30 seconds of anonymous interweb fame!

Back in June on Mark Bittman’s Bitten blog on the NYTimes website, he asked for new ideas for people’s favorite uses for peanut butter.  I submitted two of mine in the comments section.

Today, Mr. Bittman reposted some of his favorite suggestions and one of mine made it (sans attribution, but thats cool with me)!  He calls it “a kind of Modern PB&J”.  Huzzah!  Give it a try for a late-night snack sometime and let me know what you think.

A kind of modern PB&J: spread onto a soft flour tortilla with a bit of apricot preserves, the folded in half and browned in a buttered pan.

(Sorry for the lack of postings in recent months… I wish I could say I’ve been too busy, but I’ve mostly been too lazy.  I’ll probably be posting a reply to a comment made by a friend [requesting suggestions for Revit novices] within the next few days.)

Revit 2010 – Conceptual Mass – Make Shape

David Fano of designreform.net sent me this link for his new video demo of Revit 2010’s conceptual massing tools.  Its really exciting to see Revit’s modeling capabilities advance like this.  Go check this video out.

The Cult of Done, or, Just do it already!

Interesting stuff first, commentary second.  From Bre Pettis, the Cult of Done Manifesto:

Dear Members of the Cult of Done,

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

More Revit 2010 News – New Massing Tools

The Revit Clinic has a new video up going over some of the new massing features in Revit Architecture 2010.  Looks like the massing/modeling tools have come quite a long way.  I can’t wait to get my hands on this release!

Also, it looks like my suspicions about the new curtain wall tools are holding up.

Check out the video here:

Revit Architecture 2010 Massing Environment video

Beginning Revit Programming?

Does anybody have any good starting points to begin learning about programming Revit API stuff?  I have no previous programming experience, but I figure I can’t be the first architect to learn this stuff from scratch.  I’ve started watching Jeremy Tammik’s video “Introduction to Revit Programming” several times, but I get lost pretty early on.  I think it might be for people that are already a little familiar with programming in other venues, but not for brand-new beginners.  I’ve already downloaded the MS Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and installed the VB.net and C# versions, but since I have no background in programming, I really don’t know where to begin.

Any suggestions from the community?  I’ve thought about going out and buying something like “VB.net for Dummies” or something like that, but I’d like to see if there is a better way to start that is targeted more towards architects.

As a side note, a friend at work recently installed Grasshopper for his personal copy of Rhino.  It seems like a pretty sweet set up and the parametrics look a lot more robust than Revit’s.  I’m going to have to learn those some day…