Through the Interface

Going viral during a pandemic

I’ve been getting quite a bit of unsolicited email of late. It started with this one, in late July: Hi Kean, Did you know that a QR code of your email address is currently being circulated all around the globe in a viral meme? Cheers, It came with a couple of images attached: Perhaps somewhat rudely I largely ignored it, as I thought it was some elaborate spam or phishing attempt. I did scan the QR codes and found some curious things encoded: my email address, the URL to blogs.autodesk.com, my old Autodesk office phone number, the location of... Read more →

AU 2021 update & MX3D on the AU blog

The count-down to Autodesk University 2021 continues, with registration for the event now open. I’ve gone ahead and registered, as I expect many of you will at some point during the remaining 54 days. It’s free, after all, and I’m sure will have lots of great content, as usual. Be sure to put the dates in your calendar – October 5-7 for the Americas, October 6-8 for EMEA & APAC, October 13-14 for East Asia. The timing of this year’s event – being several weeks earlier – means that it falls during our children’s half-term break. This year –... Read more →

15 years of this blog

If you’re going to forget an anniversary, let it be the one for your first engagement with social media. The very definition of a victimless crime. I just remembered that it was back in June 2006 when I started this blog (the welcome post was on June 19th, 2006, so I didn’t miss it by much). It’s been quite the ride… 2021 posts over 15 years, at an average of about 2.6 posts per week, rain or shine. I always set myself the goal of 3 posts per week, but in recent years that’s dropped back to 2 or... Read more →

May The Fourth Be With You

Yes, it’s Star Wars Day, once again. My kids have all gone off to school in their favourite Star Wars T-shirts, while I’ve stayed at home in my slippers. Over the weekend I did a little preparation, getting around to building my latest birthday gift. Are you having some fun today, yourself? Happy May the 4th! Read more →

International Women’s Day

Like many of you, I have the immense privilege of having incredible women in my life. For me, today is about recognising this privilege, but also remembering that despite more than a century having passed since the original suffragettes started their organised fight against sex-based discrimination, there’s still important work to be done. (In fact I genuinely feel that in recent years we’ve seen a regression in some women’s rights, something that I desperately want to see corrected over the coming years.) It’s important for me to see our daughters (and yes, especially my own beloved daughter, of course)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #19

We’ve reached the end of a much-needed week off up in the mountains. I’ve actually spent a bunch of time fooling around with getting RetroPie working on a Raspberry Pi 400 I bought for the kids (ahem). We’ve been having lots of fun playing Zelda on the NES and Super-NES, Sonic on the Megadrive, and Runn ‘n’ Gunn on the C64. Before leaving to come up, I did record an additional episode of Floppy Friday, although in fairness no floppy was harmed (or used) in the making of this particular episode: we take a look at three C64 games... Read more →

DevDays Online and another "Build Your Own Dasher" Forge Accelerator

I’m currently up in the mountains with my family, enjoying the annual school closure for the kids’ “ski week”. I recognise we’re especially lucky, this year, given that a) Swiss ski resorts are open and b) our kids are at school physically rather than remotely. Spring seems to be hitting early, this year, but even if the snow’s a little soft, the sun is very welcome. Here’s a shot where we’re sitting at the top of a run as a rescue helicopter takes off (this is never good to see, but it is often impressive): Yesterday we went to... Read more →

Floppy Friday #18

This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK. For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here’s an image... Read more →

Looking back to look forwards

Over the weeks since AU, I’ve been heads-down with writing a chapter for a book that’s due to be published in this summer. The book is about innovation in the construction industry, and my chapter will talk about opportunities related to digital twins and generative design. Which means I haven’t had much time to write “serious” posts for this blog, of late. I did want to put pen to paper in this new year about the sheer joy I’ve been getting from recording Floppy Fridays, though. It’s clear there’s been a strong “retro” trend in recent years. I’d probably... Read more →

Halloween and 3D skeletons

This year’s Halloween was destined to disappoint: we’d held out some hope until the 30th that the kids (which just means our youngest, at this point) would end up being able to go trick-or-treating in our village. Understandably – but disappointingly – the announcement came that any kind of trick-or-treating was off the cards for this Halloween. Stricter rules about groups of people were also announced, but with effect from today. From today onwards any kind of public or private event can have a maximum of 5 people present. Given the acceleration of cases in Switzerland, this is completely... Read more →

Announcing Floppy Fridays!

The situation in Switzerland regarding the pandemic is looking bleak, at the moment (and no, yodelling isn’t helping). The number of cases per-capita is currently ahead of the US, and the critical infrastructure in my home canton is starting to get overwhelmed, hence us being put on “red alert”. I’m expecting our kids to be sent home any day now, but we’ll see what the authorities decide. Anyway, this has definitely been at the forefront of my thinking, of late, when it comes to what we’ll end up doing to keep busy during the upcoming confinement. People who follow... Read more →

Steep roads, waterfalls and outsider art

Our children have been off school for the last two weeks, so I’ve been alternating between preparing my Autodesk University 2020 material and going on excursions with the family. We had planned to visit Kosovo during this break, but as it was on Switzerland’s quarantine list we chose to cancel our flights. Somewhat frustratingly – just the week after – the Swiss Confederation added 15 new countries to the quarantine list and removed only one: Kosovo. So we could have gone, after all. Argh. That said, when we’d planned the trip back in July, I hadn’t realised the timeframe... Read more →

25 years with Autodesk

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of my joining Autodesk. The years have literally flown by. To bathe in the nostalgia of the event, I decided to go up into the loft and dig through my old photos, to see what I could find. Here’s one of me that was probably taken around the time I joined Autodesk (at a guess, anyway). Yes, I had long hair, although it was usually tied back: it was only this curly just after it had just been washed (so not very often, ahem). If you could travel back in time and tell my... Read more →

A Swiss staycation

I’m just back from a proper two-week break from work. I say “proper” because it’s rare that I manage to disconnect completely from meetings and email, but given the increased mental load of being attached to Zoom over the last several months, it really felt like a good time to force the break. It’s been a while since I’ve shared anything travel-related – I did so much more of our big trip of a few years ago, of course – but given the fact many people aren’t travelling much, at the moment, I thought I’d share what we’ve done... Read more →

Celebrating at a distance

We’ve just finished celebrating the 20th anniversary of a dear friend and colleague, Clayton Hotson, joining Autodesk. We were in the same team, way back when Clayton joined, both working from our San Rafael office. Over the years we’ve ended up doing other things, but in the last few months have happily found ourselves back together in the Research Engineering team (the awesome group that was responsible for incubating Dreamcatcher…. it’s a serious honour to be working with this team). Anyway, today we got together and had a surprise celebration for Clayton. We dug up some photos of Clayton... Read more →

Thoughts on our new situation

I’m sure we’ve all been thinking lots about the developing situation we’re living through at the moment. Between markets crashing, social distancing, school closures and home-working, the world looks very different than it did a few short weeks ago. The below poem came through my inbox, this morning (thanks, Mum!) and it definitely resonated with some hopes I’ve had about the crisis. IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC And the people stayed home. And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And they... Read more →

Grindelwald, the Jungfraujoch and a week off

I was back home on Thursday night with enough time to have dinner with my family before getting an early night (a relatively easy thing to do after a busy week in Soho). I was out of the door at 5:30am on Friday to get across to Grindelwald for the Gümligen Engineering team’s annual ski day. I changed trains in Bern. And yes, there is a suburb of Bern called Wankdorf, which does indeed cause endless amusement to Brits. It was a little before 7am by the time I got to the Gümligen office, meeting Nenad, Martyn and Adrian:... Read more →

Walking on old wood

I was due to meet with a customer in Zurich on Monday of this week, but unfortunately it had to be rescheduled at fairly short notice. As I’d already bought a non-refundable train ticket – if you buy them a little in advance you can get a day ticket for the whole of Switzerland for less than a return ticket to Zurich, which can be very handy – I decided to head across to Zurich anyway. I used the morning for another meeting – luckily the person I wanted to catch up with was in the office – and... Read more →

Kicking off the new decade

I’m back online after a thoroughly needed (and fully appreciated) 2-week break. It was great to relax and hang out with my immediate family: we spent most of the fortnight up in the mountains, and managed to snowboard for 11 of the days. There was pretty decent snow – not loads and loads, but then we often don’t have much at all at this time of year, these days – and we had a lot of sun. This is the second year we’ve all been on snowboards. As the kids get older I’m starting to see my board moving... Read more →

Back home and Happy Holidays!

After getting back to Bangalore from Pune, I did end up having to spend the best part of Wednesday morning dealing with more Indian bureaucracy. The bank I was in was going through its annual archival process, which meant the floor soon filled with papers… … and then boxes containing them. This brought back memories, as it was Writer Relocations who handled our move to India, back in 2003. After this I was able to head across Bangalore to meet with an old friend, Lokessh, for lunch. Lokessh works just off Queen’s Road, in the old centre of the... Read more →