Altium

About a month ago I've started using and learning Altium Designer 19.1.5 as part of some extra engineering work. Up until then I've spent my entire (albeit short) professional career using EAGLE; as such, I have certain workflow habits ingrained into myself. Because of this, I am continually running into things that I find ridiculous and dumb about Altium.

To add insult to injury, this $8000 retail piece of software has bad documentation, terrible linking between pages, and even worse searching of those documentation pages. On top of that, their "bugcrunch" and forums are, as far as I can tell, unindexed, so you can't even use a good search engine.

My current conspiracy theory is that this is all done so you're obliged to re-up at $2000 a year or whatever so you have someone to ask when you inevitably run into something that shouldn't have even been an issue to start with.

As a result, whenever I'm having trouble doing something, I'm going to try to keep a record of my solutions as I find them, whether that's by clicking around, or getting help from support. These posts will probably be written assuming the reader knows the basics of Altium, so be forewarned.

Quick Update

Not that I think anyone reads this, but I thought I might go ahead and post a quick update on my life. I have some thoughts related to this blog that I may or may not continue with, but I figured this would be a good start.

I graduated from UNT in May 2016 with two bachelors degrees: one in electrical engineering and one in mathematics. For about a year all I was doing was play music and apply to jobs; I started playing with a swing band in I think September 2016 and was playing with a few other groups. I got an electrical engineering (EE) job in May 2017 and have been working there since. I'm fortunate to still have time and flexibility to play lots of music, and have recently started working there less and doing some other EE a little bit elsewhere.

Project Euler

Well, I haven't really done much of anything in the last six or so months. I've been working on a road case for my steel guitar, I might try to post that soon. The main thing I've been working on besides school is a really cool website called Project Euler. It's basically a site that has a bunch of different interesting math problems to solve in any way you see fit. Since I took a class last semester that focused on MATLAB, I've been doing them in that. I'm not sure is there's a completely mathematical way to solve all of them, but if you enjoy programming, or want to get into it, I highly recommend the site. If you're afraid of math, I still recommend trying it out, because the problems are really kind of more "number" based than "math" based.

Quick Update

Well as I'm sure you have noticed by now, my backlog of posts has been used up. At this point I have a backlog of post titles, but I have yet to write the actual posts.

Back at College!

Just a heads-up, I am indeed back at UNT. I moved in Move-in day was last Saturday, and though I think most if not all of my stuff is up here, I'm not exactly settled in and unpacked yet. Also, like last year, because I am back at UNT, the posts will certainly be slowing down. Luckily though, I have a backlog (albeit small) of posts that I need to format and add pictures to, but will be able to put those out on a somewhat regular basis. Who knows, maybe I will post a picture of my room once I'm done.