2017

  • This is likely to be my last post of the year, so for those of you who are still reading this in 2017, I hope you have a peaceful, relaxing holiday season and a fantastic start to 2018. If I don't manage to post sooner, I'll certainly do so once back in Switzerland from our […]

  • Having left Lesotho, we had two main items in our calendar for the rest of the year: we had two nights booked in Addo Elephant Park from December 17-19 and then a family gathering in Knysna starting from December 21, give-or-take (my wife is half South African, so we're making the most of this leg […]

  • We had originally planned on leaving KwaZulu-Natal to enter into Lesotho on December 10th, but that morning two things happened: we awoke to find it raining heavily, but – more importantly – one of the kids had some gastric problems. We ended up extending our stay in the Tower of Pizza for an additional day, […]

  • I was planning to post something today about our trip to Lesotho – which it turns out is the most amazing country, more on that next time – but as Autodesk Neuchatel employees have now received definitive communication regarding our future employment, it seems more appropriate to talk about that. It has now been confirmed […]

  • Some months ago I received a question from a developer about the Autodesk App Store: he questioned whether it was worth investing the effort of placing his product there. While this is clearly something that people have to decide for themselves, the numbers are certainly indicating it's valuable: the App Store team tells me they've […]

  • The trip to Durban from Bangalore was a long one: partly because the departure from Bangalore airport was at 3:45am, but mainly because we had to take three flights to get to our destination. We left our place in Bangalore at midnight: the first UberXL I tried to book was a phantom, so I cancelled […]

  • Here's a quick recap of the series, so far: Creating a basic map for our round-the-world itinerary Adding a photo for each placemark Adding labels for the approximate timing of the journey Overlaying the actual path visited from a tracking device Downloading the actual path in multiple queries A few weeks ago – while we […]

  • Being back in Bangalore brings back floods of memories. My wife and I lived here when we had our first baby. This wasn't part of our plan, particularly: we found out we were expecting during the first week we moved here, back in late 2003. That was a challenging time for us: workwise I was […]

  • On Wednesday morning, I woke up to the news of Autodesk restructuring, with approximately 13% of employees impacted worldwide. In my years at Autodesk I've been through this more than a few times, and it's hard not to feel a little detached when you're on a 6-month trip with your family. I decided to go […]

  • In total we stayed for 5 days in Kodaikanal, India. It's really not the ideal time of year to visit Kodaikanal: the Northeast Monsoon is just getting started, so you can end up staying indoors more than you'd like. But then when you're on a world tour you're inevitably going to experience imperfect timing at […]