Thanks to all who emailed me with good wishes following my recent injury. I eased back into work...it only took a couple of weeks for "cabin fever" to settle in. I snuck into my Morgan Hill office where my co-workers were delighted to see me alive and happy to have me back at work.

It is a bit amazing that I can have 10 broken vertebrae and still be able to walk and move about. I can't really turn or twist my torso, but that's OK. I'm happy with my mobility level knowing that it will get better.

The most common comment from readers were references to my age...apparently how old I am is a bit of a mystery and supposedly will affect how quickly I am expected to recover.

Actually, my quick recovery has less to do with my age and more to do with the fact that 1) I exercise regularly and lead a pretty active life - riding my horses 2-3 times a week, playing softball in a women's league, swimming, walking, etc. and 2) having a generally good attitude. I don't spend a great amount of time feeling sorry for myself. I'm a glass half-full kind of a person and that works pretty well for me. Nobody really enjoys hanging out with someone who is depressed, mopey, or whiny. Why would I want to hang out with myself if I was like that?

However, since inquiring minds really must know....I was born in January 1958. I don't really want to give my full birthday due to the risk of identity theft and the exact day is rather irrelevant. Age is more a state of mind. I heal as quickly as any 20 year old, look like I am closer to 30, and can be as silly as any eight year old...I am definitely in touch with my inner child. How wonderful is that? Hope you make friends with your inner child and do something for him or her soon.

A reader from Brazil emailed me with the following question:
Im using Autodesk Inventor Professional 10 and have a problem with pack and go. I need to export one assembly to a CD ROM and ever lost the fasteners (bolts , nuts , pins). All of these are in the content center files located (for default) in folder - My documents - inventor - content center files. When i open the assembly direct from cd all fasteners aere missing and a message is displayed "unresolved assembly". What can i do ? Please help me

This is a common problem and easily resolved.

1. Go through your assembly and perform Copy- SaveAs for each fastener type.
2. To do this, you can just go to the browser, right click on the fastener and select 'Copy-SaveAs'.
3. Save the fastener using your company's part number for the part in a common directory on your server.
4. Run 'Replace Component' to replace the fastener with the fastener in your fastener library.
5. When you run Pack and Go, include the folder where you saved the file.
6. You can also manually add files to the zip file using Winzip.

Back in July, I did a presentation for MAUG...no I didn't announce it in CADzette...I am now making stealth appearances at user groups, so if you want to catch me making a presentation, you just have to attend all user group meetings in the Bay Area and you may have a shot at seeing me.

As happens often when I present, chaos ensued. My intention was to give a pretty straight forward demo on the autodrop function and FEA module in Inventor R11. Nobody had seen the autodrop function and they all thought it was pretty cool. I had two people come up afterwards and say they wanted to upgrade their Inventor seat to Pro just for the FEA module...too bad there wasn't a reseller in the room I could point them to.

The chaos happened because the users know I am not a demo jockey...I'm a user...so they feel free to yell out things they want me to show them...and I am happy to oblige...mostly because what they are asking for, I haven't tried and I am curious too. The problem with that is...if I haven't tried it, I don't know what is going to happen either...and I have no way of controlling the results. It becomes very "real world" very quickly.

Anyway, one of the users asked me to write him a lisp routine on the spot. He wanted a routine that breaks a line and then allows him to change the properties. He routinely has lines that go through a rectangle and he wants to be able to break the line so it is a single line inside the rectangle with one set of properties (like hidden or center) and the extensions outside the rectangle continuing on.

Given the time constraints and watching somebody code is often like watching paint dry, I took a quick stab at it...saw it was going to require more debugging that the tolerance of the audience and offered to email it to him the following week.

The routine is not perfect...I think it requires more mouse clicks than necessary, but I couldn't get it to work with fewer picks...so here it is, open, fully commented, and available for free for your usage. Feel free to modify it for your needs and thanks to MAUG - the Marin AutoCAD User Group, for inviting me to speak.

I had downloaded a part from the SolidWorks Design Library user-donated area (and why doesn't Inventor have that?), but the part was about twice as big as I needed...so how to get it to the right size?

First off, it seems like some of my menu items were not visible or available. If you go down to 'Customize' on the menu, you can see what menu items are visible/hidden. Enable the ones you want.

To scale a part:

1. Open the part file.
2. Go to Insert->Features (this has to be enabled on your menu)
3. Select all the features you want included in the new part.
4. Set the new scale factor.
5. Press OK.
6. Perform a 'SaveAs' to the new part number.

Why is it when you perform a 'SaveAs' in SolidWorks, you get the file up with the new name, but when you perform a 'SaveAs' in Inventor, you have to browse to the new file? If SolidWorks can do it, why can't Inventor? This has been a pet peeve of mine since Day 1.