Personal
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Yesterday I hopped on the TGV Lyria in Bern to head across to Paris for a meeting with a large customer who was interested in learning more about generative design. It was nice to be heading back across to Paris – especially just before the summer break – as I have very fond memories of my year studying just south of the city. On arrival at Gare de Lyon I decided to walk for a couple of kilometres to stretch my legs after five hours in the train, to see part of the city I didn't know but also to…
-
It's been a relatively busy week, and yet very much "the calm before the storm" of AU London. I've been receiving lots of meeting requests over the last few days, filling up my AU London schedule nicely, as well as a request to be part of a "technology trends" panel session on the second day, just after the class Lorenzo and I will be giving. That should be interesting… despite my role, I definitely don't consider myself a futurist or visionary. But anyway – perhaps that will make for a more interesting discussion… we'll see! I've also iterated a few…
-
Today was a fantastic day. Members of the BIM 360 engineering team based in Gumligen went on their annual ski day and kindly invited me along. We'd originally planned to go on February 1st, but the weather was very poor and so the plan was cancelled. It was rescheduled for today, but only earlier this week – once it was clearly goingto be a gorgeous day. [For those of you who didn't know we have BIM 360 develoment staff based in Switzerland: the team originally came with the C-Plan acquisition – which happened back around the turn of the millenium…
-
Very unusually, for me, I've completely re-written this post over the course of the week. At the beginning of the week I was feeling more than a little gloomy about the state of the world – primarily relating to politics, climate change and data privacy issues – but I'm gradually starting to feel more optimistic. Yes, every single day we see more news related to US and UK politics, but I'm now genuinely expecting some of the craziness to work its way through during the course of this year. The climate is still a serious worry and will be for…
-
Today is our last day of work for this calendar year. I spent it in our Gumligen office – Autodesk's main office now in Switzerland – where we had a workshop in the morning followed by a raclette for lunch. Many thanks to all of those involved in organising and preparing the meal: it was a really nice moment. This afternoon I built a quick and dirty Dynamo script that creates Christmas trees… … and then ran it through Project Refinery to generatively design some Christmas trees. Because Christmas. 🙂 It's now time to sign off for 2018. It's been…
-
I couldn't visit Dublin without popping by Autodesk's new office there. So it was that after a great few days with the Kingspan team, I hopped on the Luas green line from Leopardstown and headed into the centre of Dublin. I got off on the edge of the central zone at Charlemont and headed along the canal to the location Google Maps told me to target. Unfortunately, on arriving at Fitzwilliam Place, I came to realise there was a problem with the instructions I'd been getting from Google. It didn't really fit with the image in my head of our…
-
This week I had the chance to make a long-overdue first visit to Ireland. I flew across to Dublin for meetings with Kingspan, a large building products manufacturer. Brian Glancy, Kingspan's Head of BIM Strategy, had organised a session for the people working with BIM in the various Kingspan companies around the world. It was the first time most of the attendees had met one another, and the discussions were extremely interesting: most of the people there work with wildly different toolsets – most containing Autodesk tools, at some level, but many relying heavily on competitive products. The event was…