Tips

Tips

Ted Boardman tedb@tbmax.com         http://www.tbmax.com

The Excuse

Well, well, if my schedule has any relationship on the state of the economy and business in general, then things are picking up for the foreseeable future. I’ve been as busy as I’ve been in years and it all involves travel.

I did take my usual 2 ½ weeks vacation in Europe the last of September and first of October and it was, as usual, a great trip. Sally and I chose cities to visit that usually elicit a “where’s that?” response from our friends when we tell them where we are going. We are not typical tourists and don’t need to use a guidebook to decisions, so it allows us to get to places off the main routes.

We started with a couple of nights in Rotterdam, Holland. I like Rotterdam. It’s a city that was mostly reconstructed in the 1950’s and as you turn corners you don’t know if you will be confronted by 18 th century Dutch architecture or very modern Dutch architecture such as the Rotterdam Cube Houses by Piet Blom http://www.nai.nl/e/collection/news/2003/0309_kubussen_e.html or the Erasmus bridge http://www.home.zonnet.nl/absolutelydutch/site/idx3/htm/display/index3.htm . Rotterdam is the home town of Rem Koolhas, I believe and has the Dutch Architectural Institute (NAI). Like I say, I’m not a tourist who tends to visit these sites, but do come across them during long walks and enjoy “discovering” them. One event I always try to make is breakfast at the Hotel New York, the official Holland/Amerika Lijn hotel http://www.hotelnewyork.nl/eng/hotel/index.html on the piers where countless grand ocean liners (and now cruise ships in the summer) have docked in the last century. Both the interior and exterior are interesting. The city also hosts a large Maritime Museum http://www.maritiemmuseum.nl/talen/english/english.html to stay in tradition with being the world’s busiest port, I believe.

Off by train to Luxembourg or Lëtzeburg http://www.luxembourg.co.uk/ if you speak the local language. I’m quite comfortable speaking German and can read other Germanic and Scandinavian languages, but this one tosses me into total confusion. There are times when I understand most everything in a sentence then it’s off in an incomprehensible babble for the rest of the sentence. Steep walled valleys surround the city on three sides, while, the main city is on the plateau and is primarily a banking and insurance haven, i.e. not considered an exciting city by most tourists. Fine with me. The valleys contain small slow moving brooks and several small villages and large parks making it a great place to wander with the option to stop for a cold beer most any time. Luxembourg is about the only place I know where many restaurants still have horse steaks (steak du cheval) on the menu.

Another local train trip into Aachen, Germanyhttp://www.aachen.de/DE/tourismus_stadtinfo/aktuell/index.html for a few days; a small city with a long history as a mineral bath mecca and said to have the oldest cathedral north of the Alps. The core of the old city has been restored and is another great place to just wander and eat and drink and observe the local inhabitants going about their daily business.

The last stop was two nights in Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities, to prepare ourselves for the flight back home. While Amsterdam is overrun with tourists, our schedule gets us out early in the morning and back to the hotel by 8pm at night, so we only have a few hours in the afternoon and evening when we get to “mingle”. I’m sure the hours between 9pm and 4am are a different world entirely, but one I’m not familiar with.

If you’re wondering why I’m doing my vacation travelogue for you, it’s because of my current work schedule. I’ve got a new book due at the publishers in January and between now, October 23, and the holidays I have work trips to New York City, Boston, Los Angles, Green Bay, Holland/Belgium, and Las Vegas. Any max and VIZ writing I do these days has to be focused on the book, so I’ll ask you all to have patience until I can crawl out of this hole I’ve dug.

The Tip

I wouldn’t dare leave without at least one max and VIZ tidbit, however.

How many of you are using the Numerical Expression Evaluator that has been in max and VIZ for many, many releases. It can be extremely handy and is easy to use once you get a handle on the syntax.

It is accessed by highlighting any numeric field and pressing Ctrl-N on the keyboard. The formulae you enter can be extremely complex using functions like tan, cos, htan, hcos, if you have any clue as to what they might be used for. Setting the formulae off in parentheses allow nesting of functions similar to what you can use in MS Exel or other spreadsheets.

An example might be that you need a circle of 24 feet in circumference. The formula is C=pi2R. You can adjust R, the radius, so the formula becomes R = (C/pi)/2. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Enter the formula in Numerical Expression Evaluator and press the Paste button.

You can check the accuracy by going to the Utilities panel, Measure tool for the circle. Note that there will be rounding errors depending on the Units and Display settings.

Again, have patience and I’ll be back with my regular column as soon as I get through this rush season. Thanks for understanding.