PowerCADD Forum

David Jones is a civil and structural engineer in Inverell, Australia which is near Melbourne. As part the of the Australian $50bn Pacific West Railway, David has developed a drawing/map that is heavily illustrated with many bitmap images which produced a 237MB that crashed PC9 frequently. He used PixelTools to get the file size down to about 15MB by limiting the colors, trimming and editing the bitmaps, which are now saved at PNG-8 images.

At some point we will give you a complete tour of the drawing and the methods used, but at this point I think you will be interested in the accounts of the following ‘adventures’ by David. From this point on, all of the words are from David. — Alfred Scott

I had a serious motor vehicle accident on 15th January 2020 and am lucky to be alive. We were driving along a road from the east coast towards Armidale 120km SE of Inverell when I encountered a large storm front. Christine, my wife was in the passenger seat with me. I slowed down to 80km/h before we encountered the heavy rain and all was well for 200 metres when I encountered a diesel spill on the roadway. Combined with the heavy rain, it was like driving on a skating rink. I ran off the road into the table drain where the vehicle caught its passenger side wheels in the table drain and pivoted, overturning sideway, passenger side first.

Someone phoned the emergency number and rescue people, police and ambulance people attended probably 30 minutes later. We were 35km east of Armidale. Christine had a bad cut on her left forearm, and we both had assorted cracked ribs and clavicles. By the time the rescue people arrived, we could talk to them and they cut us out of the vehicle, and we were able to walk up to the road and climb onto the gurneys of two ambulances.

The airbag on the passenger side deployed and while the vehicle was upside down, the front of the vehicle encountered a lump of shaley material in the drain which spun the car around 180˚ and then it had sufficient momentum to come back onto its wheels facing the way I had come from. We were thankful for the fact that we were upright. We were both knocked out, Christine by the side airbag and my right ear came into contact with the door pillar on my side.

We thought we had escaped with minimal injuries but two months later a CT scan showed I had blood on both sides of my brain. I was flown by aerial ambulance to Newcastle just north of Sydney where they performed two mini-craniotomies to evacuate the blood from the left and right sides of my brain.

They cut a line in the scalp 100mm long for each mini-craniotomy, and insert retractors to draw open the scalp, then used a hole saw 35mm in diameter to cut a hole in the skull and to evacuate the blood, put the bone back in, and stitch the scalp together. They left two drains in for two days with a duck-egg-like container. The left side gathered 100mL and the right side 40mL. We came home by surface transport five days later. They implied that I might need the left side to be done again because of the large amount that came into the drain. It was done again five weeks later, but they couldn’t get the bone back in because it hadn’t knitted sufficiently, so they inserted a titanium plate suitably sterilised.

I again was only in hospital for five days before they transferred me home by surface transport. I was unfortunate enough to get an infection under the plate ten days later and had to be flown to hospital a third time and they took the plate out, drained the gunk, and it took them two days to identify the bacteria and then they knew which antibiotic to use to fight it. I was unconscious for two days, had lost the ability to speak and the use of my right arm. Fortunately, the antibiotic meropenem intravenously every eight hours for five weeks and then bactrim orally for another seven weeks has cleared up the infection and I have got my speech and the use of my right arm back with some rehabilitation assistance.

I was in hospital for three weeks, in a rehab facility for three weeks where they offered occupational therapy, speech pathology and physiotherapy. Then because I am working on the route planning for the railway project at age 74, they offered me place in the Hunter Brain Injury Service to fine-tune me for work for another four weeks. All of this was free. I am very thankful that we have a wonderful hospital system in Australia.

I had two minicraniotomies to drain blood from both sides of my skull, then on 21 Apr2020, the left side of the skull required another minicraniotomy because there was still too much blood. They couldn’t get the bone back in so they installed titanium mesh. Eleven days later I got a massive infection in the lining of the brain which almost took me out.

They took out the mesh, and I was unconscious for two days while they identified the bug, and put me on an intravenous antibiotic Merepenum, then had three weeks in hospital, three weeks in a rehab facility, all with intravenous drugs, four weeks in a brain injury unit, then home on 9Jul2020, completely restored to good health.

On 12Mar2021, they reinserted more mesh, and I started getting more infection which they thought they had under control. The wound broke down on 3May2021 and they removed the mesh on 6May2021 and since then I have been the local hospital at Inverell with day leave from 10am to 5pm. They are trying to get the antibiotics to a suitable level using a PIC line, and will set me up to come home in a few days with an intravenous thing on my belt for another four or five weeks with capsules which need to be changed daily, which injects the antibiotic over 24 hours. They figure that I won’t have another mesh installed over the 1 1/4” hole.

This amounts to five operations on the left side of my head. I hope this the end of the matter.

David Jones
[email protected]

I have a MacPro late 2013 with OS 10.11.5 and 10.12.6 on separate SSD drives. I also have the 2017 iMac with a 2TB SSD drive, which I updated to Max OS 10.13. Latest PowerCADD works OK but I also have the Times font issue mentioned on the Forum. It looks to replace the Times font with something else. If you try to revert to Times the text blocks are blank. If you select Times New Roman, all is well. I could produce a satisfactory pdf with Times New Roman. If the fonts in the drawing don’t include Times, all is OK.

David is lucky to be alive.

I had a FaceTime video chat with David yesterday and I’m happy to report that he is well and back to work on the huge drawing/railway map. It’s now about 300MB.

Alfred