Milt Hull and I have lined up some exciting meetings and are both going to Comdex to find out what's hot for the Year 2000. This is a great chance to see a lot of presentations. We pick the ones with the biggest crowds and the most interesting products. Comdex is so big that it is very possible that Milt and I will not even meet during the show. We will get together and compare notes after we get back.
November
Even though Alan Cooper moved his presentation to February, November looks like a great month. Why do we have great meeting on those rare occasions when I am out of town? Randy Pfeiffer of El Dorado Software will be showing us 3rd PlanIt, an easy-to-use CAD program designed to make it easy to lay out a model railroad. I do not consider myself a train enthusiast but I do set up trains for Christmas. The trains are my wife's- I just get the setup chores.
This year my wife bought several more of these huge O-gauge trains and so we'll need a new layout. I flipped through a train layout magazine and saw an ad for software from a company in El Dorado Hills that offered a demo version on its Web site. I wrote down the URL and later downloaded the software. The demo version limits the number of objects you can set up and does not let you save, but it does let you see the power of the product.
3rd PlanIt lets you choose the scale and type of track and start laying things out. There are also standard buildings and accessories. I played with it a little to see how easy it would be to design a new layout with a new odd-shaped train board. It showed me that my initial new design would not connect without cutting track. By playing with track sizes, I got a fit. It would have taken me a lot more time and space to do this with physical track. This way, you know exactly how much more track you need to buy.
The real power of this package comes when you want to do multiple layers of track (as I am sure I will). You can also design mountains and other terrain. Design it all before you start cutting any materials. It even handles spirals so that your train can wrap around a mountain.
If you like model railroading in any scale, do not miss this meeting. This looks like a great package. I am going to have to send my wife to this one.
Dr. David P. Anderson, Director of the the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project will also be on hand to tell us about SETI@Home, a project that lets us use our PCs' idle time to help SETI@home. If your computer is the one who finds life, you will get a chance at fame.
