The Month-End Report

OK, I couldn't think of a better title than that. It's been a while since I last posted, but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy. I've been quite busy; I just haven't been documenting it in the blog. We go through cycles, and it takes a certain frame of mind to want to talk about things. (At least I've found that it does for me.)

I have 3 new "finished" house designs. One is particularly good. Very attractive and perhaps even practical. Another has a good floorplan/layout, though it doesn't necessarily make good use of the space allotted to it. In fact, I have cloned it into 2 other designs with the same floorplan but radically different facades. One has a flat roof, and the other has a "Florida" roofline. I haven't completed those designs. They are waiting for some inspiration. The third finished design is a narrow lot "Florida" design (perhaps I am in my Florida phase, right now) that I like well enough. It has some rough edges that I need to fix, but I don't seem motivated to attack it.

Once I'm satisfied with the images of these new houses, I will post them on the web site. Of course, the number of designs is getting such that I probably need to reorganize things. Sometimes I wish I were a little less anal, but then, my attention to detail has served me rather well, so far.

I had another computer "adventure" this month when I decided to upgrade my video card. Not that the video card in my new computer was slow, but I thought I could enhance my system's performance by buying a card specifically "tuned" for CAD graphics (instead of using a card optimized for gaming, which most systems would have). So I did some research, and found the ATI FireGL T2 card. It's about $260 (at most mail-order places), and it has markedly better performance on CAD applications than a typical gaming card (such as the ATI Radeon X300, that I had). But ... wouldn't you know that my new Dell computer is "different". Ahem. Turns out the T2 is AGP, and my new Dell 8400 uses "PCI-Express" for the video card. The T2 wouldn't fit. So I shipped it back. And paid $40 restocking fee and $22 shipping. So, it was a $62 learning experience for me. In desperation I decided simply to upgrade the X300 to an X600 (which is about all I can afford), so now I have a new ATI Radeon X600 video card. MSI is the manufacturer. It's faster, but perhaps I should have waited a little longer. Now I learn that ATI is making FireGL technology for PCI-E, in the V3100, V3200, etc., line. They are a little costly, but I may be upgrading my video card again once these cards begin to ship. They are not available anywhere, at the moment. This is typical of computer technology: there's something new and better coming out every minute. You could choose to wait for some future "cool" technology, but even then there will be something even cooler just on the horizon.

You can aim all you want, but you still have to pull the trigger, sometime, if you want to hit anything.