I belong to several group lists. Every group has one... the dear, sweet, gullible soul who simply must forward you the email about the computer virus, the rampaging rapist, the soap that really kills, etc.

The person means well. She really does. When this happens, I go to snopes.com, do a quick search, locate the information confirming it is a hoax and forward the link back to the dupe; along with a note that before she emails the list with yet another hoax, she just do a quick check on snopes first.

Snopes is a great source of information on hoaxes. It also makes entertaining reading during lunch and breaks. So before you forward that email (or act on an email that someone sends you), you may want to check snopes first.

Thanks again to all those who donated money so I wouldn't be stuck behind the bar at the Los Gatos Brewery for the entire day. With your help, we raised my bail money and sent three deserving kids to an MDA camp. We managed to raise the full bail amount - hurrah! - and a few dollars over.

Reminder...all donations were tax-deductible.

One of the things I do is design electronic packaging for consumer products. Inventor R10 is my first choice, although I will use SolidWorks, Pro/E, CADkey, or MDT if I have to.

Recently, I designed a nice enclosure that consisted of five parts. I perform a 'Save Copy As' stl file for all of the parts and emailed them to the plastic fabricator. Four of the files could be read by his equipment, but the fifth file was no good.

Here's how I tested it. I saved the file as an 'sat' file. I opened it in MDT. I then performed an Export to stl. When I selected the solid model, I got an error that it did not lie on the proper XYZ octant.

What the heck does that mean? And of course, help does not help. So, I emailed the subscription center and a very nice guy informs me that it means that the model lies below the 0,0,0 planes. This was true. When I created the model in Inventor, I extruded mid- plane into the positive/negative XY-plane direction.

So, I had two choices...I could go back to Inventor and redefine my features on the planes, which would involve basically re-building my part or I could go to MDT, select the model, type MOVE, Select the center of the model as the basepoint, 10,10,10.

No error message this time when I went to Export- >stl. Emailed the file to the plastics house and they gave the file a 'thumbs up'.

Lessons learned:

• Inventor needs to improve how they create stl files...because most designers want to be able to design for part maintainability, which means we sometimes go into the negative planes.
• Being a subscription customer definitely pays off.
• MDT is still a necessary tool to assist in troubleshooting these types of problems.