Personal
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I usually enjoy the month of December a great deal: things are winding down for the holiday season, and participating in Advent of Code helps dust off my atrophying coding skills. This year has been a little different, for various reasons: I've had a number of converging end-of-year deadlines that have kept me busier than I would have liked - not necessarily a bad thing, of course - and Advent of Code was a shorter edition, this year.The creator of Advent of Code - Eric Wastl - decided to scale back to 12 days (instead of the usual 24) for…
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The last post talked about the trip across to Santa Fe and the first few days settling in. Now that I'm back from the week away, I've written up the second part of the mini-series, which covers the main part of the trip and the return. As I was up early with jet lag on my second morning in Santa Fe, I headed across the car park to "the gym" at the resort. I use inverted commas because it really wasn't much of a gym, and by the time I arrived it was already full of Autodeskers (three of my…
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On Saturday I went to the station in foggy Neuchatel to take the train to Zurich. From there I was heading to the town of Santa Fe in New Mexico - somewhere I'd never been - for our annual meeting of the leaders working on our various research areas. There are no direct flights to Santa Fe - it's a very small domestic-only airport in the US - and the best I could do was fly to San Francisco and take a smaller plane to Albuquerque. Which is only an hour's drive from Santa Fe. I was really apprehensive about…
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Last week I headed across to Barcelona for the annual offsite of our research team. As the dates of the meeting fell during my daughter's school holidays - a rare occurrence! - we were able to fly out together to Spain. Barcelona isn't Benidorm, but you do get the occasional hint of that very strange relationship that Spain has with the UK. We'd originally planned to fly to Barcelona on the Tuesday evening, but as Vueling decided to consolidate flights (at least I assume that's what happened - we were just notified that our flight time had changed to the…
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After holding a couple of fantastic Encoding Experience events in Boston and San Francisco, last week was our chance to see how well the format would work in the UK. On Monday I was back in Zurich airport to fly across to Heathrow. It was one of those rare flights where I opted for a window seat, so I made the most of it. Here's the view as we crossed the channel, the coastline being the south coast of England.As we approached London the weather was still lovely.And then we landed.Rather than inflicting the ever-increasing Heathrow pick-up fee on my…
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Today is the 30th anniversary of my first day at Autodesk. On August 29th 1995 - when the first Jurassic Park movie was still relatively fresh in our collective mind - I showed up for work at the Autodesk office on Cross Lanes in Guildford, UK. (This office probably closed 25 years ago, now - we've closed multiple offices that succeeded this one, even. So it goes.) This was my first proper job out of University, and I was genuinely thrilled to be working at a company with Autodesk's reputation. It was a really easy place to feel at home:…
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It's been nice being home for the month of July, and it looks like most of August will go the same way. I ended up taking a couple of weeks off in the middle of the month for a "staycation". These are very enjoyable in the Switzerland when the weather is good, and in fairness for the first week when we were out and about the weather held up pretty well: the second week was a bit more miserable, and it's been a bit mixed since I've been back working. The break kicked off with a trip to the Montreux…
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This week I've been in Toronto for an internal summit of our Research Engineering team. On Monday I stopped at the SWISS lounge by the E gates at Zurich airport. It was nice to hang out on the balcony overlooking the planes... they even have binoculars you can borrow! Shortly before we left a quick rainstorm hit. As I boarded it was getting sunny again, though. The flight was largely uneventful. On arrival I zipped through customs and immigration and took the UP Express to Union Station. As it was a really quick trip, I'd planned on going straight out…
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As mentioned in the last post, I ran across to the Arsenale site of the Venice Biennale to take as many photos as I could in approximately 30 minutes. This post includes those photos, but I've decided not to even try to fake some meaningful commentary. It's just unfair on the people who worked so hard to create the exhibits to have someone come along and pretend he knows anything about their work. I will just give a quick shout-out to my new friend - and neuroscience classmate - Ehab Mokhtar, who you'll see in photo 56. Ehab kept up…
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I was up earlier than I needed to be on Saturday - even after the MIT party of the night before - so headed across to the Giardini della Biennale in very good time for the 11am opening. It was a very nice walk along the main waterfront. I decided to stop nearby for breakfast. If I'd known at the time that this would be the last thing that passed my lips until getting to the airport, I'd definitely have eaten more. I walked through a very nice park with an arts & craft market just being set up. I…