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 to university.
Stateside, the eldest had the first few lectures of his bio-medical engineering studies at Johns Hopkins University. The lecture theatres apparently did fill up after these pics were taken. :-)
So it’s nice and quiet at home, for better or worse. It’s probably for the best, as work-wise things are looking to get busy over the coming weeks, too: besides the ever-present AU prep (the clock is certainly ticking on that, at this stage), I have a number of other internal and external presentations to prepare and deliver. It’s just that time of year.
Something extra-curricular that I'm looking forward to is an exhibition at EPFL that’s starting quite soon: our eldest had a really interesting class there last semester on digital musicology, which led to him volunteering for a “side quest” where he created a number of visualizations - both 2D and 3D - of musical pieces. He’s mainly a Linux nerd and so implemented them in C++ using either VTK or low-level OpenGL. Pretty hardcore stuff. It turns out that his visualizations will make up a decent chunk of the exhibit, so I’m very much looking forward to checking it out! (If you look closely you can find his name in the credits on the above page.)
To wrap up this post I did want to just say farewell to my friend and fellow blogger, Scott Sheppard, with whom I’ve worked a lot over the years, between working with and evangelizing the DWF Toolkit to posting monthly plugins on Autodesk Labs and most recently our time together in Autodesk Research. On Friday Scott will be the latest of a number of friends to retire from Autodesk (John Goodman and Patrick Emin both retired earlier this summer, for instance). I used to wonder at how few colleagues made it through to retirement at Autodesk, but of late it seems like there are many more who do. All the better, I say.
I wish you a very happy and fulfilling retirement, Scott. It’s been a pleasure blogging alongside you. Please keep in touch!
