Couldn’t really get into work first thing, not until at least two cups of coffee. I added shader debugging until my brain switched on. Weather was a bit crap. Ended up walking the dogs in light rain. Came back and did more work. Now I was having an issue with constant buffers when bound to both vertex and pixel shaders.

I went to combat and spent most of it working out how I could solve the problem. Then came home and found out that that wasn’t the issue anyway. Spent many hours then trying to work out what’s wrong with it. After sitting down now I think I’m looking in the wrong place. It’s all a bit complicated. I’ll crack on with it tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll work it out.

So today was heart attack free and really a hell of a lot of work to do. No breaks. Started fairly early, shopping arrived, put away then just ploughed on. Went to Pump early evening. Was scheduled to do a home check, but they decided against it.

Came back, only had about 20 mins left of the shift, so two hours later…it’s just one of those things in game development, you just need to try ‘one more thing’ and see what it does, doesn’t matter about iteration time. You think, okay, just try this, and that leads on to just try that etc. It’s a pain, but it’s the way it works. Another hell of a busy week next week I’m sure.

Anyway, I really am now done for the week. Need to phone mother, better get wine and an ambulance on stand-by.

As for yesterday I can’t remember. I think I went for a run, did a twelve hour shift and fell asleep.

This morning I started work far too early, the fingers were going before the brain was engaged, but stuff had to be done. Now I can cope with most things and not get too stressed. Today I had a dev kit that was bricked and needed reflashing and no less than nine people on hip-chat. Conversations ranged from why a singleton constructor shouldn’t access itself, to why a data format was in 32 and not 64 bit. Plus being queried about changes to unsigned int limits. Which are all different across platforms just for fun. I can cope stressful situations without too much of an issue, confrontation, anxiety and depression. I can even cope quite well when Captain James says, “Right, now I’m going to roll back the throttle and go for an auto-rotation. You have control.”. Now that last sentence is a bit confusing, does he mean, “You are perfectly in control of the air-craft.”, or, “You now have the cyclic, collective, pedals and need to scan air-speed, altitude, rate of climb, rotor RPM as well as looking for somewhere to land, and my hand is on the throttle so I can bail out if it all starts to go tits-up.” Somehow I think it’s the latter.

Now the two things that cause my stress level to overflow and my body finally says enough is enough and tries to have a mini heart attack. The first is trying to book any kind of travel on-line. It always fucks up. When I was trying to book a hotel and flight to Japan, Jamie had to take over as it was all going tits up, I was bright red and about to pass out. Booking a flight on one web site and a hotel on another at the same time just doesn’t work, ever. And then if you try and do visa’s as well…The other thing that causes me to have a heart attack is tech support calls from my mother. I know she means well and is just trying to get her laptop to print the inside of her bloody cards, but I’m at the other end of a phone, trying to communicate with a dead dev-kit, nine people and debug a bloody file I/O problem at the same time. I installed OpenOffice somewhere, you only have a trial version of MS Office, it doesn’t support power point anyway. My stress levels are rising, I’m getting frustrated, she’s getting frustrated, I really can’t help. I think if I ever had a job in telephone support I would last about the first phone-call. The person at the other end would still be in the same boat they started with and I’d be dead.

Anyway, I finished off my nine conversations, found my bug and resurrected my dev-kit. I then walked the dogs quickly and finally I was returning back to normal. I went for a run at about 6PM then carried on working. So today apart from a 30 minute run and a quick dog walk I’ve done a 14 hour shift, yesterday was about 13 hours and tomorrow I’ll imagine will be the same.

People think working from home in game-dev is all bed of roses drinking coffee and playing games. That really is far from the reality. Even in the non-crunch times, it’s very long hours and very complicated work which requires a huge amount of concentration. Yes, it’s fun, I get paid a lot of money, I get to fly helicopters but you do actually have to work for it. I think I’ve seen Jamie when I got up and I’ve just seen him again now he’s going to bed. I’m now sat downstairs on the couch with the dog, soon I’ll be off to bed and get the joy of doing it all tomorrow.

So today was about to start early then the shopping turned up, still got it out the way.

Oh, to finish the Turkey story off, on the Saturday I think I had breakfast, ate yet another pizza for lunch and drank far too much beer. In the evening we went to the Italian again and I had yet more sea-bass. We had a nice chat to a couple, then sat at a bar and listened to a band then another bar. It’s all a bit of a blur really, I drank so much that week I’m still feeling bloated now. I put on about seven pounds in weight, most of it I’m sure is liquid.

So worked all the way up to a late lunch when I picked the dogs up. Sasha was mega excited to see me, Dillon on the other hand wanted to stay behind and play with his new mates. He seems to have grown, mind you they got through 6Kg of food in ten days, which is a hell of a lot. They travelled home fine and got settled right back in.

I did some more work then went on to Combat, I could feel my stomach jump up and down. It was still great fun though. Came back and did a bit more work, then practised some more hovering.

No watching the Singapore GP, think I’ll have an early night tonight and do some helicopter reading. Tomorrow will be an ordinary day, except for the bit where I fly the helicopter.

So as I was saying (badly reading by the last post), Turkey once again met all expectations. I’ll write a bit more about our last day tomorrow, although it wasn’t particularly special. We did have a fun chat with a couple in the evening though.

Flew home today. Took a while but over all very uneventful. Which I guess is nice. Unpacked everything, got the washing on, done the accounts.

Bath (wine free I think), pizza and bed. Back to work tomorrow. Fun week ahead.

Okay so this morning I hardly met any kind of expectation. Jamie wanked my off at about 11am. We got up eventually about 12 ish. I spent the morning or was it the afternoon reading the second part of the hunger games. To tell you the truth it’s taken me the best part of ten minutes to type this. I’m going to bed.

This morning started off pretty much the same as the others, I woke up, had a pee then made it down to breakfast. It was only about 10:15 today. I had two cups of tea, croissants, cereal and yoghurt. I think I even managed orange juice. Towels were placed.

I tried to sort out the airport transfer but they said call back tomorrow, even if it said confirm 48 hours before. We then went to the sun-beds, I managed about three pages of ‘Air Law’, before descending to my Kindle and starting on the ‘Hunger Games Pt2’, chasing fire or something I think it’s called. It’s a bit of a slow burner (pun intended), but I’m about 60% through and not a great deal has happened yet. Still I will polish it off tomorrow.

I spent all day drinking beer, which now means my guts want to explode with excessive wind. What I need is a really good burp and a massive poo.

So we spent all day by the pool. This is why I like Turkey, there must have been about what thirty people round it in total. There was an old German woman about 60, with no top on, very saggy tits. If she didn’t keep her chin up her nips would have caught in the cracks in the tiles. There was another old German women, coughing her remaining lung up as she lit up a fag. A French couple, she sat there in something that I can only describe as ‘a salad’ and he sat there doing Suduko in a very ill fitting pair of speedos. There was quite a cute looking guy who had some sort of patchy skin complaint, he spent all day dabbing himself with what looked like typex. There were various Russian’s with small children bursting out of ill fitting shorts. There was an old Belgian man who spent all day drinking Turkish tea out of small glasses while he showed off his rather large penis in a very baggy pair of budgie smugglers. There were no stunners, no supermodels, no porn stars. And the best part about it…no one gave a shit. I sat there slightly bulging over my ‘Aussie Bums’ catching the rays. Jamie sat there in a pair of shorts. Nobody really cast an eye, there were no stares, no one commented that a 70 year old probably could wear something more age appropriate, well if they did it wasn’t in English. Everyone just gave each other just a little bit of personal space and a lot of respect. It’s obvious that the total crowd there couldn’t ever have an in depth discussion, we spoke about five different languages and this wasn’t the United Nations. The closest you got to a translator was the barman. Speaking of which, there was a very proud man. I had a brief chat to him. He works seven days a week during ‘the season’, he starts at 7AM and finishes at 7PM, he has no breaks, he grabs something to eat from the bar during the day. He is in charge of the whole bar at that pool, he also has to monitor the toilets every hour. I doubt he’s particularly highly paid, but he’s pretty happy with his little empire. Every time I saw or spoke to him he was always polite, always had a smile. If he wasn’t busy at the bar he’d walk round with bottles of water and take drink orders around the pool. I was never short of a beer. It must be very difficult to feel content, but I have a feeling that this man was, he was happy with his lot, happy with what he did, enjoyed it even. You do have to admire that in a person. I did speak about the occupancy, it appears we are currently at about 400 with a max of 700, so just over half full. Apparently it’s been like this all summer, which is a shame, it’s a nice hotel. Probably a bit on pricey side, but at least it keeps the Thomas Cooke Essex brigade somewhere else. I’d much rather spend the day next to a old Belgian with a giant penis than a man from Essex and his bronzed wife who was a giant penis.

Jamie went back to the room, I finished off my chapter. We ended up in the bath, no sex, too much the beginning of the week, plus I think I may have exploded.

We went to dinner, I had a couple of rather nice pasta dishes, okay it was a Friday, but I’d already had pizza at the pool bar. Couple of nice desserts as well, nothing too excessive.

Entertainment this evening was a couples thing in the amphitheatre, this is normally some sort of ‘Mr & Mrs’ interpretation and normally in German so we gave it a miss. Oddly we we sat down on a small jetty by the sea on a couple of sun-beds. We had the most amazing view of the moon. I started discussing the moon landings and if they were faked or not. We got on to lots of deep conversation, a security guard popped down and probably wondered what the hell we were up to, after he decided we were just into some very serious philosophical discussion and not about to set the fridge on fire he left us to it. Jamie wants to join a gym and may be get a bit fitter. That’s great, I always enjoy exercise, certainly after a good combat class I really feel good. But he needs to do it for himself, not for me or for anyone else. Physical fitness is a great boost to the self. Would I object if he had a six pack and could bang all night? Of course I wouldn’t, but as I say, he needs to do it for himself and I’ll support him all the way, if that means having to actively ignore him, then so be it, as I fear that may be the case. Any encouragement may just be seen as negativity.

Anyway, after deep thought we retired to the room and had a bit of a slurp, well it wasn’t a slurp, we just kind of laid around for an hour. I then changed into some shorts and off we popped to the ‘Rosebud’ bar. I must say, my mother would approve but every night I have actually put on long trousers, okay skinny jeans, to eat, as everyone, or practically everyone was sticking to the dress code. This is fine providing we could eat outside, but anywhere inside was far too hot. Certainly afterwards I enjoyed changing into something slightly less formal so I could cool down.

Alas, we are now almost at an end. Seven days of fun and relaxation is almost at an end. It looks like everyone at home has suffered from ‘freshers flu’ I’m sure it will strike us when we are back. I’m now on my third ‘Long Island Ice Tea’. I don’t really know whats in them, but what I do know is that it’s at least five spirits that aren’t measured and then topped up with a minimal amount of coke.

Turkey, once again you have lived up to all expectations, you’ve failed to disappoint. You may cost about about two and a half grand, but I always consider it money well spent. I’ve never come away from here not feeling relaxed and if you have as many mental problems and instabilities as I have then thats one hell of a good thing.

Turkey, please make friends with Syria, just treat it like a Belgian with a giant penis and like the current song in the background which couldn’t be more apt ‘Let it be.’.

This morning I woke up, whic if you read yesterdays entry you will know is always a bit of a miracle. Actually I woke at 6AM and went for a pee. I then woke again at 8:30. Then at 9:30 for some odd reason I thought it was time to get up as there was only 30 minutes of breakfast left. I got up. I went to breakfast. Cereal, croissants, yogurt, some of that tarmac they call coffee. Then i realised just before 10 that I was actually an hour early and that breakfast didn’t in fact finish until 11. Bollocks.

I then went in search of ‘Guest Relations’, I started at reception, she pointed me across the concourse to a desk with a lady behind it. I wanted to book the Italian, I requested 7:30, she said she had a space at 7:20, I took it. I then asked where it was, as with everything else in this place it’s a voyage of discovery. It’s actually located just off the main restaurant, you could never bloody tell.

I picked up towels and placed them by the kiddie pool. I had a good oggle at the main pool, many fine specimens. I then decided to have a coffee at the kiddie pool, they have a decent machine there. By the time I’d finished I was drowning, fuck me it was hot. I went back to the room.

I picked up Jamie, actually I didn’t he was still dallying. I went to the sun-bed. I just couldn’t face ‘Aviation Law’, so I decided to get the Kindle out and read a novel. I happend upon one I picked up on recommendation by an internet blogger called ‘Dan Howell’, now he’s a very cute guy that does vlogging and I’d bang him harder than the beginning of the universe. The book is called, “The Fault in our stars”. I’m 41, and in 41 years I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in one day. I read this book in one day. Yes it’s a work of fiction, but by god is it powerful. If you get the chance to read one book this year, make it this one. You can get it for your Kindle or even in paperback. You will laugh, and by fuck you will cry.

We ate at the bar again, I went for a pee, Jamie ordered, so we ended up with two cheeseburgers and a pizza. I returned back to the sun-bed and mainly slept. That book really quite took it out of me. I ventured into the pool, it was certainly colder than it looked. At least I’d got that far. Eventually we retired to the room, I had a shower.

We had a booking for the Italian, so we turned up on time expecting it to be packed. We were the only ones there. We had crab cakes to start. I had the ravioli, it was okay but not memorable. The whole meal was pretty good. We then popped back to the room for a bit then sat at the Xanadu bar. This was because there was an ‘act’ on, who according to the blurb was fairly famous. We settled down and got some drinks. I must admits the next couple of hours was very good. I had no idea who this bloke and his band were, but they were very professional and knew their stuff. I had a really good evening, including some very bad singing according to Jamie.

Still, the holiday is almost at an end. I’m not doing any juxtaposing tonight, but I do have a couple of thoughts for the next couple of nights. But for the meantime, I’m just going to disappear into my cocktails and get fairly assholed.

Okay, a couple of queries that keep coming up. I write this blog instantaneously. I have no prerequisites, I start with thinking up the tag title line then waffle on. None of it is pre-produced, not much of it is thought of before hand. What you get is raw me, it’s my state of mind at the time. If you enjoy it, then please post, if it offends you then just fuck off. I’m me, and at the moment I’m pretty happy to be alive, this changes at regular intervals. I’m not ashamed to say I love my husband dearly, even if he thinks he’s ugly, I’ll love him to the end of time, to put up with me takes some kind of miracle. We’ve been together for seven years about, we have two children (okay dogs), I’m very comfortable with me family, they all mean the world to me. Without them I am nothing.