Personal
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The 2016 Tour de France passed within a few hundred metres of my home, this afternoon. It comes to Switzerland every so often – I'm guessing at every 5-6 years, on average – but it's the first time I've had the chance to see it here. We made an afternoon of it: with some friends we headed over to a good spot in plenty of time for the kids to decorate the road with some pavement chalk. We then waited around for the bicycles to show up. The sponsors' caravan came first and the kids had plenty of fun collecting…
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Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can't believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something's so much fun you don't really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There's a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I've hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I've noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need to…
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It was a great weekend of football at Autodesk's annual tournament – this time nicely closely to home in Zurich. The Neuchâtel team did really well in the group round, as in recent years: we came top of Group C, which turned out to be the "group of death" – two teams we beat went on to finish 1st (England) and 3rd (VP Staff). Our goalkeeper – and our rock-solid defence – didn't concede a single goal during any of the matches, until we ended up being knocked out by Barcelona on penalties in the quarter-finals. So it goes –…
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It's a very welcome long weekend, here in Switzerland, and as the weather's a little brisk I decided to spend at least part of it building robots. Not the kind of robots you'd expect to see on Pier 9, but the kind of robots sold by our friends at LEGO: two different sets I've received as gifts in recent months. So here's a picture of the Mindstorms EV3RSTORM (Christmas) alongside WALL•E (birthday). Unfortunately I don't much rate WALL•E's chances of coming out unscathed from the above encounter: after all, who's ever heard of the plant being mightier that the twirling…
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I decided to dust off Visual Studio and write a quick AutoCAD app, this morning. It tackles a question received via a blog comment from Pankaj Potdar, over the weekend. I have two blocks with different attributes I want to merge them in single block, and I don't want to create any nested blocks. I haven't had much time to spend on AutoCAD, of late. Part of the reason has been work-related: I'm heads-down getting the VR/AR track in shape for the upcoming Forge DevCon, as well as spending time on new duties in Autodesk Research. The other part is…
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As mentioned a few weeks ago, over the Easter school break I headed across with my family to Cuba. Cuba's really an interesting country. I could probably write weeks of posts about it, but I'll try to keep it brief and move onto other topics. We visited two parts of Cuba during our fortnight there: Havana, the capital, and Cayo Largo del Sur, an island off the south coast. While in Havana we stayed at a "casa particular" in the old part of the city. Old Havana is as run down as the images you've probably seen of it, even…
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Tomorrow we're heading on an extended* family trip to Cuba. My thanks to President Obama for timing his trip to finish just before ours (apparently it was all a bit hectic). * It's an extended (2 week) trip with my extended (on my wife's side) family, so I suppose it's an extended2 family trip. I've always wanted to visit Cuba, so I'm really happy to be making this trip. We'll be spending 10 days on Cayo Largo – mostly diving and snorkelling – with a couple of days in Havana on either side to soak up the culture. I suspect…
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After a nice week on the slopes – children in Neuchâtel have their annual "semaine blanche" around March 1st, the day the canton celebrates becoming a republic – I eased back into work this morning by heading across to Geneva for the 86th "Salon de l'Auto". I was there when the doors opened so I could make it home for a late lunch. As usual there was plenty of shiny on display at this year's show. I liked the fact that I could watch the reflection in the paintwork of a physical car of a video that was certainly computer-generated…
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As part of the restructuring that went on at Autodesk, last week, I have a new role. This isn't a bad thing, thankfully: in fact it's the opposite… it's something I've been working towards for several years. I've been in the AutoCAD team for the last 4 years and was in the Autodesk Developer Network team for my 16+ years at Autodesk prior to that. These were great environments for me, for quite different reasons, but my ultimate interests lie in where the company (and the broader industry) is heading, technology-wise… one reason I've always felt drawn to the work…
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The last couple of weeks have been very interesting: partly for reasons that I'll go into in my next post, but also because I've had (or am having) the opportunity to visit three universities in Switzerland. My first visit, on Thursday of last week, was back to ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts – to have lunch with Max Rheiner (who you may remember from my post about Birdly, some months ago) and discuss the possibility of collaborating on some research into the use of VR for CAD. It was a great discussion, and I'm very much hoping it…