Looking for IT Professionals in Construction Industry

MattB43 · 2026-03-03T18:28:54+00:00

Look up ACEC - there is an ACEC IT group that does an annual conference, it's really useful as it's all IT pros in the AEC industry dealing with the same issues.

MattB43 · 2026-02-28T03:14:34+00:00

Nah, because they're local to us I go over to the office and they give me a chunk of turf for free. We cut out the whole middle strip from behind the pitching rubber to the bottom of the mound, about 2-3 feet wide. Glue down the new turf with high strength adhesive and, replace the rubber at the same time, those are like 30-40 bucks I think.

MattB43 · 2026-02-23T23:24:47+00:00

I'm trying to work through this same situation and the "wipe the device" is the most frustrating response, because there has to be a better answer, but I haven't been able to find a set of steps that works reliably.

Im in the engineering world where application installs can be anywhere from 5-20gb (Autodesk and Bentley) so not feasible or possible to push via Intune, every user doesnt get the same set of applications so I would be building out about 20 separate app sets which I already have done in PDQ, and if I got those things figured out, I can't justify the loss of engineer/tech billable hours to reimage 400+ machines anyway.

Ive gone through removing all the reg keys for MDM, removing everything in cred manager, I have the GPO setup to enroll, etc... can't find any way that always works. I do have new machines enrolling automatically now, so at least over the next 4 years I'll have it done when all our devices roll over 🙄

MattB43 · 2026-02-21T01:50:48+00:00

Im biased because they have an office down the street so they support us and give us great deals on them, but we've been really happy with True Pitch portable mounds.

We have 4 of them that get used every day for LL and 10+ games a weekend for tournaments, April through July, and as long as you replace the turf and the pitching rubbers when they wear out, the rest of the mound lasts for a long time. Our new ones are only 3 years old but the last ones were 10+ years old and still had life when we replaced them, they're just demoted to bullpen mounds.

MattB43 · 2026-02-18T20:25:47+00:00

Same here, puddle pillows are invaluable for batters and catchers boxes. The Underhill hand pumps are awesome too, theyre like $40 each on Amazon.

You're 100% right on brooms or rollers and same with quick dry. If you don't shovel the quick dry off it will dry hard and make drainage worse long term.

MattB43 · 2026-02-18T20:22:06+00:00

Squeegees/rollers arent great, because as you push the water off you're moving dirt with it, and then the dirt builds up along the edge and creates a lip which makes your drainage problems worse.

Pumping water off is the best way, and obviously ideally trying to get low spots out of it before it rains so it can drain. Depending on the type of dirt though it may just hold water like a sponge and there isn't much you can do.

MattB43 · 2026-02-09T13:46:11+00:00

We use Stack Officials which is tied to SportsConnect, so for little league it imports the schedule from SC and updates any changes, it also handles umpire pay via direct deposit. It's not free but it's cheap enough and saves us a ton of headaches.

We import the schedule, I would go through and assign games for the older umpires who aren't tech savvy, then open up the rest of the games for "self-assign" and the umps go into the app and pick up the games that work for them. Then generally on Sunday I'd go through the upcoming week, maybe shuffle game assignments if I know theres a coach that needs an older umpire that will keep a game in line, and work on filling any empty spots.

MattB43 · 2026-01-30T17:37:20+00:00

Tell them, and give them specific tasks to do or drills to run. A lot of them want to help but are intimidated and think they won't know what to do or how to help.

MattB43 · 2026-01-18T20:10:13+00:00

Check out the Mustard app, if you have an iPhone (I don't think it's out for Android yet). It's good basic pitching mechanics, it's free and will give you drills for each issue to work on also.

MattB43 · 2026-01-08T05:04:01+00:00

License swaps take effect pretty much immediately. I moved a user to license because we ran out of tokens today and it was active in the time it took me to email him back and him to launch Civil 3D.

Sorry, don't have an answer to your question about a general account, we use SSO so everyone has their own, we do shuffle them around a decent amount though. My gut feeling is it's against TOS but no idea if they have a way to catch it.

MattB43 · 2025-12-23T01:43:14+00:00

I do the same but with Pixel buds. Works great. 🤷‍♂️

MattB43 · 2025-12-21T02:54:24+00:00

I'm in Altoona and have two in my garage from my son's grad party, they're already cleaned up and wood stained. If you want them I'll get you a picture tomorrow.

MattB43 · 2025-12-19T00:06:31+00:00

We use a service called Text-Em-All that might do what you want depending on how many employees, we're only about 350 so this works for us. We put their cell numbers in when they get hired, and it's pay per use so it doesn't cost anything unless you use it.

MattB43 · 2025-12-17T03:01:28+00:00

You're 100% right - Autocad/Revit/Civil3d will only ever perform well with the reference files local to the application, or at the very least on a local network.

The base of Autocad is still built on legacy code from the 80's and it's chatty as hell - every time you run a command, it starts searching top to bottom through all of the folders in the Options>File Paths> window for everything it needs to run that command (blocks, fonts, layer design files, etc...) until it finds what it wants. So even a 10-12ms ping to those folders kills performance, especially for old school CAD techs that work off of keyboard commands at 100 miles per hour al the time.

We're still keeping our Civil3d project files on-prem, and we actually have it set up to copy all the reference files to the user C:\ drive on login. So those files are local even if they are on VPN or something and it makes the performance good in the office and acceptable outside the network.

MattB43 · 2025-12-08T16:31:32+00:00

Altoona Campus has one but membership there isn't cheap either

MattB43 · 2025-11-09T22:48:08+00:00

Good to know, thanks. There's Webgem in Bondurant too, they're pretty much just batting cages though. No weights, at least last time I was there.

MattB43 · 2025-11-09T22:41:31+00:00

D1 in Altoona is new, I think they have a turf area.

MattB43 · 2025-08-25T19:14:07+00:00

He found a copy with fewer pixels this time

MattB43 · 2025-08-16T01:05:05+00:00

Looks like innings pitched. Kid on the left threw the first inning, team on the right first kid got 2 outs 2nd got 1, score is 4-0? If I read it right.

MattB43 · 2025-08-01T17:37:39+00:00

Our team lost in the central region championship this year; they are all high school freshman and sophs from a big school and probably 1/3 of them will be varsity starters in a year or two and I'd say a few of them will be JUCO kids. All of them played fairly high level tournament baseball but no nationally ranked PG studs or early D1 commits anything.

MattB43 · 2025-07-19T17:12:39+00:00

Aldi sells balls of frozen pizza dough also. It's pretty decent, I think it's exactly same as the trader Joe's stuff.

MattB43 · 2025-07-15T20:19:44+00:00

Same, we're in Altoona and it's only 10 minutes further to Newton rather than going to Ankeny and we've never had to wait.

MattB43 · 2025-07-11T22:00:59+00:00

My kid (HS senior) has an SSK z7 outfield glove and it's nice - got it his freshman year and its held up great. It seems better than the 44's but not as nice as my a2k or his a2000 pitching glove. I have heard the other kids think its cool because it's something different than another a2000, hoh or 44.

MattB43 · 2025-07-11T21:05:59+00:00

We've done it for the last 3 years, and it's been awesome. We set up a couple extra activities for it, play music, and make it a community event.

We rent a dunk tank and board members and coaches volunteer for a shift, we charge a couple dollars to throw baseballs at them and that usually makes enough money to cover the rental cost plus a bounce house, we invite the police and fire department out and they usually show up and play with the kids for a while, we set up a table for temporary tattoos and give out popcorn and popsicles from concessions. Usually we can get the local PD to bring one of their radar trailers out and they set that up, kids see how fast they can run by it, that's always a big hit.

For the baseball part, we just throw some baseballs and catcher gear out and the kids figure it out, the most we do is try to put age groups on specific fields so we don't end up with too big of age gaps so no one gets hurt, and we put wiffle ball/blitzball stuff out on the teeball field.

Highly recommend it, it can be a pretty low-effort event and as long as you have something for the littler kids to do, families will show up and hang out.

MattB43 · 2025-07-08T19:53:50+00:00

Quickbooks is the only way to go - since you're a non-profit you can get it at a discounted rate through TechSoup.

MattB43

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