Day 5…Wednesday @ SWW09

Well, that’s it!  It’s all over!  The fat lady has sung on another SolidWorks WORLD and the majority of the attendees have returned home again.  As a quick side note this is the 2nd time I have typed this post up.  The first time my blog writer crashed just as I was saving it and I lost everything so I apologize for the time that it took me to get something up here.

As I stated previously I am going to hold off a little bit on Wednesday’s General Session so that I can process all of the information that is given to us there.  Wednesday, more so than the rest of the days is absolute information overload.  This is the day that they name the SWUGN User Group of the Year, the SWUGN User Group Leader of the Year, the SWUGN Lifetime Achievement award, the top 10 enhancement list, and the What’s Going to be New in 2010.  That is a lot of information to process in a 1 1/2 hour time frame.

So on we go to the rest of the day.  After the General Session dismissed I headed over to the 1st technical training session of the day.  I decided to sit in on a session titled “In Context Sketch Editing for Robust Top Down Assemblies”.  It was a good session but was more geared towards the beginner SolidWorks user.  I still however did pick up some little things that I definitely want to try when I get back home.  Next, off I went to a session called “Optimizing Your Hardware for SolidWorks”.  This session was given by a gentleman from ATI and covered a wide variety of things in regards to your computer system.  I am usually not a huge fan of sitting in on sessions given by exhibitors but I thought that I would give it a shot.  This guy did an all right job of it but you could definitely hear some plugs from time to time.

Next up was time for some food and fellowship.  Another great lunch period except for the fact that I ended up launching spaghetti sauce like a cannon all over my brand new WHITE SolidWorks User Group Leader t-shirt.  Unfortunate but hopefully we can get it out.  After lunch and a brief time in the press room I was off to my 2nd to last session of the conference.  I decided to sit in on a session called “SolidWorks Network Installation, Where to Put Things and Why”.  This was a good session about putting all of the files that are listed in the Tools > Options > File Locations drop down on a network drive somewhere so that EVERYONE is always working off of the same group of files.  Looked like a great idea and one that I am going to experiment with when I get some time back at work.

Next up, and the grand finale of the technical training sessions at SolidWorks WORLD 2009 was a session that I went to called “Effective Use of the Hole Wizard”.  This session seemed to cover a lot of things in a short amount of time.  It went from a beginners session, to an intermediate session, to an advanced session all within an hour.  The advanced portion was quite involved and covered some things that are not endorsed by SolidWorks but could be very beneficial if done right, and I will repeat that, IF DONE RIGHT.

After that session wrapped up it was time for the hardest portion of the whole event, saying good bye.  It is never fun to say goodbye to someone that you have met and spent so much time with in a 5 day period.  At an event like this you seem to get a group of users, SolidWorks employees, resellers, exhibitors, etc. that you spend almost every non waking, conference moment with.  These are the ones that it is difficult to say goodbye to, you might not see these people for another year (or even worse, ever).  It is definitely a good thing for such social media applications such as Facebook & Twitter and other tools like phone, email, and IM.  So to all of you that are reading this and I got to spend some incredible time with last week, I want to say THANKS and I hope that we can connect well before we all touch down in Anaheim, California next January 31.