The Boss'

Here’s a worthwhile video, and there ain’t many of these on the ole’ interwebs these days. It’s a remarkable story of commitment between a husband and wife.

Robertson  McQuilken quit his job as a university president to go home and care for his wife, who’d been suffering with Alzheimer’s. Prior to making the decision to go home, the university had tried various ways to care for Robertson’s wife, so that he could keep coming to work. At different times his wife even escaped from their home where she was being looked after, and would attempt to walk to the university, where she knew she would find the love and protection of her husband.

There’s also a four part audio series that Family Life Today did with Robertson a while back.

This post is technical.

If that’s not your cup of tea, move along. Nothing to see here.

For two full days, I struggled with this issue. I was trying to add a custom ‘add-in’ to Revit Architecture 2010. I built my custom add-in dll with Visual Studio, and followed the steps to modify the Revit.ini file so that my add-in would be loaded when Revit starts. Despite following the instructions meticulously…failure. The INI file was rewritten. My changes were tossed out and Revit recreated the INI file from scratch.

Follow instructions again. Failure. Uninstall Revit. Reinstall Revit…failure.

Repeat the above process complete with hair pulling and eye poking for two full days. At last, I broke down. I decided to make use of our Autodesk Developer Network membership and ask for help.

In just a few hours, the kind folks over at ADN Support sent a link to this knowledgebase article, where someone else was describing my exact problem, and the solution. And it was so simple.

Issue

I modified the Revit.ini file to add information about my addin and now Revit keeps rewriting Revit.ini on every startup and so my addin does not load. What could be the problem?

Solution

If you compare your modified Revit.ini file with the original one in a binary viewer then you can see that the UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark) is missing from the beginning of your file – possibly the text editor you used did not write out that part -, and so Revit finds the file corrupt. If you modify your file in Notepad then it should add the missing bit and it should work again. 

After reading this, I added my external command to the Revit.ini file in Notepad and, sure enough, works like a charm.

I post this in the hope that it may save someone else the frustration that I had to go through.

Here are a couple of rough models I threw together to get a feel for a new kitchen design that I’ve been working on.

Above, you see the existing space. Our small dining area is to the far right. Through the door on the left is our laundry room. I’d like to relocate the laundry and then remove the wall that separates the two spaces. Like so…

It’d be nice to get rid of the large rectangle that you see clad in brick, but it houses an old chimney, as well as a lot of mechanicals for the upper floor of the house. I’m considering wrapping the whole thing it brick as a shout-out to the chimney within it, and also to add some texture to the space. 

Around every corner in the text there is something profound, interesting, or odd.

1 Samuel 11 opens with one of the bad guys, Nahash, an Ammonite, besieging the town of Jabesh Gilead. So the men of the town say, “Hey, make a treaty with us, and we’ll serve you.” So Nahash says, “Sure, I’ll make a treaty with you and let you live, but first, we’re gonna need to gouge out your right eye.” The men of Jabesh, understandably, aren’t thrilled with these terms. They’d rather keep both their eyeballs, thank you very much. They ask Nahash for seven days to think it over, and to see if they can find some help. Nahash, for some reason, agrees to this. I’m not sure why, when you have your enemy on the ropes, you’d let them run home and get their big brother to come and bail them out. It’s like the part of the movie where the bad guy goes on and on giving a speech about world domination, while the good guy is slowly picking his hand cuffs with a hair pin. You can see where it’s going. The men of Jabesh find rescue in Saul, the newly crowned king of Israel. He’s not happy when he hears about the terms of the treaty, so he cuts up his oxen – poor oxen – and mails a piece of them to every corner of the kingdom. Just as a way of saying, ya know, don’t mess with us. All the Israelites turn out to fight the Ammonites, but they’re sneaky about it. They send messengers to Jabesh Gilead to tell the men that by tomorrow, they’ll be delivered. The men of Gilead, in turn, go to Nahash, and lie. They say, “Yeah, we’ll come by tomorrow and surrender, then you can do the eye gouging thing to us, or whatever else you want.” (Did they keep the eyeballs? Or just pitch them all in a big bucket or something? I’m just saying, that’d be a ton of eyeballs.)

Imagine Nahash’s surprise when the whole Israelite army shows up. I can just see him leaning against the fence after school with his eye gouger, all cocky, smiling, waiting for the skinny geek to show up, and then the look of terror when the older brother who’s been locked away at reformed school shows up to kick his a$$.

I’m not sure what lessons can be drawn from 1 Samuel 11. I guess a polite way of describing the trickery that goes on at the end would be to call it shrewdness. Yeah, I like shrewdness better than liar. Nowhere does it say that God sanctions the behavior, but it does say that “the spirit of God came upon him (Saul) in power.” That’s how he was able to do what he did. The eye gouging bit, or course, does bring to mind Mark 9:4, where we’re told it would better to enter the kingdom of heaven with one eye, than to be cast into hell with two. So there’s definitely a lesson there somewhere. Any ideas?

Endlessly fascinating, to say the least.

The Dream Giver by Bruce H. Wilkinson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was a fun and interesting little book to read. It’s a quick read…easily read in one or two sittings. As the description says, it’s a modern day parable, where the main character, Ordinary, leaves the Land of Familiar to pursue his dream, with the help of the Dream Giver (God). It’s a unique way to give a pep talk about following your dreams. I also feel like it would be a good book to hand to someone who’s questioning the particular path that they’re on. View all my reviews >>