Travel
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It's now less than a week before my family and I get on a plane and start our big trip: visiting 13 countries on 5 continents (not including the one we're starting from) over the course of 6 months. We leave on July 2nd, 2017, and – if our plans don't change – will return home on January 5th, 2018. Here's a map of where we're going… be sure to zoom into different locations and click on the place-markers to bring up additional information. It's been a deliberate choice, over the years, not to talk much about my family on…
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I'm writing this on a train to Geneva airport from where I'll hop across to the UK for a week. This afternoon I have a meeting in London at the British Library, after which I'll be checking into the Hilton London Metropole where Autodesk is holding its 9th (at least I think that's right, if the first was – as I seem to recall – in 2009) annual Technical Summit. This is the internal meeting where technical staff from around the world get together to share information and learn from each other. Every year the percentage of presentation proposals selected…
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It's a beautiful Whit Monday, here in Switzerland – and will probably be a beautiful Memorial Day, when I arrive in San Francisco, this afternoon. I'm heading across the pond to attend an internal technical conference and spend time with other members of my team over the coming fortnight. I have a couple of posts to finish up – one on WinRT, another on iOS, now that I'm able to deploy that version to my iPad 2 – before I wrap up the somewhat epic "cloud & mobile" series with a summary post. I'll see what I can get done…
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I'm here, once again, for our annual Developer Day and DevLab, in between Paris (on Friday) and Farnborough (Monday and Tuesday). Others in the team are doing many more dates, so I have it easier, in many ways. Just as I did, last year, I ended up flying from GVA –> ZRH –> MUC to get here, mainly from a cost perspective (I fly back directly, MUC –> GVA). This time, though, I took the train from Neuchâtel to Geneva and flew back across to Zürich's new airport only to find my onwards flight to Munich had been cancelled. I…
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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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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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I'm just taking a few days off to visit family in Italy. We're sitting in a brand-new EuroCity train on its way from Bern to Milano Centrale. Aside from it being very comfortable – which is new, most of the other times I've made this journey have been in cattle-wagons – it's got one cool feature I hadn't seen before and simply had to mention: real-time tracking of our progress inside Google Earth displayed on overhead screens inside the cabin. Now you needn't even look out of the window to see where you are! Simply marvelous! Unfortunately this visualization of…