Through the Interface

Our closing party

On Thursday we celebrated Autodesk’s presence in Neuchatel together, one last time, at the official office closing party. It was held at the new bar on top of the Beaulac Hotel… a fitting venue, in some ways, as this was for many of us the first place we stayed when we first visited Neuchatel for our job interviews (it certainly was mine: I stayed here back in July 1995 when I came across for my 2nd-round interview to join Autodesk UK, some years before I moved here). Anyway, the new bar is really nice, with interesting decor… … and... Read more →

Life after Autodesk [Neuchâtel]

Given the impending closure of our Neuchâtel office – we have our big closing party on Thursday afternoon, although a few teams will still have people in the office until the end of August – there are a lot of former (and soon-to-be-former) Autodeskers starting to look for jobs in the region. Most were offered jobs in either Barcelona or the new Dublin office, but – given the salary differential to work in these locations and the currently booming Swiss economy, which has around 2.5% unemployment nationwide – the vast majority have chosen to accept their termination offers and... Read more →

Autodesk Football World Cup 2018

On Friday lunchtime – after a great few days in Barcelona for the Forge Accelerator – I hopped on an EasyJet flight to Bordeaux for this year’s internal Autodesk football tournament. I was one of the lucky ones: there was a later Vueling flight – which I’d very nearly opted to take – that was cancelled because of strikes in South-Eastern France. A bunch of players and fans from the Barcelona office ended up having to rent cars and drive them to Bordeaux to participate. Apparently a number of others from the UK and Italy were also impacted and... Read more →

I <3 Hockey (but probably not the one you think)

Back in the UK, during my teenage years, I got into field hockey in a big way. I spent several winters playing hockey on frozen grass pitches around the East of England. When I went to University I played a lot more (between the 2nd and 1st teams, this time mostly on astroturf), and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Once I started working things became harder… I still managed to play a few times, but mostly ended up joining teams to play other sports: Field hockey just turned out not to be a sport I could play regularly, for one reason... Read more →

Happy Star Wars Day

To help celebrate Star Wars Day, I’ve decided to talk about an incredible concert I was lucky to be able to attend with my wife and friends last weekend. It’s funny: I remember booking tickets for the concert way back during our round-the-world trip: it was a rainy day in Sao Paolo when I found out about it and immediately snapped up seats. The event was a ciné-concert of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope held at the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne with accompaniment by the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra. I hadn’t realised before, but “film concerts”... Read more →

Celebrating a 20-year journey

When I first visited Neuchatel I instantly fell in love with the city. This was back in the summer of 1995, during my second round job interview for Autodesk. From that moment I knew I wanted to live here, but it was only in early 1998 that I had the chance to do so: a colleague had moved across to San Francisco to join the Kinetix development team, which left a Swiss-based vacancy in the European Developer Support team. I was thrilled to have the chance to move across and fill that role. During my first few weeks in... Read more →

Taking a (very cold) breath

It’s been a busy couple of months since getting back from our big trip (which, while incredible at many levels, was in itself not really a relaxing experience, all things considered). So in some ways it feels like a good time to take a break, especially as the kids have the week off school. We took the chance to head up to the Bernese Oberland for a bit of skiing and snowboarding, as we often do at this time of year. I’m working a bit in the mornings and the evenings – I have a few important projects to... Read more →

On becoming Swiss

Last week I received an important letter through the post. It was final confirmation from the Swiss Confederation that I’m being granted Swiss nationality. This is something I could have requested some time ago – due to the years I’ve been married to a Swiss person (something I lovingly refer to as “time served” ;-) – but it was the Brexit referendum that pushed me over the edge. The day after the vote I requested the forms I needed to fill out. It took me a few more months to get around to submitting them, but Brexit was definitely... Read more →

The world seen through social media (or not)

Something has been nagging at me, since returning from our world trip. Perhaps it’s best described as the impact social media is having on travel. Interestingly it’s been talked about very recently in The Guardian in an opinion piece entitled “Instagrammers are sucking the life and soul out of travel”. While we didn’t necessarily plan our trip to be able to take iconic pictures, having our own Instagram feed (which we’ve made private now that the trip is over, although I’ll accept connections if it’s obvious you’re a reader of this blog) meant that we weren’t completely immune from... Read more →

Thinking about light

A year ago I talked about my early forays into the world of home automation, mainly via Philips Hue. I’m now treating the “experiment” as a success, and have decided to invest in more lights (and another Hue bridge for our main home). While thinking about this, I decided to check on the availability of an API. Sure enough there’s a great REST API available for Philips Hue, as well as a number of SDKs. All of which has me thinking about possibilities of using Philips Hue as a way to visualize data. Just as we use Forge inside... Read more →

The end of our 6-month adventure

So, that’s it. 6 months flew by in the blink of an eye, and we’re back home in Switzerland. On the one hand it seemed to go quickly, while on the other hand we feel as though we’ve come back to a house we barely recognise full of stuff we don’t need… We each have a room of our own to sleep in (if we so choose)! And look at all those clothes! Detaching from most of your former existence – while retaining and strengthening ties to your core, your nuclear family – is an interesting experience. During the... Read more →

Cape Town

We arrived in the Cape on New Year’s Day. Leaving Swellendam we stopped by Robertson to see the house in which my wife’s grandmother grew up. A nice bit of family nostalgia. We then decided to swing by Franschhoek for a quick visit… on the way we passed by the Theewaterskloof Dam: one of the main reservoirs supplying the Cape. It was depressingly empty: the Cape has been suffering a multi-year drought, to the point that they currently have level 6 water restrictions in place. To get to Franschhoek we headed across the lovely Franschhoek Pass. Franschhoek is a... Read more →

The Western Cape

Happy New Year! Hopefully you all managed to take a break during the last few weeks; from our side we were focused on spending an enjoyable Christmas with our family in South Africa and then squeezing the last few drops out of our 6-month adventure. After Addo we spent a couple of days in Port Elizabeth, with some old friends. We visited a few beaches for walks, but the bulk of our time in P.E. was actually spent at the mall. Yes, at the mall. On our night safari in Addo, the driver had mentioned going into P.E. to... Read more →

Addo Elephant Park

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 6-month round-the-world trip (I’ll be back at work on January 5th in some capacity). We were very excited about our visit to Addo Elephant National Park. While not the Kruger, it’s certainly a large, impressive park and the most easily accessible large park for... Read more →

The Karoo

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 to enjoy a family Christmas). We left Lesotho on December 14, so had a few days to kill before needing to be in Addo. We had a couple of options: head southeast to the Wild Coast or southwest to the Karoo. As we expected... Read more →

Lesotho

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, which we spent in front of a roaring fire, making handmade Christmas ornaments and watching seasonal movies. It was really the first serious feeling of Christmas we’ve had, this year… it was very welcome, too. Anyway, back on the road the following day, we... Read more →

My future

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 that the Neuchatel office is definitely going to close its doors. According to Swiss law, employees had a 2-week consultation period to find alternatives to closing the office and – in this case, more importantly – to negotiate a more favourable social plan for... Read more →

KwaZulu-Natal

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 it (I’ve seen a number of these since arriving in Asia, for some reason). The second one I booked stayed at 1 minute away for quite some time… I ended up realising it was parked a few metres up the street. I walked up... Read more →

Displaying a round-the-world itinerary with Google Maps – Part 6

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 were in Tahiti, but again in New Zealand – I noticed that the “visited” path from the Garmin site wasn’t being integrated properly into the Google Map integrated into our family blog. After a little bit of analysis, I realised that the amount of... Read more →

Bangalore

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 building a new team in Bangalore for Autodesk’s consulting division, while Celia was dealing with all the issues related to a first pregnancy in a foreign country. Not to mention my father being diagnosed with terminal cancer, back in the UK. Our two years... Read more →