Yesterday was rotten weather wise. There was a storm overnight and it continued well into the day. I ended up staying in bed and just studying the air law book. Not that I seem to be taking much of it in, my brain just wasn’t really in the correct state for that. Walked Sasha in the rain.

Picked up Jamie from work then went for a run. It was then time for mother to arrive. She arrived and hobbled into the hallway. See brought the dogs a treat each so they buggered off. I talked a lot about flying, theme parks and work. She mentioned that she’d sold a few things in an auction. That was the only real mention of money. She never once mentioned anything that had fallen off on her, her house or her car (other than her sister now uses a walker), or she couldn’t afford to eat. She did milk the whole ‘Are we going to Weymouth’ thing quite a lot, saying that’s the only holiday she has now. She asked me about how I was coping without massive amounts of anti-depressants. She then left. I was quite surprised, may be she’s finally learnt. I may relent on the Weymouth thing, will need to keep an eye on the weather.

I did the accounts and studied some stuff on vortex rings, then cooked food. Had a fairly early night. A big Geocaching session tomorrow.

So mother now keeps emailing me and FB messaging me about when I want my cake. Can I just send a courier? She also emailed me that she sold some more of the family silver at an auction. To pay for some glasses, in the shape of a Kim & Co. pencil skirt. I may have to invite her round the weekend, don’t know when, hopefully when Jamie is here so I can use him as a bit of a distraction.

Work was dull, all about screen clears. We took the dogs out for a nice long walk lunchtime. I finished at half six, it was very hot. Walked to Harry Stoke and did a cache there, and a bonus one on the way back.

James is back. So booked with him for tomorrow afternoon. Was clearing up the wine bottles and at the back of the pile found a case of New Zealand, which made quite a pleasant surprise.

Fast clears. Oh joy. That was about the joys of the day. Actually it started at 6:30, took Dillon to daycare (who is now flat out on the couch next to me). I was actually quite tired, probably because Jamie didn’t come to bed until 2AM. Yes, fast clears. Fun how these work. Okay, for depth buffers it’s actually pretty good. You have some meta data which say represents a 16×16 block of pixels. That metadata stores the min and max z of that block. So to clear depth you just right max depth to min and min depth to max. Then do your render. Job done, that really all there is to it, no need to clear the whole depth buffer. When the rasteriser writes to it it checks the min/max values against the meta data, so it knows if it can skip the whole tile. Colours are a bit more involved. You clear the meta data. Do your render, this marks the tile as ‘touched’ and fills in any untouched pixels with the clear colour. Then after you have finished you have to run through the metadata and clear any untouched tiles. Job done. Anyway, took quite an age to implement, all working now.

Picked up Dillon. Went to Pump. Laverne stood in as Trudie was away. Did more work. Had an odd and slightly worrying experience tonight, I’ll discuss it in a couple of weeks. More GPU fun tomorrow.

Working on more maths trig stuff. In the end it was a little pointless as most of the stuff I was trying to get it to use was double precision. Anyway, that’s all done now. Then did a couple of CPU bits and now back to GPU. I’m trying to time the amount of time it takes to draw nothing, which at first seems a bit naff but it is useful. You can see how much overhead your draw calls are taking. So things like shader and buffer sets still take time. The object being to optimise this down as much as possible.

Went to Combat, was fun I guess. Came back and did some more work. Think I’ll have an early night, what to try and start early tomorrow so I can get out early evening.

Mail server seems to be getting a lot of spam recently. I’ve updated some of the mail rules, which will probably mean that it will fail completely.

This morning I could have quite happily woken up dead, I just wasn’t really in the mood. Jamie brought me breakfast and buggered off to work. To cut a long story short I parked up at Thornbury leisure centre at 12:45. I then had a great time, almost six full hours walking across fields and being very solitary, except for the point where I came across Shrek and Princess Fiona, who were doing the same circuit but in the opposite direction. I managed thirty-five caches, I needed thirty-seven to make two fifty, but if I don’t do that Tuesday I will need shooting. So to the person who is reading this…I’ve ordered the t-shirt and the patches, it will be going back with Megan Tuesday. Came back and logged everything then had a bath. Watched the world cup final. Germany scored in extra time and to be honest I think they actually deserved it, so well done them.

I’m looking forward to a week where I was rather better off being dead.

Oh, as a side note I received this email from my mother:

Hi Tim,
I will let you know when I make the cake – I bought all the ingredients yesterday.
I have washed your curtains and they look nice but the colour ran into the rubber inside the washing machine door, so it has orange stains on it now. Your dining room floor must be sloping as two of the curtains have a 3” hem, one is 2.25” tapering to 1.5” and the fourth one only has a 1” hem and they were obviously made to measure. I made yours all the same length, so that is why two of them are longer, so I feel happier now that it was not my fault. I will hang yours as they are and then pin them up to just above the rad and cut them off, as I have the same sort of problem, as my rail is not level.
Love,
Mum

….

I’d like to officially point out, that I really just don’t give a fuck.

Woke up fairly early but couldn’t really be arsed to get up. Managed it eventually. Read the paper. Walked Sasha. Went to Tesco’s and stocked up on petrol. Then I drove over to Cotham and walked into town. Visted ‘Pride’ briefly and then walked bad again. Did the accounts. Then it was time to head off to town for my sisters birthday. We went to a place called ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ which was a magic club. I didn’t really have great expectations but we ended up having a really good time. I drove, so was very sober. All our group ended up on stage at one time or another even Jamie. Sarah was up first which was dead amusing. The second ‘magician’ I must admit wasn’t really my taste. But the act after the interval were great, they were called, ‘The wizards of odd’. They did a great forty-five minute set. Drove home via the Chinese.

There’s something going off at work at the moment which I’d like to comment on, but I’m just doing my best to avoid at the moment. I’m just going to see if it blows over.

So got up this morning at 7:15, I was at the garage by about 7:45, dropped off car. Had to wait until 8AM for the curtesy car to arrive. It was the bloody Agila again, but this time a red one. With no petrol in. It’s still like a shopping trolly but without the charisma. I put a fiver of fuel in, I did about twenty miles total so I guess that was fair. Got home by about 8:20 so started work. Far too early. They rang at just gone twelve to say it was all done. There is some bush thing broken on the turbo which needs replacing. They said they would phone when it arrives in. And they will. They also won’t charge for fitting it. I do love Dan Harford, it’s a main dealer and it’s family owned, the same service manager has been there for years. You never get the feeling you are about to be ripped off. Although the service and MOT was over three hundred quid. Still that was a main service, it won’t get that again for another three years, based on the mileage I do. I’ll probably dump it before then anyway. Picked it up at about two, dropped off the trolly.

Work wise was hectic, changed all normal libc trig calls to use a vector library, it’s about five times the speed. Also had some fun with running out of system resources on semaphores. Went to Pump, did PT with Laverne. Started editing a new dog video from the footage we took last week.

Things to do tomorrow, then out in the evening for a few hours, Jamie is working Sunday so we won’t stay out too long.

Spent all day basically replacing trig functions with a mapped copy and sorting out issues between single and double precision versions. It was heavily grunt work, but it did make quite a nice change from GPU stuff. Tomorrow I have to do some fun vector ops to replace sin / cos / tan. There’s also some odd issues with modulo, still one for tomorrow.

Received an email from mother. Offering to make cake.I should have spotted something coming at that point. So I replied and just said I was very busy. Then came what I was expecting, ‘So we won’t be going to Weymouth then?’. You just know everything must have some kind of ‘pay load’. I look forward to my cake.

Walked the dogs. Finished a bit early after last nights mammoth session. Had to take Jamie out to some customer. Bit into my evening.

Anyway, I went out, walked all the way down the A38 to Filton. Found a geocache I have been looking for three times now. Walked back the exact same way. Found a provisional drivers license. It belonged to a fairly cute looking nineteen year old. Googled the address, it was about an eighteen minute walk. It was a truly beautiful evening, very warm, it was about nine thirty but thought I’d make the effort. Found the place, dad answered, he was very grateful. Son appeared, looked nothing like his photo, very greasy black hair. I didn’t want to bang him, I just wanted to wash through a couple of bottles of shampoo. Anyway, that was my good dead for the decade. Walked home, didn’t get back in until ten thirty. It was still a beautiful evening. Came back and did the shopping list.

Up early tomorrow to drop the car off for it’s service and MOT.