As we've been blogging about, we're down in Vegas (baby) for AU 2006. Autodesk University is Autodesk's grand poo-bah get together, where all us big time software dorks get invited to talk to other folks and teach and show what we've been up too and what we know.

BTW: For those that just read my (Jeffrey's) blog, keep in mind Jillian blogs too and so you might wanna point your RSS reader over to http://www.becausewecan.org/blog/ instead.

I gave three talks this year, one on presentation graphics in Revit, one on Worksets, and one on using BIM info throughout the project (where I talked some about what we've been up to with Frank). It was, as always, tons of fun (despite some technical issues with the Worksets session) and a real honor to get asked down here. However I guess if 600 people are willing to listen to me talk for 90 minutes about Revit that makes me the biggest dork of all, but hey, I don't have a Dork patch on my coveralls for nothin'.

They (Autodesk) recorded my sessions, and they are gonna be online too, so those who didn't make it down can sign up and watch many of the classes online. Some great stuff is happening down here!

However, I gotta admit, we building designer Revit folks don't get the nice swag. We get t-shirts. I went to a Alias Studio Tools (an industiral design tool) class instead, and I wound up with one of these for free!

Rock. On. I'm gonna go to more classes where amazing car designers use $10,000+ software now. Plus it's more fun to sit and draw/model cars than buildings. I might need to switch careers...

This thing-y that I got for free is like a 3D knob, as you twist, turn, tilt, and pull it's 'cap', the 3D view follows, so it makes for really quick editing and navigating. And it's too fun when used with Google Earth, it's like some kinda video game... Even tho it doesn't work with Revit (yet) it does with some other stuff I use (Alibre found it immediately and put it to work) it's so much fun that I'm way happy to have one now.

But all in all, it's been a great conference, with lots of really great people and ideas (if no small amount of work to get ready for).