I spent the last week in the San Francisco Bay area Autodesk offices. It is always great seeing colleagues of mine as well as the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. Here is my quick visual story in pictures of this week captured with my mobile phone.
Nobody should ever miss an opportunity to visit Ritual Coffee Roasters in San Francisco for a great coffee and a crowd of tech heavyweights seated in the coffee shop.
Visited Hackerspace Noisebridge (http://www.noisebridge.net)
Read More: Hacker Spaces – Come Meet Your Makers
Several scenic ferry rides across the bay to get to the office. This has to be one of the best commutes ever with the scenery and being able talk with people without worrying about a car cutting you off on the congested freeway. I can never have enough middle fingers for the highway 101 commute. ;-)
The new span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge is coming along nicely.
http://baybridgeinfo.org/construction-cams
Looking out my fourth floor office window I notice I had a feathered stalker staring back at me. Apparently this seagull is known by a few Autodesk employees as “Jonathan” and sits in window ledges frequently.
See more of my images from the week:
In addition to some of the best restaurants in the world, San Francisco has high end catering trucks and unique food vendors.
On Wednesday I visited the crazy creative folks in the Instructables.com office to discuss some future projects as well as snoop around the office at their cool projects. I got to see the infamous Clap Off Bra and the 12 foot tall cardboard Trojan horse they used to try and enter the Autodesk building for the Christmas party. Check out the Trojan horse video: http://youtu.be/Hosmu-0ECBoheck
You should check out Instructables.com to learn how to make projects varying from electronics, food, robots, crafts and even more.
The SF vertical cityscape.
On Thursday I worked from the Autodesk San Rafael offices and met up with colleague Gonzalo Martinez to test the Autodesk Octo Copter. This is a kit built 8 rotor unmanned aerial vehicle drone. With this drone we are able to capture real-time video as well a capture high resolution images to create 3D models automatically using Autodesk 123D Catch. The drone can be flown manually or programmed for autonomous flight paths. Read More: Aerial Capture of 3D Geometry
One of the funniest things to occur during flight testing was a vehicle pulled up next to us. The guy wanted to know what was flying around as some people doing some construction work had thought it was either a UFO or some secret police spy drone.
Autodesk celebrated being on the Fortune Magazine’s list of top 100 companies to work for. Nice excuse to have cake!
More sights of the Bay from walking around it in the evenings in Larkspur to seeing the fog settled in the morning around downtown San Francisco.
Friday morning I visited artist Marco Cochrane at his studio on Treasure Island. Marco creates sculptures of art displayed around the world as well as at the famous Burning Man event. http://www.marcocochrane.com/
Finally later Friday out the view of my airline window I see a fine sight, I see home.
Cheers,
Shaan