Had another very confusing day to do with forces, accelerations and inertias. At the end of it though I have something that seems to work reasonably well. It will certainly do for testing at the moment.

Er, walked the dog. Went and did Body Pump. Which is really the first kind of exercise I’ve done this week since combat. Still feeling a bit sick, but kind of on top of it now.

Another late finish, but will make up for illness this week.

Bath and wine time. Busy DIY weekend ahead.

Started vaguely on time and now finally finished after a ten hour shift with no breaks. All about torque again really. Getting confused with it coming out one end and how to apply it at the other. It’s all very annoying as I’m trying to get a system to do what it was really never designed to do.

New bread bin arrived, it’s a Brabantia.

I’m knackerd.

Got up at 6:30 AM to take the dog to day care. Went back to bed after not sleeping at all. So didn’t really start until gone 11. Got straight into it though. Still all physics related. Today I had to do something with Ackerman. Basically if you have a vehicle with turning wheels you want the outer wheel to turn at a shallower angle than the inner wheel. The question being, what is the angle? Well ok, if you take the steering angle to be the left wheel, so you are turning left. If the neutral steering position is at 0 then turning the wheel left will give you a negative angle. What you need to do is work out the intersection point of the wheel normal to the line of the rear axle. Which sounds more complicated than it actually is. Using basic trig, the angle at the wheel is half pi minus the wheel angle, so at 0 it will never intersect, then as it turns the opposite line length will get less. So using the tangent you know the wheel base and now the angle, so can work out the distance along the axle line. Now you know this, you have the centre point of the imaginary centre circle. If you then add on the axle width you have the adjacent, the opposite is just the wheel base. Using the arc tangent you can now work out the angle require to the right wheel. So what you are doing is producing two circles, one the inner wheel follows and the other the outer wheel follows, the object being that you then get less wheel scrub. This is called Ackerman steering.

Had another lot of cleaners turn up. They apparently got lost in Fishponds. I picked the dog up. Came back and did more physics stuff.

Did another Japanese lesson, still going well.

Had a bath as still feeling a little bit shit. Planning on drinking lots so I stand the chance of sleeping.

Didn’t start today too early as I felt somewhat fluey. So instead stripped the walls of paint stripper as that didn’t require too much visual focus. Then I had a very late breakfast and did some work. Still working on physics stuff, all coming together. Shame I didn’t get a great deal done.

Ordered more paint stripper. That should be the last lot now.

Going to have a bath and an early night I think. Dog off to day care in the morning.

So today I was back heavily into physics and integration problems. I couldn’t work out what the hell was going on. Walked the dog, still no improvement. Then just before I headed out to Body Combat I dumped out some acceleration figures, these were all over the place. For an object that was supposed to be accelerating I was getting negative accelerations.

So came back from combat and had a closer look. If I stepped through it in the debugger, then all was good, problem with that was, it was using a bigger time step. That was the root of the issue. I was taking the position of an object, then ticking it through physics and then taking the position of it again. Using the two positions I was then generating a velocity by taking the distance moved and then dividing it by the time step. Then using the difference between two velocities multiplied by the time step to calculate the acceleration. The problem is if you look at an object that’s being integrated by a physics tick of 1/60 of a second it moves all over the place. It’s then made even worse by floating point errors and then multiplying back by inverse times. So in the end I just stored the velocity and used that, everything then worked fine. The good news is I now know what the problem is. The back news is I need to write a whole load more shit to get round it all.

I’ve been feeling a little bit under the weather all day, so having an early night with some hot lemon and probably watch a bit of crap tv on the iPad.

Didn’t get up as early this morning as I was planning on. Put it this way it was heading more towards the afternoon than the morning. But I still put in a good eight hour shift. So that’s all the walls covered apart from the wall behind the bookshelf and the bit behind the radiator. I reckon I can peel off about Tuesday and nail the rest next Sunday. I also consumed about 15 cups of coffee, this meant that the last section of wall I no longer required a ladder.

Put the stuff in the bread maker, that’s now making pizza dough. Finished off the accounts. Ordered a new bread bin. Booked a hotel for our anniversary, also booked the Harry Potter tour thing in London, so will be a nice day away.

Right, I’m going to have a bath in the satisfaction that I’ve done a good days manual labour. I’ll then make pizza, I’ll probably be pissed by then.

Got up and took the dog for a walk. Via the vet. She’s lost a bit more weight, so well done Sasha. Went to the sorting office and picked up a parcel, then did the shopping. Jamie was with me, so was all very expensive. I then had lunch, and wanted to do a couple of re-checks for the animals. Trying to get hold of people is a real pain, found one who was in in the end so popped over there. Lovely lady and lovely dog. Dog had a couple of traits that are being worked on, but is really only a puppy still. Decided that it was getting a bit late to go into town so went back home and stripped the remaining paint stripper off and redid a couple of odd patches. Left now so I can start on the next bits afresh.

Started doing the accounts, but had to abandon it as time was getting on and we had a dinner booking.

So we went to the “Ye old’e Inn”, in Westerleigh. We had a booking for eight, but due to me getting Westerleigh and Nibley confused we got there late. The pub has just been bought by a friend of mine and this was opening night. We had a fairly good meal, there were issues with a couple of bits and service was quite slow but as this was first night blues I’ll refrain from the trip advisor review this time round. We will be going back for a Sunday roast at some point though. Now, he booked a singer, young girl. She had like a poster thing up behind her, by God that had had some serious air-brushing work as she didn’t look anything like her. Anyway, before she started Jamie said that she will do Abba and an Adele number. She fired up and sure enough did an Abba medley followed by Adele. Now she is meant to be a Leona Lewis tribute act, but to be honest she just isn’t really black. I don’t think she actually sounded like her. She did however did a really good Whitney and held every note. After she finished part one we buggered off to the bar as it was all rather loud. In part it all started to go downhill a bit as she was playing more to the pissed up crowd, nothing wrong with that, go for your audience. She never made it to dub step though. Overall a nice evening out, but as I say we will re-visit before I actually review it as an eatery.

Paint stripping tomorrow.

Spent the day heavily in physics code. It’s confusing the hell out of me I must admit. I’ve been battling over the same issue all day and just been going round and round in circles really. It’s very frustrating.

Went to gym and did Body Pump.

I must admit, now I’m completely wiped out.