Personal
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It's nice being back in the Bay Area. I got in on Monday night and took BART into the city, checking into the Hyatt Regency (just across the street from our 1 Market office). That first evening I caught up with my old team – the DevTech managers, now under Stephen Preston's leadership – for dinner and then went for an over-priced green beer with my former boss, Jim Quanci. It was St. Patrick's Day, after all. 🙂 Then it was a short night's sleep before the usual jetlag woke me at 3:30am. On the plus side, it gave me…
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Many of you will have seen last week's announcement about the creation of the Autodesk Foundation. The foundation has been set up to formalise something that's long been part of Autodesk's culture: supporting charitable causes through direct investment, software donation and matching of employee gifts. This formalisation will also bring greater alignment around our support for the broader design community, which is something that's new. I'm particularly excited about changes being made to Autodesk's employee volunteering program. As an Autodesk employee I'm able to spend 4 hours per month of company time volunteering for qualifying nonprofit organisations (political and religious…
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Yesterday I had a really interesting day. I spent it at Geneva's Palexpo exhibition centre, helping Morgan Motor Company set up their stand for this year's Salon International de l"Auto & Accessoires (i.e. the 84th Geneva Motor Show). It was really cool being there before even the press were allowed in (they get to attend today and tomorrow), while most of the cars were still under wraps: I've been to the show – and visited the Morgan stand – before, but this year was very exciting for me as it marks the culmination of some months of collaboration between Morgan…
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I'm still on pseudo-vacation. We really had a great week in the snow: sun during the day (everyday!) with the odd bit of fresh snow overnight on a couple of occasions. It's snowing again now, but unfortunately this time it's set to snow all the way through to the end of the day tomorrow, so it's quite possible we'll head home a little earlier than expected. Which, on the plus side, will allow me to do some prep-work for Monday's Geneva Motor Show project installation. Anyway, all this to say that I've written this post really quickly with plenty of…
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I'm up in the mountains for the week as the kids have their winter half-term break (which in Switzerland is actually intended for kids to ski… very civilized :-). I'm going to take a few meetings and probably write a few blog posts, but otherwise I'm planning on hitting the slopes whenever I get the chance. I did want to comment on how my research into right-click menus ended up, last week. I put together some code that made use of the technique shown in this previous post to create and load a partial CUIx file containing our OBJECT_ACAD_TABLE shortcut…
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Well, today was the day I printed my first 3D object. The missing feeder tube from our site's MakerBot Replicator 2 hasn't yet been replaced, but Francesco Tonioni, friend, colleague and probably the most practical person I know, cobbled something together as a stop-gap. So the game was on. 🙂 This initial project stems back to May of last year – when I was in Boston for our internal Technical Summit – when my son talked to me about an idea of his. My children really like LEGO, and, at the time – the specific product tie-in tends to vary…
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Aside from being St. Valentine's Day, Friday is notable as it marks the beginning of the first ever ETHx class, "AMRx – Autonomous Mobile Robots". ETHx is the moniker being used by the prestigious technical institution ETH Zurich for the MOOC courses they're delivering as part of edX. This is exciting: despite the fact I live close enough theoretically to attend classes at ETH Zurich in person, I'm very happy to be able to do so from the comfort of my home. The topic is itself very interesting… the "environment perception" piece alone looks as though it should cover algorithms…
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I've been a fan of TED for many years (and am very happy to be working for a company that has sponsored such an important conference). Yesterday was the first time, though, that I actually had the chance to attend a TED (or in this case, TEDx) event in person. TEDxLausanne was held at the University of Lausanne, about an hour from my home. It was held in English, which isn't a requirement for TEDx but seems a good choice for a multi-lingual country such as Switzerland. The agenda contained an interesting mix of sessions: there were (of course) a…
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I was up in the mountains with my family, over the weekend, but as Sunday was "un jour blanc" I decided to stay on an extra day and make the most of the superb conditions (i.e. bright sunshine and fresh snow) predicted for Monday. Hence the title of this post, which is the British equivalent of playing hooky, for those who're wondering. (And yes, it was yesterday, but I've just realised I don't remember ever using that particular verb in the past tense… "I skived off" is more likely than "I skove off", I suppose. 🙂 Here's a quick animated…
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It's been a really interesting and productive few days here in Tel Aviv. In a sense it was too short a trip – I was penned in by commitments during the weekends either side of it – but despite that a lot was achieved. I didn't get to see very much of the city – apart from the hotel, a restaurant, some nice lunchtime eateries and a bar or two – but I'll definitely try to come for longer, next time around. After arriving on Tuesday and meeting with the people I'd be working most closely with during the course…