Personal
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I've headed to Paris with the family for a few days, this week. We're staying in our first Airbnb-booked apartment in the 11th arrondissement. So far, so good! As the forecast for today looked a bit rainy, we decided to postpone our daytrip to Disneyland Paris until tomorrow and take the opportunity to visit the Louvre instead. Which turned out to be a good thing, as it's closed on Tuesdays, and on Wednesday we've already planned to climb the Eiffel Tower. What fun. Anyway, as we were leaving the Louvre, walking to the île de la Cité to visit Notre…
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Birdly is an immersive Virtual Reality experience that let's you fly like a bird through virtual cityscapes. To get a sense for how it works, check out this video: Birdly - Splitscreen from maxR on Vimeo I first heard about Birdly from Brian Kling, a friend and colleague in our Neuchâtel office who tried it out earlier this year at the Lift conference in Geneva. He came back really excited about the exhibit, and his excitement was contagious. Since then I've been looking for an opportunity to experience it firsthand. I'm happy to say the opportunity finally presented…
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After getting home late on Friday from the Cloud Accelerator in Prague, on Saturday morning we celebrated my son's 9th birthday (how time flies) with a party for his classmates at Robosphere in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the heart of the Swiss watch-making industry. A fun fact: this town has also had a major impact on both architecture and the automotive industry, being the birthplace of Le Corbusier and Louis Chevrolet. Robosphere is a local organisation dedicated to increasing awareness of robotics and related fields. They have a couple of options for birthday parties: we opted for the "Primo" package – the…
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The nostalgia is strong in this one. (In both this post and this blogger, in case you're wondering.) It started with my 20th anniversary at Autodesk, but it got worse, last weekend, when I travelled to the UK to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the University of Kent (where I studied, back in the day, about halfway through its history). I'd coordinated with a couple of close friends, so we descended on Canterbury from Switzerland, Connecticut and Windsor, and joined a thousand or so alumni for a really fun, celebratory weekend, revisiting old haunts and sharing old memories. Doubling down…
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Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the day I joined Autodesk. I know: it's tomorrow, not today, but then you really can't beat good Beatles lyrics (and it hopefully helps reset the cosmic balance after quoting an Olivia Newton John song in the title of the last post ;-). I already used this title – somewhat prematurely – 5 years ago, but hey. As I'm feeling a touch nostalgic, here's a BBC video about computer graphics & animation – and even CAD! – from 1983: it was around this time I first became interested in computers. I recommend watching this episode…
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So yes, I'm back flying again. I'm not travelling anywhere, though. Some of you will remember my abortive attempts at UAV piloting from around a year ago. My Quanum Nova has been gathering dust, since then (it's also in pieces because I tried – so far unsuccessfully – to install a Bluetooth telemetry module). But I'm motivated to get back on that particular horse thanks to a discovery I made a week ago. On a whim, I bought a micro-drone called the Hubsan X4 H107C. This is an incredible little device: you can pick one up for around $50 and…
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I've been trying hard to keep up my blogging rhythm, through the summer, but some weeks it's just hard. I'm currently enjoying an extended staycation with the family – and the weather in Switzerland has been simply amazing, this year, thankfully – and this week I just haven't found the time for my usual 3rd post. So here's a quick photo of a local field of sunflowers. Happy summer, everyone!
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Autodesk sponsors a great event, here in my home town: the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF). An old friend and colleague from the UK, Nick Manning, typically comes across to talk at the event, as well as to present the Imaging the Future award: 5,000 CHF for the international competition film with the best production design. The 2015 winner was a post-apocalyptic Ethiopian movie called Crumbs. This year's festival – the 15th edition – closed its doors on Saturday. Over the years the NIFFF has really grown in stature, and regularly attracts impressive guest speakers from the film industry…
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Looks like this week is going to be all about sweat. Hopefully there won't be blood and tears to go along with it. On Friday I drove with my family across to Verona, Italy, for Autodesk's annual football (soccer) tournament. This year was incredible: 20 teams from around the world showed up with around 600 people (between the players and supporters). We had hoped that Google Maps' estimate of the length of the drive would more or less accurate at 5 hours 40 minutes, but – through no fault of Google's – it ended up taking a brutal 8 hours.…
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In the past I've mentioned the Autodesk Foundation and to some extent the focus Autodesk has on benefiting local communities. Today I was very happy to participate in a charitable teambuilding activity in the office: a group of volunteers spent a couple of hours building prosthetic hands for people in developing countries – very often children who have lost their hands due to landmines. The instructions were straightforward to follow: there were a few tricky parts, but we managed to work through them as a team. The resulting hands will be shipped back to Odyssey Teams in the US, from…