Autodesk offices in most places around the globe have been closed this week as part of an extended holiday break. From my side I’ve managed to spend a couple of days on the slopes, here in Switzerland, although I ended up coming back down to the lakeside as there’s a strange weather blip where it’s currently warm and wet enough to be raining in the Alps for the lead-up to Christmas. Ah well.
I’ve been having fun working through Advent of Code, although – as ever for this time in December – the coding challenges are starting to get quite tricky. It’s good for my brain, though: I’m finding that I’m coding less and less for my day job, so having a deep dive into some gnarly programming puzzles helps strengthen a few underused neural pathways.
I’ve also been to see the latest Avatar movie twice. Which is a lot of Avatar, given a single showing is over 3 hours long. I took the kids for the first showing… in fact it was supposed to be the whole family, but I’d forgotten to factor in the needs of our 8-month-old puppy, who really doesn’t like being left alone for 30 minutes, let alone 180. So my wife stayed home – she also had some work to do – but we managed to go together on Wednesday night, just the two of us, this time with a few glasses of champagne and a packet of amazing truffle-flavoured crisps. (Zweifel, the Swiss snack manufacturer and maker of the best salt & vinegar crisps in the world, have just outdone themselves… I don’t think I can ever go back to prawn cocktail-flavoured Walkers, that’s for sure.)
Watching Avatar 2 twice in the space of a handful of days was actually just fine. I enjoyed it the second time nearly as much as the first.
Anyway, in-between casual coding sessions and watching state-of-the-art movies, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on all that’s happened during the course of 2022. I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post, but for now I’d just like to take the chance to wish you all the best for the festive season. I find it a unique period of the year – in that pretty much everyone is offline at the same time – and I hope others are taking the time to recharge and spend some quality time with friends and family.
See you in 2023!
