Monthly Archives: April 2013

One has now eaten salad

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So took the dog to daycare. For once the alarm woke me up, I normally pre-empt it somewhat. The day was mainly spent doing two things. One I can’t talk about much, but it’s to do with suspension, anti-roll bars and application of force. The physics are correct, may be a bit too correct, it may need to become a bit un-correct for the sake of playability.

The other thing I worked on involved reading a lot.

Went for a long run. Picked up the dog. Then did some more Japanese. I’m going through the review unit at the moment. I’m supposed to be writing out all the dialogue in Japanese, considering I can’t even spell in English I’m writing it out in English. But it does mean I’m getting through it a bit quicker.

Had a shower. Ate salad. Wine free evening. Still puzzling about that anti-roll bar.

“You’ll eat anything with wings”, really, panty liners have wings and I ain’t reaching for the soy sauce

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So spent the morning transferring the PC game over to iOS. Apple have mad the provisioning profile system a bit more user friendly, so it only took one hour rather than three.

The rest of the day was mainly spent tweaking the mobile version so it’s a bit easier to play. Overall I’m pretty happy with it so far, although it still requires a huge amount of work.

Went out for a run which was very knackering. Jamie won some voucher for take-away food, so everything that was lost by running has now been made up for in a Chinese.

Had a bath, food arived and we watched ‘Brave’ by Pixar which was very good. Lots of coding in the hair department.

The “Iron Lady” is dead, rust in peace

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Started this morning working on a couple of odds and ends. Ended up getting the current project up and running on iOS. Except there’s a few issues it seems to be rendering in black. Still apart from that it worked fine, so added the control system and a few other frills. It’s almost done now except for the anti-roll bar which I’m still not happy with, need to work through the numbers on that.

Walked the dog. Went to combat.

Mid morning I heard the news that Baroness Thatcher had passed away. She died of a stroke at the age of 87. Now, I’m very much a child of the 80’s. I remember the Falklands war being broadcast every evening on “John Craven’s news round”. I remember her very strong leadership, her speeches and her love of Ronald Reagan. I remember the tax cuts, the prosperity and the relentless attack on trade unions. I also remember the hunger strikes, the Brighton bombing and the poll tax. And let’s not forget Section 28.

Did I admire her? Yes. Did I agree with her? Sometimes. She was a remarkable woman. All politicians are admired and loathed by everybody, usually at the same time, she was no different. Where she stood out for me though was the way she just took no shit. I always admired her straight talking. In one memorable interview she said, “I don’t mind how long my ministers spend talking, as long as they do what I tell them”. It was very much that attitude which got things done, when the country was in dire straights, she was the catalyst that gave it a firm kick up the ass. She modernised British politics, she mondernised British attitudes and to some degree she modernised British people.

She outstayed her welcome. Eventually all the power began to go to her head. She thought she was invincible. She wasn’t. The time came when she had one too many mad ideas and she was given the heave-ho. John Major took the lead, but as I always said, “She was twice the man he will ever be.”

Denis was always in the background. A genius businessman in his own right. He cleverly knew actually where he stood, and more importantly where he should stand. He certainly was no interference, but she could not have done it without him.

Maggie, you were an inspiration. And ironically you died on my birthday.

Rest in peace.

“On it’s own, number 367”

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So started up by getting up too late which kind of buggered the day up some what. Took the dog on a nice walk, including visiting the vet, she’s continuing to lose weight, unlike the rest of us. Saying that being ill for a month didn’t really help, only last Thursday was the first time I’ve been properly running again.

So I had a number of things to do during the afternoon including a cat home re-check thing. Plus I needed to visit Toolstation. Getting there was fine, but getting back I got stuck in loads of football traffic.

Got back, did the accounts. Then it was a quick shower before being picked up by mother. It was our annual bingo trip. This evenings caller was a very laid back Jamaican chap who seemed in no particular hurry which was quite useful as we were hardly on the ball anyway. We failed to win anything. The lager had more water in it than the Thames. Afterwards we went to the Indian, which was pretty empty. Had a nice meal, gave them a good tip and told them to spend it on a new carpet.

…

So today was going to be a busy one. Started off moving the network cabinet out and disconnecting the phone line and drilling a hole through the wall. Then it was outside and running two new phone cables (yes I could have done it in one, but BT won’t be thrilled about sharing a twisted pair with Virgin media). So for the BT on I used actual BT cable and the Virgin one I just ran using some UV protected dual twisted pair. Finished running all the cables, managed to finally get them through the walls and then had lunch. Mother arrived and delivered cards. She put quite a lot of effort into them, keeps her off QVC I suppose. Put the bird table together, impressed with that. It’s quite tall but very good quality. I then put the socket side of the cables together and put a new master socket on for the Virgin line and screwed it next to the BT one. I then finished off the connection ends. No problems, all works, I now have both phone lines terminated behind the network cabinet in the office. Ready for the PABX installation. Job for another day that one. Tidied up and then did the third job of the day which was to knock a whole in the wall to surface mount a network and TV wall plate. Thankfully that all went without any issues and is now ready for the face plate. So it’s back on the dinning room next time that all the cables are out of the way. Need to continue stripping the patio door, then I think it’s time to bury the alarm cables and neutralise the walls.

Anyway, worked hard today, time for a bath. Must attempt to drink less wine and eat less cheese next week. But that’s next week, time for a bath and wine now for sure.

And then the Yen goes mad

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Started this morning with the news that the Japanese government has pumped billions into their economy. Lovely, the yen has now shot up about 8%. Which is typical as mine is currently sat in a drawer. Tempted to get some more but not sure how much i’ll actually get through.

Working on the excitement that was collision meshes today. Did find a load of problems though, mainly to due with duplicate vertices and degenerate triangles. Finished off with producing a binary file for it all. Works nicely now.

Walked the dog. Moaned at people. Still haven’t heard anything from the cleaners.

Went to pump.

So I’m about done for the day, apart from the dishes and hanging the washing up. Must be bath time.

May be if I don’t pay for your piss poor cleaning job you’ll get the message

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Well at least I slept last night, may have been partially wine induced. I felt somewhat itchy, which means either the dog has fleas or my balls need shaving again.

This mornings work started with one of the chaps commenting on my wing implementation, saying it could be replaced with a normal surface. Which in theory is probably correct, I can see how it would work. If you have an angled plane and then blast air at it, it would produce some sort of down force and some sort of drag. The problem is it isn’t any where near correct. Now, there was a fault in my equation and also an issue with it not working backwards. So, here goes the explanation. Let’s start with energy equals half mass multiplied by velocity squared. Note the velocity squared here, that’s important. So what’s mass? Well that will be the area of the object multiplied by a length multiplied by a density. So we end up with energy equals half area multiplied by length multiplied by density. If we assume length is actually a distance then that energy equation can then be rearranged (energy equals force times distance) to force equals half area multiplied by density multiplied by velocity squared. So area is straight forward, you then also multiply by the attack angle in radians and a coefficient as you don’t want all the possible down force applied. The drag equation is the same except you use a drag coefficient. Also remember the squared thing? Well a negative multiplied by a negative will give a positive, so you have to reverse the sign of the velocity squared if you go backwards so you still get a drag, but you will get an up force rather than a down force. So in the end, I was right.

Now the cleaners. Okay they came yesterday, stayed for just over an hour. Missed out half the house and did a fairly piss poor job. They also broke part of the dish washer by jamming a giant baking tray in it and chucked all the rubbish bags into the wrong bin. So I sent him an email yesterday to which I haven’t had a reply. So may be if I don’t pay them any money they may get the message, or they can just fuck off.

I ordered a drill bit from Amazon, three quid. It arrived by courier in a box big enough to hide half a dozen Albanians. Must do wonders for the packaging industry.

At work in October I ordered a new fibre line. Now this isn’t ADSL or any of your Virgin Media crap, this is many thousands of pounds worth of direct fibre connection to a huge back bone. Now we already have one fibre in the office, this works fine. This new one is supplied by the same company, well actually it’s the same managing company the line itself is being provided by another company. So OpenReach come in and actually do their job properly. They install the fibre and a device known as an NTE, which is basically a termination unit. Weeks later a Cisco router turns up at the office. It’s the size of a small car. I get it sent back and replaced with a 1U version. This I get installed into the network cabinet. Problem, the NTE terminates in a twin fibre connection. The router doesn’t have any fibre inputs. After many emails they say just connect the NTE network port to port one of the router. We do this. Nothing happens. Many more emails later. They finally send an engineer and a large box of bits. Engineer arrives and goes away again, he decides he needs more bits. More bits arrive. Engineer returns and inserts bits. Router now apparently works. I get an email saying that I need to connect my network to port one of the Cisco which is a 100Mbps port. Now, we are paying for a 200Mbps connection. I’d be impressed to see how I can get 200Mbps from a 100Mbps port. I’ve tried to communicate this to them, I’m thinking of putting them in touch with my (soon to be ex.) cleaners.

It’s torture porn night. May be some Twilight. Then see who can piss me off tomorrow.

Today I looked at wings, Paul McCartney never got a look in

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An unfun sleepless night. Caused by my brain still working when my body wasn’t interested. It’s surprising what goes through my mind when I’m trying to sleep, usually about twenty work related threads. It does mean I get quite a lot of work done, well the theory of it at least, but it also means I’m fairly knackered in the morning. Took the dog to daycare at 6:15.

So today was mostly about springs and air again. First was setting up an anti-roll bar, that was fairly straight forward. Then it was on to aerodynamic wings, which turned out to be more straightforward than I thought it would be. Basically for a simple wing you just have the area the angle and a couple of coefficients, one for drag and one for down force. You then just multiply that by the square of the air velocity and the air’s mass and you’re done. Well you’re done in so far as you have a force, you then apply it at the wing attachment point. Doing something not really physics related tomorrow, which will make a change.

The cleaners came, they were hear for about an hour an ten minutes, I’m sure I pay for more than that. They didn’t do a very good job. I’ve sent an email, they will get their marching orders as I haven’t had a reply. I’ll give him to the weekend.

Picked up dog.

Did some more Japanese, almost at the end of unit five now. Diluted the new wine kit, just waiting for it to come up to temperature now which will be tomorrow probably, then I’ll get it going.

So how much does air weigh?

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Started off the day thinking it was a Monday, meaning it was pretty slow going. Anyway, sorted out an issue which I then found out actually wasn’t so ended up reverting it. Then implemented rolling resistance, which is basically just a coefficient of the downward force. So the harder something is forced into the ground the more resistance it gives.

Took the dog out for a run as it was really nice weather, still very cold, but the sun was out. It’s the first time we’ve done that in months. It was fun but she does slow me down quite a lot, but will give it ago again if the weather is nice.

Then came back to do aerodynamic drag. Now this is quite interesting, aerodynamic drag is the force an object is subjected to when its travelling at a velocity. The faster the object, the more the drag. The drag can build up and be a very important force as it’s actually the square of the velocity multiplied by a coefficient. So rolling resistance is important up to a certain velocity and then aerodynamic drag takes over. So what is this magic force? Well it’s actually the weight of air. So what’s the weight of air? Well first a distinction, weight and mass are not the same thing. Weight is actually mass under the force of gravity, so w=mg where m is the mass and g is the gravity. Gravity is normally taken as 9.8 or 10 for simplicity, it’s an acceleration so it’s units are meters per second per second or ms^-2. So anyway, back to air, what’s it’s mass? Well this actually depends on air density or how close the particles are together and this depends on temperature. So air at about 15 degrees centigrade is about 1.2 kilograms per meter cubed, which when you think about it is quite heavy. So no wonder when you drive a Volvo at 100Mph the aerodynamic drag is quite a force to be reckoned with.

Did another Japanese lesson, it’s getting very tricky and got a bit tired towards the end.

Easter Sunday, Emeli sander and the Simon Cowell trousers

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Yesterday then. Started off with getting up earlier than I’d liked. Had breakfast, drank coffee. As the dog was going to be spending a considerable amount of time on her todd today I thought it wise to take her hour for a decent walk. Two hours later we got back, she was suitably tired. The weather actually was quite nice, at one point it got above freezing. I just had enough time to mop up the sweat from my balls before mother arrived to pick us up.

Arrived at Sarah’s where we then devoured quite a nice turkey. Afterwards we sat around and drank about six bottles of wine. Shaun and Homer Simpson our now indistinguishable. My mother sat there and aged while looking like a dead catalogue model for ‘Kim & Co’. Jamie sat in the corner wearing Easter bunny ears, looking like a reject from a ‘One Direction’ tribute act casting call. My nephew Conor is looking more and more like Jomah Lomu (except for the black bits) and my other nephew Daniel looked like his hair was cut by the council and wore jeans which looked like Simon Cowell hand-me-downs. I’ve seen lower rise tower blocks. He was wearing a cool t-shirt though, as it was one I gave him.

Mother dropped us back home so we could let the dog out. Dog tried to mug my mother, but was soon distracted by a pigs trotter. We had coffee and discussed paint colours.

We returned to Sarah’s for some nibble bits and a few more bottles of wine. We then played some strange Xbox game where we had to create shapes, ‘Hole in the wall’ or something. Anyway, much fun was had by all. Came back home and went to sleep. Busy day tomorrow.

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So today started in a similar way to one a few days ago, except this time I was on the receiving end and the song was Blondie’s ‘Teenage kicks’. It was quite nice to hear that version rather than the dolcit tones of ‘Harry Styles’. Mind you it was playing on Claudia Winklemann’s show, which is slightly ironic as I’m sure she’s porked him at one stage or another.

I got up and put another layer of paint stripper on the skirting boards. I then got Emeli out and started on the door frame. So I’ve put in an eight hour shift, I now have the door frame and skirting boards all done. Just the patio door frame needing a bit more work. I think I’m going to move the phone wire next week, depending on the weather and try and finish the patio door off.

I’m now all covered in dust.

Debating if I should have pizza as technically it is a salad night. But I have been working pretty hard and I’m sure I have a small one in the freezer somewhere.

Definitely going to have a bath though. And some wine, there’s always time for wine.

TheHut.com do have a flash sale on, so will have a quick look to see if I can pick Daniel up something before he decides that V-neck tank tops and loon pants are this years must have fashion accessory.