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What's your favourite ACAD prank?

70 REPLIES 70
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Message 1 of 71
troma
3621 Views, 70 Replies

What's your favourite ACAD prank?

Do you like to mess with your coworkers' minds?  What do you do?  Set MBUTTONPAN to 0?  I'll tell you my favourite later.  What's yours?


Mark Green

Working on Civil 3D in Canada

70 REPLIES 70
Message 2 of 71
Light_Guy
in reply to: troma

Setting the ESC key to QUIT
Setting all colors to black

Zoomfactor to 300

 

for starters....

Paul Hamor
"Always good ships!"
Message 3 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: troma

I haven't done this is a while. But...  I'd create some very large text covering most of the screen. What it said was basically random. Then I would create a slide, undo to the point where I created the text and then did a VSlide.

 

The person would come back and start trying to erase the text. Since it was large and very visible they wouldn't try to zoom in. After repeated attempts to erase the text they would come to me and ask form my help. After asking them how it got there and what they'd tried to get rid of it. I'd suggest they try a regen. The slide would disappear and their drawing would be as they left it.



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 4 of 71

Well, there aren't any fulltime CAD users around here, other than me, so I can't really prank.

 

But, one thing that just annoys my buddy to no end (bonus of my normal workflow)... is not having any toolbars, putting my command line on the top of the screen and having my windows task bar vertical instead of horizontal.

 

We've got a workstation in the office he can access programs with, but, it's usually simpler to just walk in and use my machine, since it's already on.



Melanie Stone
Facilities Data Management
IWMS / CAFM / CMMS / AutoCAD / Archibus / Tririga / Planon / MRI Manhattan CenterStone / Revit / data normalization, data mapping, reporting and process documentation
mistressofthedorkness.blogspot.com/
Message 5 of 71
troma
in reply to: AllenJessup

I knew I'd learn something on this thread!  I've never heard of slides before, interesting function, nicely abused Smiley Wink

 

Reminds me of the windows trick: take a screenshot of someone's desktop and set that as the background for the desktop.  Then hide (or switch off?) the shortcuts on the desktop.  But of course it looks like they're still there because of the picture.


Mark Green

Working on Civil 3D in Canada

Message 6 of 71

Yes, a fellow keyboarder!  Although with C3D you can't avoid clicking buttons.  But I do get a laugh every time we upgrade and someone asks me "where did they put the explode command?  (or line, or move etc)" and I say "look, there it is, it never changes!"


Mark Green

Working on Civil 3D in Canada

Message 7 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: troma

A script using VSlide and a Delay was how we did animation in antediluvian times. In Softdesk/LDD you had a routine that would "Drive" along a polyline and create a slide at specific intervals. You'd then use the script to play them back as an animation.



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 8 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: troma


@troma wrote:

 Although with C3D you can't avoid clicking buttons.


Well... You can. But I'll admit that the contextual ribbon is convenient. However if I want to draw a featureline I use my alias - DF.



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 9 of 71
troma
in reply to: AllenJessup

Yeah, I have a few aliases set up

FF, *EDITSURFACESWAPEDGE

PP, *ADDNETWORKPARTSTOPROF

POP, *PROJECTOBJECTSTOPROF

But I could do with more.  Never figured out why I can't hit enter to repeat the create surface command, even if I've typed it on the keyboard.

 

Back on topic:

set ZOOMWHEEL  to 1 is a nice way to confuse someone

but my favourite so far is to mess with the MTJIGSTRING sysvar.  Go to Bob's machine and set MTJIGSTRING to "Hi Bob!"  That got a few good reactions.


Mark Green

Working on Civil 3D in Canada

Message 10 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: troma

MTJIGSTRING - That reminds me of a lisp I wrote back in R12. It was to change sheets in the single Paperspace Layout in that release. But the real point is that I had one user then who I new would enter the wrong page designation quite often. So I included an error message that was triggered whenever the designation that was entered was invalid. It said "Lida. Spell it correctly!".

 

I also used MODEMACRO to greet the 2 other people who were working on that project - "Hello Joe and Lida".



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 11 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: troma

This isn't an Autocad prank. But it was funny.

 

I used to work for a family owned business. One day the owners son and I wrote a batch program. This was back in the days of DOS. We set it to fire up when the computer was turned on. It said:

 

"Enter the correct password with 30 seconds or C: drive will be FORMATTED!"

and we included a countdown.

 

The boss sputtered quite a few expletives when he saw that. You only had to "press any key to continue".

 

This was a little payback for an earlier occurrence. The boss never liked the computer asking him question like "Are you sure you want to continue?". He would just mash down on the Y key while grumbling. Then one day he accidentally typed FORMAT C: instead of FORMAT A:. He sat there for a couple of seconds and then turned to me and asked "What does that mean?". I told him it meant he was going to go to the front office for the rest of the day while I reloaded the OS and all the programs. Luckily that didn't take as long then as it would now.



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 12 of 71
troma
in reply to: AllenJessup

As always, Allen, you are a wealth.  I'm only recently past the stage of figureing out how to run a lisp, never mind write one!  How did the MODEMACRO work?  Were you all taking turns on the same machine?


Mark Green

Working on Civil 3D in Canada

Message 13 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: troma


@troma wrote:

 How did the MODEMACRO work?  Were you all taking turns on the same machine?


No. I included setting the MODEMACRO in the lisp. The lisp was set to load on startup on all three computers. So all three of us would see it. I later replaced it with GRTEXT so I could immediately dismiss it.

(GRTEXT -1 "   ** HELLO JOE / LUDMILLA **   ")

(GRTEXT)



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 14 of 71
Curtis_Waguespack
in reply to: troma

blipmode = on

 

Simple, effective, and most often the casual user has never seen blips before. Smiley Wink

 

 

Message 15 of 71

:Of course now (r2012+) it has to be .blipmode = on . smileyhappy:



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 16 of 71
AllenJessup
in reply to: AllenJessup

Smiley Very Happy I did not mean to do that. But it looks interesting! Smiley Surprisedh no.



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 17 of 71

Smiley Happy

 

You can tell I don't use ACAD much these days!

 

I was just trying to remember how to open a web page with the PGP file too, and I couldn't recall that either.

But I used to have some fun with that also.

 

Message 18 of 71

You had to set up a shell command.

 

pgp.PNG

 



Allen Jessup
Engineering Specialist / CAD Manager

Message 19 of 71
hwalker
in reply to: AllenJessup

No cad users apart from me.

 

But occasionally when the boss wants wording changed on a drawing he'll come in and say for example

 

"The second reinforcement erm was placed in such a way that erm"

 

And that's exactly what I'll put in the text

Howard Walker
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Left Handed and Proud

Message 20 of 71


@AllenJessup wrote:

A script using VSlide and a Delay was how we did animation in antediluvian times. In Softdesk/LDD you had a routine that would "Drive" along a polyline and create a slide at specific intervals. You'd then use the script to play them back as an animation.


Holy cannoli, yes indeedy! I remember doing that back on dos-based autocad back in high school. ~showing my age~



Melanie Stone
Facilities Data Management
IWMS / CAFM / CMMS / AutoCAD / Archibus / Tririga / Planon / MRI Manhattan CenterStone / Revit / data normalization, data mapping, reporting and process documentation
mistressofthedorkness.blogspot.com/

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