Personal
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Autodesk loves its dogs. You might say it's in the company's DNA. One of my favourite internal Slack channels is #fun-dogs-of-autodesk (the "fun" prefix just indicates it's not business-related). Susan Taylor posted a link to a CBS flashback video there yesterday, which speaks to our long history of welcoming furry friends into the workplace. There are lots of familiar faces in this video: Lynn Levy, Linda Saldana and Patti Harris (who very sadly passed away some years ago). I worked with them all in the 90s/00s in some capacity, so this was a real "blast from the past". …
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This is a topic I can't quite believe I haven't covered at any point during this blog's existence, as I'm such a huge fan of a) the Neuchâtel region and b) vintage computing. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the creation of the world's first programmable computer, which also happened to be the world's first programmable robot. This might be a bit confusing to some, especially those who associate this concept with Babbage, Turing, etc. The world's first "computer" was a mechanical automaton that translated a "program" into (mechanical) hand-written output. So no, it's not a general-purpose computing device,…
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Last Monday I left my son in Baltimore and headed back to Dulles for a short flight to Toronto to attend internal meetings with our research team. I didn't feel like fighting public transport for 3+ hours to get from Baltimore to Dulles, so took the easy (and much more relaxing) path of taking an Uber. I was there in less than 90 minutes - a not insignificant time saving. I really wish it was more convenient to take public transport here. The flight to Pearson was short - a little over an hour in the air - and as…
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I mentioned last time that I was going to be busy preparing and delivering a number of presentations. I'm happy to say that crazy period has mostly come to a close. It was marked on Friday with the recording of the Autodesk University 2024 class that Håvard Høiby and I will be delivering again soon in San Diego. It was a lot of fun preparing and delivering this class with Håvard, I must say. And I think people are going to really engage with the content (especially the information about Forma's extension framework and SDK). Be sure to check it…
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Life seems to have shifted quite radically this week, as the summer here in Switzerland starts drawing to a close. A Sunday morning storm reset the temperature to something more autumnal (although these are looking to climb again gradually - we're not completely done with warm days here, thankfully) and all of my three children started their respective schools again on Monday. The two youngest are once again in the same institution - they're in the first and last years of our local "lycée" (the Denis-de-Rougement in Neuchâtel), which is the three years of post-mandatory schooling that often precedes going…
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I haven't been the the US purely for personal reasons for quite some time. The last time was probably on our round-the-world trip, and interestingly our first stop was in Washington DC. I've just flown across to Dulles, to help my sone get settled into his exchange university. I always love seeing the crazy elevator bus transport system that I haven't yet seen anywhere else in the world. It's like you're in some strange parallel universe where this kind of futuristic system became widespread, back in the day. What I like less about Dulles is the immigration queue. We were…
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In the last post I wrote about our recent time in Brittany and Cornwall. Something I find very striking about the English countryside is the thatching on (some of) the rooves. This also apparently exists in Brittany, but seems to be more rare. I'd been speculating about the amount of upkeep needed on a thatched roof and then we came across one being replaced. I suppose you could call it a cottage industry! (Groan.) It turns out a thatched roof can last as long as 40 years - if maintained well - although the ridge will probably need replacing every…
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We're just back from a fantastic 2+ week roadtrip to France and the UK. I'll talk about the initial part of the trip today and the rest of it in the next post. Our trip towards the UK started on Friday July 5th with a trip to the vet. Dogs entering the UK have to have documented proof of having a de-worming pill administered by a vet less that 120 hours (5 full days) before departure. As our ferry from Roscoff to Plymouth was scheduled for Wednesday July 10th at 9am, we were within the window by taking Daisy to…
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It's been an interesting year, so far, at many levels, and I have no major expectation that it's going to become less so in its remaining months. For starters there's the weather. As someone who is walking a dog for an hour a day, I feel intimately in tune with the weather, these days. And it has sucked. Badly. Even nature seems to be rebelling at the amount of rain, which is in itself remarkable. We're about to head off to visit friends in Brittany and family in the UK, which means it may well get worse before it gets…
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A full week has now passed since more than 500 people were in Munich for the Autodesk DevCon 2024, and yet I'm only now finding time to put proverbial pen to paper. It's just been really busy, but I'll talk more about why at some point in a future post. For this year's event I opted to take the train from Neuchatel to Zurich and then from there on to Munich. In theory that's 5.5 hours from city to city, but that's not really accounting for delays due to the unreliable Deutsche-Bahn network. (That's not me being all "Swiss"about things...…