Personal
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I'm sure we've all been thinking lots about the developing situation we're living through at the moment. Between markets crashing, social distancing, school closures and home-working, the world looks very different than it did a few short weeks ago. The below poem came through my inbox, this morning (thanks, Mum!) and it definitely resonated with some hopes I've had about the crisis. IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC And the people stayed home. And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And they listened…
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I was back home on Thursday night with enough time to have dinner with my family before getting an early night (a relatively easy thing to do after a busy week in Soho). I was out of the door at 5:30am on Friday to get across to Grindelwald for the Gümligen Engineering team's annual ski day. I changed trains in Bern. And yes, there is a suburb of Bern called Wankdorf, which does indeed cause endless amusement to Brits. It was a little before 7am by the time I got to the Gümligen office, meeting Nenad, Martyn and Adrian: Martyn…
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I was due to meet with a customer in Zurich on Monday of this week, but unfortunately it had to be rescheduled at fairly short notice. As I'd already bought a non-refundable train ticket – if you buy them a little in advance you can get a day ticket for the whole of Switzerland for less than a return ticket to Zurich, which can be very handy – I decided to head across to Zurich anyway. I used the morning for another meeting – luckily the person I wanted to catch up with was in the office – and then…
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I'm back online after a thoroughly needed (and fully appreciated) 2-week break. It was great to relax and hang out with my immediate family: we spent most of the fortnight up in the mountains, and managed to snowboard for 11 of the days. There was pretty decent snow – not loads and loads, but then we often don't have much at all at this time of year, these days – and we had a lot of sun. This is the second year we've all been on snowboards. As the kids get older I'm starting to see my board moving down…
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After getting back to Bangalore from Pune, I did end up having to spend the best part of Wednesday morning dealing with more Indian bureaucracy. The bank I was in was going through its annual archival process, which meant the floor soon filled with papers… … and then boxes containing them. This brought back memories, as it was Writer Relocations who handled our move to India, back in 2003. After this I was able to head across Bangalore to meet with an old friend, Lokessh, for lunch. Lokessh works just off Queen's Road, in the old centre of the city.…
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On Wednesday morning I headed off at the crack of dawn to Geneva to fly back out to India. The sun was coming up across the lake – and the Alps behind it – as the train flew towards the airport. I changed flights in Heathrow, heading onwards to Bangalore. For once I had a World Traveller Plus seat – and a bulkhead, to boot – which I definitely enjoyed. The only downside was the combination of my aging Bose noise-cancelling headphones giving up the ghost partway through the flight with a tantruming toddler across the aisle from me. I…
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This post continues the story of our trip to Scotland. As the last week was purely vacation, feel free to skip this post if you're only interested in my work-related content. (And if you like the travelog stuff, feel free to check out these posts from our big trip of a couple of years ago.) While on Skye we stayed in an apartment near Sconser. Skye is actually a lot bigger than you expect – with a lot of single-lane roads with passing places – so it was nice to be staying relatively close to the ways onto the island…
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After the pre-BILT Hackathon on Wednesday, there were still three full days of the main conference to be experienced in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. My family was with me – at the start of our 2-week Scottish adventure – so I wasn't planning (or able) to spend the full 3 days at the conference. I did make it along to the opening keynote, however, which was largely run by Marcus Fich, who introduced two Danish psychologists who talked about (among other things) our response to stressful situations. It was a very different and interesting session. After that I went…
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After returning from Paris on Friday afternoon, I came across with my family to the UK on Saturday. Our first stop was at Eton – where an old friend of mine lives. We used his home for a base to head up to Watford on Sunday to do the Harry Potter Studio Tour, something my kids had been asking to do for the longest time. We were on the tour starting at 11am: we'd ended up having to buy over-priced tickets from a secondary tour operator and throwing away the bus transfer from central London… these secondary operators tend to…
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Some weeks ago an old friend of mine, Karim Homayoun, let me know of an event being held at swisstopo – the Swiss Federal Office of Topography in Bern – that was being organised as part of the European Heritage Days. While Switzerland isn't formally part of the EU, it is part of the Council of Europe, and so participates extensively in this important activity. There have been many such events throughout the country over the weekend. There were two guided tours of swisstopo being organised – one in French in the morning and one in German in the afternoon…