Personal
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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" –…
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Things were going so well on this year's DevDays tour. Then, as Jeremy reported on his blog, the best-laid plans of mice and men unravelled, thanks to the severe weather conditions that have been hitting the UK. Despite the bad news in the weather, yesterday morning, I was still reasonably (foolishly?) optimistic about my own chances of getting to the UK: British Airways had declared my flight still to be operating – mainly as it was the return flight of one of the 4 short-haul flights planned to leave Heathrow yesterday. By the time I arrived at the airport, though,…
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Just back from a great little break: yesterday we drove across and spent the day at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Luzern (more on that in a bit), before having dinner at the Rathaus Brauerie opposite the Kapellbrucke. Then we spent the night at the Hotel Bellevue, a very friendly hotel near the edge of Lake Luzern, and today headed across to Ballenberg – with its amazing historical view of Swiss life – before arriving home this evening. All in all a great deal of fun crammed into two short days. One of the highlights for me was a…
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I started working at Autodesk 15 years ago on August 29th, 1995. Part of me wanted to start this post by saying "it seems like only yesterday that I started working for Autodesk…", but the truth is, it doesn't. It feels longer, but not for bad reasons: mainly because so much has happened in the last 15 years, whether from a technological, professional or personal perspective. [I wish it were 20 years, though, just so it'd make for a better Beatles lyrics quote. But who knows if I'll still be here in 5 years? Better to use it now, rather…
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I wouldn't normally go into the details of the way I've spent my weekend, but this one was special at so many levels. On Friday, while I was attending internal meetings at our 1 Market office in San Francisco, my wife took the kids to Baker Beach. Three kids under the age of six is a lot for anyone to manage, and – while bundling them all back into the car – she managed to leave our digital SLR sitting in the parking lot. We noticed its absence when we were getting the kids ready to head up from the…
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I've had quite a lot of contact with "laser" technology over the last few weeks. (In case you're wondering about the quotation marks, that's just a little nod to Mike Myers' fantastic Dr. Evil character, who in the Austin Powers movies refers to now-commonplace terms – such as laser – with finger quotes. 🙂 A few weeks ago our friends at FARO sent across a Photon 120 laser scanner to our office in Neuchâtel, and we've just started getting to grips with it (if you want to see more advanced use of this technology, be sure to check out this…
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I've come across to the Bay Area for three weeks with my family (which these days pretty much qualifies as a military exercise, believe me). For the first of these week's I'll be on vacation, catching up with friends in the area, as my wife and I lived here – back in the days before kids – for three years. It wasn't the smoothest start to a trip, I have to admit: early last week our eldest son came down with chickenpox. We were close to cancelling, but were given the advice to play it by ear: as it turns…
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One of my oldest friends – we've known each other since we were three years old – decided to get married in Las Vegas this week. My friend, his fiancée and his parents flew across from the UK, but others of us flew across from Switzerland and even New Zealand to attend the event. Now between Autodesk University and other events, I've probably averaged a week in Las Vegas a year for the last decade. So I didn't really want to spend a full week in Vegas, but neither did I want to make the trip across for just a…