2017
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This is likely to be my last post of the year, so for those of you who are still reading this in 2017, I hope you have a peaceful, relaxing holiday season and a fantastic start to 2018. If I don't manage to post sooner, I'll certainly do so once back in Switzerland from our 6-month round-the-world trip (I'll be back at work on January 5th in some capacity). We were very excited about our visit to Addo Elephant National Park. While not the Kruger, it's certainly a large, impressive park and the most easily accessible large park for us…
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Having left Lesotho, we had two main items in our calendar for the rest of the year: we had two nights booked in Addo Elephant Park from December 17-19 and then a family gathering in Knysna starting from December 21, give-or-take (my wife is half South African, so we're making the most of this leg to enjoy a family Christmas). We left Lesotho on December 14, so had a few days to kill before needing to be in Addo. We had a couple of options: head southeast to the Wild Coast or southwest to the Karoo. As we expected to…
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We had originally planned on leaving KwaZulu-Natal to enter into Lesotho on December 10th, but that morning two things happened: we awoke to find it raining heavily, but – more importantly – one of the kids had some gastric problems. We ended up extending our stay in the Tower of Pizza for an additional day, which we spent in front of a roaring fire, making handmade Christmas ornaments and watching seasonal movies. It was really the first serious feeling of Christmas we've had, this year… it was very welcome, too. Anyway, back on the road the following day, we headed…
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I was planning to post something today about our trip to Lesotho – which it turns out is the most amazing country, more on that next time – but as Autodesk Neuchatel employees have now received definitive communication regarding our future employment, it seems more appropriate to talk about that. It has now been confirmed that the Neuchatel office is definitely going to close its doors. According to Swiss law, employees had a 2-week consultation period to find alternatives to closing the office and – in this case, more importantly – to negotiate a more favourable social plan for those…
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Some months ago I received a question from a developer about the Autodesk App Store: he questioned whether it was worth investing the effort of placing his product there. While this is clearly something that people have to decide for themselves, the numbers are certainly indicating it's valuable: the App Store team tells me they've just hit the "3,000,000 downloads" mark (and may by now have also hit the "3,000 apps" mark, too). For many developers this is proving to be a very valuable mechanism for reaching Autodesk customers around the world. If you're interested in learning more about the…
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The trip to Durban from Bangalore was a long one: partly because the departure from Bangalore airport was at 3:45am, but mainly because we had to take three flights to get to our destination. We left our place in Bangalore at midnight: the first UberXL I tried to book was a phantom, so I cancelled it (I've seen a number of these since arriving in Asia, for some reason). The second one I booked stayed at 1 minute away for quite some time… I ended up realising it was parked a few metres up the street. I walked up to…
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Here's a quick recap of the series, so far: Creating a basic map for our round-the-world itinerary Adding a photo for each placemark Adding labels for the approximate timing of the journey Overlaying the actual path visited from a tracking device Downloading the actual path in multiple queries A few weeks ago – while we were in Tahiti, but again in New Zealand – I noticed that the "visited" path from the Garmin site wasn't being integrated properly into the Google Map integrated into our family blog. After a little bit of analysis, I realised that the amount of tracking…
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Being back in Bangalore brings back floods of memories. My wife and I lived here when we had our first baby. This wasn't part of our plan, particularly: we found out we were expecting during the first week we moved here, back in late 2003. That was a challenging time for us: workwise I was building a new team in Bangalore for Autodesk's consulting division, while Celia was dealing with all the issues related to a first pregnancy in a foreign country. Not to mention my father being diagnosed with terminal cancer, back in the UK. Our two years in…
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On Wednesday morning, I woke up to the news of Autodesk restructuring, with approximately 13% of employees impacted worldwide. In my years at Autodesk I've been through this more than a few times, and it's hard not to feel a little detached when you're on a 6-month trip with your family. I decided to go into the Bangalore office, during the afternoon, to meet up with old friends and colleagues and to meet the team providing support for our development partners (whether dealing with programming questions or helping partners get their products into the App Store). While in the office,…
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In total we stayed for 5 days in Kodaikanal, India. It's really not the ideal time of year to visit Kodaikanal: the Northeast Monsoon is just getting started, so you can end up staying indoors more than you'd like. But then when you're on a world tour you're inevitably going to experience imperfect timing at one point or another (another example from this trip includes being in South America not long after their mid-winter). So it goes. As luck would have it, during the first 3 days of our stay in Kodaikanal we had near-perfect weather. It was a lot…