Personal
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Something has been nagging at me, since returning from our world trip. Perhaps it's best described as the impact social media is having on travel. Interestingly it's been talked about very recently in The Guardian in an opinion piece entitled "Instagrammers are sucking the life and soul out of travel". While we didn't necessarily plan our trip to be able to take iconic pictures, having our own Instagram feed (which we've made private now that the trip is over, although I'll accept connections if it's obvious you're a reader of this blog) meant that we weren't completely immune from its…
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A year ago I talked about my early forays into the world of home automation, mainly via Philips Hue. I'm now treating the "experiment" as a success, and have decided to invest in more lights (and another Hue bridge for our main home). While thinking about this, I decided to check on the availability of an API. Sure enough there's a great REST API available for Philips Hue, as well as a number of SDKs. All of which has me thinking about possibilities of using Philips Hue as a way to visualize data. Just as we use Forge inside Dasher…
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So, that's it. 6 months flew by in the blink of an eye, and we're back home in Switzerland. On the one hand it seemed to go quickly, while on the other hand we feel as though we've come back to a house we barely recognise full of stuff we don't need… We each have a room of our own to sleep in (if we so choose)! And look at all those clothes! Detaching from most of your former existence – while retaining and strengthening ties to your core, your nuclear family – is an interesting experience. During the first…
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We arrived in the Cape on New Year's Day. Leaving Swellendam we stopped by Robertson to see the house in which my wife's grandmother grew up. A nice bit of family nostalgia. We then decided to swing by Franschhoek for a quick visit… on the way we passed by the Theewaterskloof Dam: one of the main reservoirs supplying the Cape. It was depressingly empty: the Cape has been suffering a multi-year drought, to the point that they currently have level 6 water restrictions in place. To get to Franschhoek we headed across the lovely Franschhoek Pass. Franschhoek is a gorgeous…
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Happy New Year! Hopefully you all managed to take a break during the last few weeks; from our side we were focused on spending an enjoyable Christmas with our family in South Africa and then squeezing the last few drops out of our 6-month adventure. After Addo we spent a couple of days in Port Elizabeth, with some old friends. We visited a few beaches for walks, but the bulk of our time in P.E. was actually spent at the mall. Yes, at the mall. On our night safari in Addo, the driver had mentioned going into P.E. to watch…
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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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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…