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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. ...

At Autodesk University, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass introduced the term “Infinite Computing” in an attempt to define Autodesk’s perspective on “the cloud” from a unique angle. I think the term is a brilliant and effective use of terminology because it focuses an otherwise nebulous concept and it radiates a sense of real and immediate purpose. ...

It’s not too often that lawyers give away their work, but Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog.com is doing just that by providing some free sample confidentiality agreements. If you can afford to pay an attorney for simple agreements like this, more power to you; otherwise you may want to grab these free agreements while you can. There is of course a disclaimer, but thankfully it’s short and simple just like the agreements.

I had the good fortune of hearing Deelip Menezes deliver the keynote address at the Bricsys 2010 Conference in person. If you missed it, check out the video now at the Bricsys web site. The question and answer session after the speech is an excellent harbinger of the discussions to come if Deelip is correct in his prediction about CAD on the cloud.

I am back home after a whirlwind trip to the Bricsys 2010 Conference. I’m very happy to be back to Ohio food and my own bed. It was a great experience and well worth the trouble. I’ve written before (and here) about the problem with food at conferences, and this one was no different. Unfortunately, there are no Burger Kings in Belgium, so the problem was compounded. I was excited when I saw a restaurant touting “American Food”, unfortunately it was “American Food as Europeans Imagine It”, which is not American food at all. ...

Bricsys asked me to give a short presentation about OpenDCL to developers at their Bricsys 2010 Conference in Bruges next week. I’m looking forward to meet keynote speaker Deelip Menezes and other familiar names in the CAD community, and of course planning to learn more about the ever evolving Bricscad platform. ...

Autodesk has been pushing for years now to get all customers onto an annual subscription program. They’ve trotted out the typical reasons: it’s cheaper, it’s easier, it’s simpler, you get more free stuff, etc. Clearly the “sell now, deliver later” model is better for Autodesk, and it’s not surprising that Autodesk has been pushing it hard. ...

After over 10 years of the same infrastructure and the same look and feel, the ManuSoft web site has finally been given an overhaul. The original web site used Perl scripts that I wrote myself to serve up pages by patching together a header, table-of-contents, and main content frame and displaying it either as a 3-frame web page or by using an HTML <table> to format the layout. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but it functioned well and served its purpose for a long time. ...

For AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk made relatively few changes in the EULA. They fixed the grammar error that was introduced in AutoCAD 2010, but they didn’t make any changes to the convoluted “License Grant” wording that was also added in AutoCAD 2010. ...

The Library of Congress announced yesterday that they are archiving every tweet ever published. I think a lot of people consider their tweets (and Facebook messages) as ephemeral writing that disappears into the ether, without thinking about the implications of its survival (mildly NSFW).

Tyler Ochoa (law professor and two time “Jeopardy!” champion) writes an interesting post about the 300th anniversary of the first copyright law, called the Statute of Anne. Referring to the motivation behind the original law, Ochoa says “Although the Stationers were chiefly concerned with restoring and perpetuating their monopoly, they framed their petition to Parliament in terms of justice for authors.” In many respects, not much has changed since 1710.