 50-minute presentation wasn’t among those. Besides, one of the big no-no’s for "classic" Powerpoint presentations is having too much happen on-screen (flying-in arrows and the like). Given the dynamic 3D interface of SketchUp I was curious if flying around inside its space [...]

One problem when exporting a SketchUp model that contains images as textures to Google Earth is file size. You do not want to have a building model that weighs in at more than 500kB. A 1 MB file may be justified for a very complex building, but anything beyond that will a) load slowly (remember [...]

These are some impressions from the graduate commencement 2007 at UMass. I am just showing a very small portion of the ceremonies (which were extensive, well organized and beautifully ceremonious) – look for more pictures of the festivities to appear soon on the UMass site. Protests during the 2007 UMass Graduate Commencement