Personal
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I was a little surprised when LinkedIn reported my 21st anniversary at Autodesk, a couple of weeks' ago. I eventually realised it was because the middle of my month of starting had been chosen to notify my connections of this particular anniversary (LinkedIn doesn't have the specific date, I suppose). Anyway, it turns out today's the actual anniversary. 21 short years' ago, I joined Autodesk Ltd. in Guildford, Surrey. Since then I've worked for Autodesk Development S.à.r.l. (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Autodesk India Private Ltd. (Bangalore, India), and Autodesk, Inc. (San Rafael, California). But all within the umbrella of life at the…
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This week has been a little hectic, once again. Yesterday I spent the morning back across at ETH Zurich, speaking with members of the Block Research Group about Forge, Dynamo and HoloLens. They've just moved into a brand new building labelled HIB – where the various schools at ETH focusing on architecture from a technological perspective will be co-located – but as it's so new it's yet to be sign-posted. I eventually did find it, but not without asking for directions from 5 different people. Inside the ceiling is pretty cool: they've used a combination of skylights for natural light…
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We're up in the beautiful Swiss town of Adelboden, our favourite local winter destination but also somewhere we try our best to visit in summer, too. We're here to enjoy the mountains and celebrate the Swiss National Day. (While I'm not personally Swiss – I hold a UK passport – the rest of my family is, and since the EU referendum I've decided it's time for me to join them.) We've had a great few days up here. The weather has been mixed, this summer, but that also makes for spectacular lighting conditions. The other day it even seemed as…
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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…