Rich_Winsor

LOL! Hey, I resemble that remark.

Sure I'm joking. Isn't that what the "wink" and "grin" are all about?

Wow! Now I see what everybody is talking about when they point out how helpful everyone on this forum is. And Perry, thanks for your generous offer.

When I purchased my spread here the main house was in the middle of a major (non-permitted) remodel. I asked the owner (a sweet old lady) if there were some plans of the project so I could see what she had envisioned for the project. She assured me she had some plans and that she would dig them up for me. Well, here's the plan. Floor Plan Drawing.pdf

Those and a SSD.

Waasup D. Scott? No update? Are you going to leave us all hanging? How did the call to the cable company go? Is Dawn sleeping with the fishes? Let me guess, to make up for it they gave you a dedicated fiber optic line run on a six inch diameter cable. Now when you hit the download button all of Southern California temporarily drops off the grid. Just wondering....

So.... what you are saying is that it finally "Dawned" on you that you have a crappy internet hook-up?

Thanks for posting those results Curt. That's just the info I was looking for when we visited this topic a while back. If I have to go satellite (for the dwellings too far from the road for cable) I could live with 6 Mbps but definitely not less than 1 Mbps. I'm still bickering with the powers that be at Charter to get them to run a couple of hundred feet of hardwire to an existing telephone pole on the property so I can get the same cable modem service which I receive at the house near the main road. Up front there I am paying for 30Mbps service so I guess I should be happy pulling 66+ Mbps.

Intel motherboards have a setting you can access in the BIOS to select the "primary video adapter". You can select "internal graphics" and you will be using the onboard graphics from the motherboard, or you can select "external PCIe graphics" and you will be using whatever video card you have plugged into your motherboard.

LOL! I think David just set a Guinness World Record for duplicate posts.

Whoa! Hold it right there buster.... You aren't one of those shape-shifting insectoid praying mantis aliens who came down to earth from a star in Orion's belt to infiltrate our society and enslave all of mankind.... are you? .... I'm onto you guys. You won't get away with it on my watch.

Oh yeah, well I'm SILVERIER. What do ya think? I put my shades on too. Kind of like two peas in a pod, huh?

Too true, what is it that they say, people are "dying" to get in there every day.

Sorry, I got carried away there. Not to change the subject (again) but have you noticed how hauntingly similar my image and your (Mr. P's) image are?

"You've painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere? The shadows on the wall tell me the sun is going down Oh, Ruby don't take your love to town"

Dang Jon, either there is some serious foreshortening going on or that is one tall flag pole. If that is a 10' basketball stanchion in the distance I make the flagpole out to be 50 to 60 feet tall.

What I am espousing is a sea change in marketing strategy. Why not try a strategy like the Grateful Dead used? When they found out that their fans were "illegally" taping their shows they didn't spend a fortune trying to prosecute the offenders and cracking down on them. They embraced the concept. Then when the taping started to become a nuisance to other concert goers they didn't cut the practice out, they made a special section for the concert tapers. They established a social network long before the Twitter and Facebook geeks ever thought of the idea and facilitated the distribution of the "bootleg" recordings. Did this cut into album sales? Maybe, but the trade off was a fiercely loyal fan base that would follow them anywhere and they became one of the highest grossing touring acts in history not to mention a merchandising cash cow. The point being that any user is a good user. Some may never "go legit" and buy a full license but that doesn't matter. They are all building the user base and market share and getting the software name out there in the marketplace. Maybe they buy a tee-shirt or ball cap to show their allegiance, or pop for some manuals or some instruction. There are many ways to extract some value besides strong-arming your user base for license fees and SSA's. There will always be the users who see the advantage of having a fully backed license with all the tech support and content that entails. There will also be those, like I did, that come late to the table but end up in the fold. Not allocating all the time and money trying to police the product would free up many resources which are sucked up in the ironfisted security approach and these resources could be plowed back into making the software an even more desirable program to use and own which in turn would increase the user base and market share and so on and so on. Will such a thing ever occur, probably not, but a guy can dream can't he?

Actually it wasn't "stealing, plain and simple". What it was was a bona fide e-Bay transaction. I was in the market for a product, did a search for said product, and found that product up for auction. I bid on the item and was the winning bidder. Did the price seem suspiciously reasonable, sure, but it's not my nor any other e-Bay participant's job to research the legitimacy of a product up for sale on their site. I wouldn't be shopping there if I didn't think I could find an occasional good deal. And in hind sight how much did it hurt the software company? They ended up getting full market value for their product which they would never have received if not for the original e-Bay transaction, which was my whole point to start with.

This is analogous to an argument I have made in defense of bootleg software. Back in 2005 I bought a bootleg copy of SolidWorks on e-Bay from a guy in England for 40 British pounds (they have since tightened their security for these types of transactions). After using the software for about five years I decided I had become proficient enough to justify shelling out the big bucks for a legitimate license with all the support and content. When I told the guy who handled the transaction that he would never be writing up the sale if I hadn't bought the bootleg version and had a play with it he could not comprehend the concept that having the bootleg copy led to getting a legitimate copy. I suspect that if the time spent on policing the software was spent on developing a truly superior product the sales would take care of themselves.

Hey O.T., what does a four stringed musical instrument have to do with the price of beans in Boston? I'm just funin' you because recently I spent the better part of a half hour on Dictionary.com trying to find out how to spell the word that I would pronounce as "wah-lah". All that French stuff is Greek to me, but the word you were looking for is voila.

Nick, isn't that what the little green up arrow is for? Dang Bill, there you go again. So we need some contour lines, fine. What tool shall we use? Of course, skinny sidewalks, how could we be so thick headed?

In a similar vein I like to change the color of the framing with the Adjust Material Definition tool so that the walls show with a little more "pop" when viewing a floor plan in a 3D Doll House view.

If your roof planes are properly constructed the fascia boards will match up. Need a little more info to tell just what your problem is.

So… you want me to spill the beans (as we say over here). Such a simple yet powerful illusion. Think about it. All the walls are exactly the same height (count the bricks). They are not tapered or skewed in any way and all of the corners are at exactly 90°. All the surfaces of the water (save for the waterfall) are perfectly level. How can that be?...... All the distortion is in your mind……with the help of a little embellishment with PSP.

I have a few observations on this topic. I was under the impression that one of the main reasons this new forum format was implemented was superior spam prevention. When spam is present I would like to be able to simply mark it as read and be done with it. I don't know how everyone else reads this forum but personally I just log on, click on the "first unread post" dot beside the first topic on the page and go from there. When I get to the bottom of each thread I don't go "Back to General Q&A" but merely hit the "Next Unread Topic" link. There is no way to know if the next unread topic is spam or not so it is quite easy to inadvertently open an unwanted topic. If I have to go back to the General Q&A page after reading each thread it will make using the forum a very unpleasant experience.