Personal
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To celebrate my second son's 5th birthday (how time flies!), we visited Disneyland Paris for the long weekend here in Switzerland (it was the Jeûne Fédéral, or Federal Fasting Holiday, which apparently has its roots back in the 15th century). We arrived back, late last night, by the TGV from Paris to Neuchâtel. Aside from being a lot of fun with the kids, it was also quite nostalgic, as my wife and I had last stayed – back in the days before children – at the particular hotel we chose (the Newport Bay Club), during Autodesk's Developer Days event back…
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I arrived back home on Sunday afternoon from a really fun event: Autodesk Europe's annual 7-a-side football (i.e. soccer) tournament. This year it was held in Verona, Italy, which was a comfortable 5-6 hour drive from my home near Neuchâtel. This year I played for a team made up of employees from Autodesk's Global Services (to which ADN belongs) and Worldwide Marketing teams (two teams ended up being combined as both were a little short on players). Here's the pre-tournament team photo: The players (from left-to-right and back-to-front): Kean Walmsley, Jason Summerfield, Jeremy Tammik, Fenton Webb, Gary Wassell, Marat Mirgaleev,…
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I'm currently in Shanghai for an internal technical conference, which I'm really looking forward to. There are loads of very interesting, deeply technical sessions on the 2-day agenda. I travelled via Beijing, to spend some time with the DevTech China team, yesterday, and will fly back there on Thursday evening to spend time with them on Friday, too. (Monday was a holiday in China – the Dragon Boat Festival – which meant I have to do a lot of flying around to get a couple of days this week in both places.) There seems to be a storm cloud traveling…
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After spending more hours than I'd wanted, last week, digging into working with the Kinect (as well as keeping up with my normal, day-to-day activities), it was nice to disconnect totally over the weekend. On Saturday I spent most of the day relaxing in the garden, getting it ready for summer, but on Sunday we decided to hitch up the trailer to one of our bikes and head across to a beautiful little (and thankfully nearby) town named Erlach. After having lunch at a restaurant we headed down to the lake for the kids to play. I was surprised at…
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I'm back in Switzerland after an incredible week in India. Much of the week was spent in internal meetings – 1-on-1 discussions with members of the DevTech team in Bangalore, as well as a full day of team meetings – but I also had the chance to unwind and enjoy a truly historic event, India's first Cricket World Cup win in 28 years. I'd only extended my trip by a day as the flight was twice as expensive without the Saturday night stay… and for India to then get so far in the competition and win in such style was…
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It was a productive 10-day trip to the US: 7 performance reviews (6 delivered, 1 received), many presentations (3 delivered by me, one of which was Pecha Kucha-style) and probably a dozen or so 1-on-1 meetings with team members, as well as going through the Birkman Method with my direct team and peers. Altogether a great week, just a little grueling. The schools are out, this week – as the canton of Neuchâtel celebrates its founding on March 1st, every year – so I'm going to spend the next day or so mostly offline with my family, and will probably…
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Earlier today, while transiting between flights from Geneva to San Francisco in Heathrow, I overheard one security agent describing the perfect "pat down" to a colleague: "You need to get them to hold their arms out wide. Not like that lady who kept her elbows by her sides, with her hands flapping around like one of those raptures [sic.] from Jurassic Park." I'll be travelling over the next week or so, between San Francisco, San Rafael and Las Vegas. I'll be posting on more technical topics, when I have time, but thought I'd share that little travel anecdote, in the…
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Yesterday my two sons – who are now 6 and 4, both great ages – managed to get me to sit (several times, of course) on a whoopee cushion. Which brought back many fond memories of my brother and I playing similar tricks at around that age. What amazed me most was how the technology has advanced: this latest generation of cushion self-inflates! A simple enough innovation – the rubber now contains a small hole and a sponge – but in many ways revolutionary. Ah, if only I had a time machine I could make a small (but very noisy)…
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I'm back online after a great week in the Alps. One of the best parts of being back at home is having the chance to build my Christmas present – the LEGO Death Star. At 3,803 pieces, it's a bit of a monster: I could really have used a set of 3D instructions, but had to make do with the 259-page, ring-bound instruction tome. I'm about halfway through and thoroughly enjoying it. 🙂 I also had some fun playing with a present I bought my wife, a Sony NEX-5 camera. I think I've managed to convince her it isn't a…
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Thank you all for reading and participating in this blog during 2010. It's your comments and feedback that make it all worthwhile, at least from my perspective. ("If a blog post gets written and no-one's around to read it, why bother spell-checking?" 😉 I'm heading off to the Alps this afternoon with my family: we've rented a chalet in Haute-Nendaz for the week between Christmas and New Year and so I'll be fully offline until the first week of January. I hope you all get to enjoy a break – as Autodesk employees do during our "week of rest" –…