Personal
-
Well, that was indeed fun. For my first afternoon in Great Malvern visiting one of my favourite Autodesk customers – the Morgan Motor Company – I took a 1/2 day Morgan 3 Wheeler familiarization course. The course was run by a company called 3 Wheel Drive (what a great name 🙂 and involved focused, hands-on guidance from highly-qualified advanced driving instructors. My tutor, Norm, was a former professional police driver with many years of experience on the roads around Malvern. I started the day at the MMC Visitor's Centre: Norm met me there and introduced me to the Morgan 3…
-
I had a fun Saturday morning, a couple of weeks ago. An old school-friend of my wife's is a partner in a temporary art tattoo business (which hopefully means a business that sells temporary art tattoos rather than a temporary business that sells art tattoos ;-), and they were looking for bald models to help showcase their wares. So I went along for my first – and quite possibly last – modelling assignment. The fact that they were only interested in the top of my head made the gig a lot easier. Here's the resulting image: What's interesting is that…
-
Another year has come and gone. I managed to miss the 7-year anniversary of "Through the Interface": it's only this morning that I thought to look back and check the day of the first post, and – sure enough – it was June 19, 2006. I have it in my head that it's around late June (just as I know the anniversary of my joining Autodesk is sometime in late August), but I still managed to miss it. Ah well. So that's that. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to the blog, whether via one of the ~7,300…
-
I've now finished my recent trio of long-haul trips: the San Francisco Bay Area in late April, Singapore in mid-May and Boston in early June. So I can take a breather for a few weeks (maybe even months), at least: I have no firm travel plans until AU, although no doubt something will come up before then. [For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the title of the post is a reference to a common British house name. In the UK people often name (or used to, anyway) their houses in this way to announce that they're "Done…
-
This isn't new news – it was announced a few weeks ago at NetSuite's SuiteWorld 2013 event – but I thought I'd mention it here mainly because of a personal connection of mine. The announcement was regarding a broad strategic alliance between Autodesk and NetSuite, as well as a specific technology integration between PLM 360 and NetSuite ERP. Here's the on-stage announcement of the alliance which includes a pretty neat video (that I hadn't seen before) introducing Autodesk technology to the ERP-centric audience: Here's a demo of the technology integration between PLM 360 and NetSuite Manufacturing Edition. As an area,…
-
I'm currently in Boston for an internal technical summit where I'll be presenting sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion (which will the sessions I've submitted - and will hopefully get accepted - for AU 2013). I arrived a day early and rented a bicycle from the hotel, taking the opportunity to cycle through the MIT and Harvard campuses (both of which are in Cambridge, where the summit is taking place) and then on to downtown Boston. It was really great being back in Boston after probably five years - it's still one of my favourite cities in the US.…
-
I'm at Changi airport, about to board my Swiss flight for Zurich. I had a great few days, here in Singapore, culminating in a presentation on integrating Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion with AutoCAD for members of the various engineering teams here. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, I'm heading home, now. I think I've set the record for my longest stay in Singapore without having participated in one of the major national pass-times (shopping), although I certainly participated heavily in the other (eating). Here's a quick shot from the top of the Marin Bay Sands, the hotel I…
-
My flight out of Zurich was delayed slightly – for snow, of all things! – but the trip across to San Francisco was otherwise smooth enough. After spending a fun Saturday night and Sunday in the city – catching up with old friends – it was nice to head back up to San Rafael for the evening. I spent most of the day today (it's still Monday, here) in our San Rafael office before we hit the road south to Santa Cruz, where I'll be attending an offsite meeting for the next few days. I chose to sit in the…
-
I'm hopping on a plane tomorrow to head across to the Bay Area for a week – I have some internal meetings to attend there. This is the first time I'm flying direct from Switzerland – Swiss now run a direct flight from Zurich to SFO – so that's something, I suppose. I actually have a few more long-haul trips planned over the coming months, but hopefully I'll manage to keep on posting regularly (I've become quite spoiled with having so much less travel since I changing jobs at the beginning of last year). It's typical that the travel starts…
-
So that's it, then. As mentioned some months ago, I've now successfully transitioned from thirtysomething to fortysomething. To celebrate the day itself, I shared a cheese fondue with family and a few friends. What was a bit different about this meal is that we had it in the back of a specially adapted horse-drawn carriage that took us along the banks of the river Thielle. A very nice experience to share. It was beautiful weather, the Alps were visible in the distance and there was still snow on top of the Chasseral (off to the left, in the below photo).…