Bones, clones, and cyclones

My blogging has taken a nosedive in recent years, but I’m happy to report that I am doing great. I’ve been 100% focused on making sure there’s a viable alternative DWG platform for all you lost, lonely, and depressed CAD users out there. I’m going to keep this short and sweet, because as I write this I am still 100% focused on the task: putting finishing touches on BricsCAD V19 to be released “soon”.

I’ll get straight to the point. Yes, Bricsys has been acquired by Hexagon, but you would hardly know this if you worked inside Bricsys. Inside the company, the same people are doing the same work today that they were doing last month. Literally nothing has changed, at least not yet. Bricsys will change, yes, and nobody can be sure just how it will change, but I assure you that my focus will not change.

Look, the AutoCAD writing is on the wall. Life in the nursing home has not been kind to AutoCAD, and things are only going to get worse as Autodesk turns up the morphine drip. I’ve said for years that BricsCAD is the best alternative, and today it is more true than ever. To steal a line from Bricsys CEO Erik de Keyser, BricsCAD is not a clone, but a cyclone!

Service Interruptus

The ManuSoft web server has been humming along steadily for the last 7 years on an old Compaq server running Windows 2008. You may have noticed that it’s currently offline. Actually the server is still humming along just fine – it’s just that nobody can connect to it.

I had some connections with the IT guy at a local printing business, and for practically no cost I had been using two static IP addresses over their T1 connection. Unfortunately the IT guy has since moved on, leaving nobody there with the ability to manage my connection. My sweet deal was destined to collapse eventually. That’s exactly what happened last week when they had some configuration changes made to their network.

I’ve now moved this blog to the cloud (Windows Azure), and I will be moving the rest of the services to the cloud over the next week or two. Wish me luck!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Although my blog has become relatively stagnant, the rest of my life has been changing — and there are even bigger changes ahead.

My children have been growing into adulthood one by one, and my parenting time has been shrinking as a result. To take up the slack, I bought a bike a few years ago and started riding it on the many local bike trails. Initially cycling was a way to get healthy and enjoy the outdoors, but it has turned into much more. Riding a bike is great exercise, but it’s also a fantastic social activity when you do it with friends, and I have made many new friends in the very large and growing cycling community here in Ohio.

The last few years I’ve also been racing my bike competitively in the many amateur bicycle races held during the spring and summer. I never played organized sports as a kid, so this has given me an avenue to explore an unfamiliar side of myself.

While cycling has changed my life in many ways, even bigger personal changes are on the horizon. I’ve been divorced (or as I often say, “married to my bike”) for many years, but even that will be changing later this year — unless she changes her mind before we seal the deal.

In addition to the many personal changes, I’m also making some professional changes. I’ve accepted a contract offer to join the software development team of Belgium based Bricsys, maker of BricsCAD. I will continue my philanthropic work, including work on the OpenDCL project and my participation in online ObjectARX, AutoLISP, and C++ programming forums. I will continue maintaining and supporting ManuSoft software products. I will even continue blogging here and writing for upFront.eZine, but maybe my focus will shift a bit.

I’m looking forward to all these new challenges, and excited to see where this new road leads. Thank you for travelling with me!