In 2007 I decided to spend the year figuring out what I wanted to do in the future. I studied usability and worked on TYPO3 trying to apply what I learnt. Eventually I took a complete U-turn and signed up for school again – civil engineering[1] ! Why? Because of all options, something with building physical stuff like houses seemed to have the greatest appeal to me.

I started in September and have now finished the first semester of ten. I passed my math exam in December with an A, which I am pretty happy with considering that I had to get myself in gear after having been out of school for 13 years. Unfortunately my expectations on myself concerning the upcoming classes now exceed the Danish income tax which I have become acquainted albeit not made friends with during the active TYPO3 years. On the other hand I am getting some of it back now; thanks to the concept of free education (yes, like in free beer) and in form of the Danish State Education Grant (SU) – an amount of 670 Euro paid monthly to any Danish student [2]. A very nice amount to have, but now that I earned an A for knowing what a fraction is, I see that SU certainly does not establish a one-on-one relationship with the expenses for my rent.

Argh!#%CAD

One of the activities I have endured this fall is learning AutoCAD. This application runs only on Windows. Engineering world is Windows. Engineers love Windows. As a consequence, they all hate me – but secretly envy me for my Macbook, of course. Anyways, AutoCAD has been a rather unpleasant experience. Somehow it must have evolved in a parallel universe because they have managed to screw up every major usability convention there is. Software ranging from DTP over word processing to Powerpoint and Keynote all agree on fundamental things such as click-n-drag to move stuff, various alignment aids, holding down shift if you wish to scale proportionally or holding down something else to lock movement to vertical or horizontal directions. The whole set of basics to manage objects on a screen is... different. Almost every procedure you thought to be predictable has to be looked up: „What's the command line shortcut for copy? cp. What's the command for move: m... not mv!“ I guess the worst – and I maintain it is an unquestionable usability bummer – was when I had to draw some boxes to represent concrete elements; I picked my starting point – click and drag. So far so good. There are nice numbers telling me the current dimensions of the rectangle (refer to the picture). When I almost had the thing at its final dimensions I decided to type in the numbers “300” and “200” to make sure the dimensions were exact. I pressed Enter and BANG... I had a box reaching from my starting point to the absolute coordinate 300,200 – not exactly giving me a box 300 by 200 mm long, as had been unmistakenly communicated by the input interface. AutoCAD is like that most of the time.