I was playing with the iPad, I’d just reset it so I could get it to run in GPS mode to play the game. It started up, I was moving the tank around, it started shooting things, I found after each shot a new thing would attach itself, eventually it blew up a building. I was in the spare room of a very old house I used to live in. Three girls looked on, I said to them that they could play now as I had to go, I also said that they may as well have the two half finished bottles of coke that were lying around. I gathered my stuff together and walked out the room. I walked past the doorway of another room, there I saw Jamie on the left hand side of the bed cuddled up to what can only be described as a small emaciated boy. To his right was Andy’s Justin. I walked in the room and got into the bed next to Justin. Jamie’s dad then enters the room, then looks at the boy. It turns out his name is Howard, he’s sixteen and looks somewhat afraid. He also seems to have a permanent hard-on which he’s failing to cover up with a flannel. I then said to Justin that I think we should have an affair, but this isn’t the short troll like Justin I know, this one has full chiselled features. He says that he really fancies lemon tea and do I have any lemons. I said the only lemon I have is the Beachams stuff. He says that’s fine as it will give a bit of a kick to it.

I then studied air traffic control from the air law book for an hour. Got up and picked up the dog poo. Then it was time to drive to Staverton. Got there in plenty of time to listen to stories of Dave travelling around Europe in his Ford transit van. There was a student out doing a solo cross-country, thankfully he returned in one piece. James duly arrived and up we went. It was all circuits again really, the wind was a bit of a pain in the ass today, flip-flapping, so all my landing spots were a bit crap. But all were safe. We had no end of traffic interruptions as well. Getting there really well though, once again, I felt fully in control. Drove back, did the accounts and went out for a good run. Had a bath.

I’m at a bit of a dilemma now, really I should be flying on the weekend we are going away, but that’s going to be too much. If I leave it until we are back that’s just going to be too long, so I think really to keep the momentum going I’m going to have to squeeze an extra one in, in a week or so’s time.

So this morning started off rather slowly, which to be honest was quite nice. I had nothing special planned for the day to be honest. So got up and found the flip-flops for the holiday. Then took Sasha out for a walk, popped in the vets and booked Dillon in for his shots. Came back and shot a new video, basically it’s an update on my life since February, imported into FCPX and done a very rough edit of the first ten minutes, don’t hold your breath folks, it’s got a hell of a long way to go yet.

Had a light lunch. Stopped off at the hair salon, booked in to see Mitch. She asked, ‘So half a head of hair highlights?’, I thought she was taking the piss until she explained, I still wanted to punch her though. Then headed into town via the cricket shop (as in reptiles). Walked into town, went round T.K. Maxx, didn’t buy anything, walked to Boots, bought some sun cream, waited ages at a till where some foreign women couldn’t understand the concept of paying for something, then moved to a different floor and paid there. Went to the Mac store, where they failed to have what I wanted. Went in the sports store and bought nothing, then walked back to the car, successful trip.

Jamie was about to have a bath, I started on the video edit, then joined him. He washed my hair, badly. I then refused to do anything more until he did a bit of a clean up operation, so did some more editing. Eventually he sent me a text to say he was ready. I then banged him like a jack-hammer breaking through steel, it’s something I’m very good at. Now it’s time to start on the food.

Today was all about shaders. Well basically shader optimisation. What I’ve been doing is removing ‘discard’. Now heres how it works, normally in a shader, if you find a pixel you no longer want to write you issue a ‘discard’ instruction. But on a certain console, calling discard really screws up the pipeline. But providing you are not writing depth you can get away with do a conditional branch, so instead of discard you can branch to a ‘write bugger all’, this is far quicker than a discard as it still supports early Z testing. So there was a lot of that, also reducing shadow sampling, I couldn’t really see the point in doing a smooth multisample smoke particle.

Went to Pump. Not my finest performance, chest really wasn’t happening. I then did a good session with Laverne afterwards. She said that it had been noted that due to my positioning in the Pump class and that I helped when the stereo broke down (which happens more often than not) that I must have the hots for black women. Laverne is a very very petite black lady. Pat, who stands behind me and I’ve known for years is a rather larger black lady. We always pass the time of day. But because of these perfectly harmless relationships, rumour has it that I now have the hots for both of them. Thankfully both very much know that lady parts aren’t really my thing, so we basically milk it as much as possible. Still it’s amusing all the same.

Jamie took me to the Italian, I had pizza with lots of toppings.

Spent the bulk of the day trying to get a console to talk to a PC ‘tweaker’ app. Getting it connected wasn’t so painful, realising that it didn’t support 64 bit systems as it was passing pointers in network messages was. I’ve left it to the tools guys, after hours of pissing about I really was getting nowhere. Have an interesting idea about GPU optimisation, shaders seem to be slower if they use ‘discard’, but may be I can get some speed back using a branch to cut out all the processing in the middle. Had a bit of a major headache by mid afternoon so took Sasha out for a walk. Then ordered a nice vest off Groupon and a t-shirt. Then continued with work and associated head ache. Had a bit of a rain storm but that thankfully cleared by early evening, then went out for a run. Another great time. Doing about eight point two miles in just over an hour.

Finally ordered a keyboard for the iPad air, well you wouldn’t want me to go to Turkey and not update my blog now would you?

So had a very sleepless night. Got up at 6:30. Took Dillon to daycare, he was very happy about the whole concept, from waking up, to almost pulling my arm off getting out of the car. Drove home and went back to bed. Then I had a very strange dream. We were on holiday in Turkey. Then suddenly a load of soldiers dressed in very old fashioned uniforms turn up with rifles. Then they keep pausing and start shooting at birds. I’m disgusted by this. I then start writing my trip advisor review. I woke up, admiring my pecks, Jamie stares at me, partly comatose. I say I’m staring at my breasts. He says, “With great breasts, come great responsibilities.”. Which is quite deep and funny for the fat whale like creature. I got up.

Work wise was all about weather and grass. Finished with grass, then on to rain drops. There was quite a lot of room for optimisation here which was pleasing. Went to the gym and did Pump, I gave it a bloody good shot. Came back and did more work. Did a bit of a late one. Going to relax a bit then head off to bed.

Tomorrow I have Zumba, or running, weather dependant.

So back to work today. Lots hanging over from the weekend. Ended up spending most of the morning tracing a rather odd v-sync issue, then spent the rest of the day on grass. Not smoking it, eating it or sitting on it, optimising it CPU wise. I had pretty good success on it. Need to look at the GPU side of it as well really.

Went for a run. Managed eight miles in just over an hour, which is about the fastest yet. Came back, set the camera up and did the ‘Ice bucket challenge’. At least my bucket had a decent amount of ice in it. Jumped straight in the shower. Then spent the next hour adding stupid effects to it.

Talking of videos check out my new one, Jamie and I attempt face painting.

So after being at a BBQ yesterday which slowly descended into a shot drinking contest, I decided to walk home. Jamie ended up waking up at 3AM and devouring a tub of ice cream with a banging headache. I woke up at 9AM felt perfectly fine and started looking at bathrooms. We headed out to a bathroom showroom, found the bath I wanted, but we couldn’t agree on tiles. So I’ll just choose what I want, as I’m paying for it anyway.

Came back. I spent a few hours working on the model helicopters. It was fine, except I couldn’t concentrate. I had a million voices running through my mind, work, all sorts of shit. A tub of Temazepam wouldn’t have calmed me down. I managed to get the T-Rex 450 set up pretty well. The tail rotor was on backwards. But still my mind was all over the place. I walked Sasha. Then had a bath, tried to read a magazine, no good, couldn’t do more than about three lines. It’s odd the only time I can find clarity at the moment is when James says, “Engine off, land it”. Then my mind is 100% clear. It’s strange that I can spend 99.9% of my time thinking about death and fun ways to achieve it, yet that 0.1% you have the entire opposite, the only think you can think about is trying not to die. People say those people who do base jumping off tall buildings and scale great heights without ropes are mad, no they’re not, they are just trying to find clarity, they want to achieve complete peace with themselves and thats the only way they can achieve it. I can really appreciate that. Sometimes I think that delivering post and having a wife with an ass the size of a country may be the solution, but in the end it will all end the same, the grass may be greener, but it’s still grass.

Back to work tomorrow, where my many demons will at least be able to focus on work. I work in a multi-processor environment, so it’s quite useful to able to focus on three hundred things at once.

So I took Jamie to the station first thing, on the way back I stopped off at the tip and got rid of the washing machine packaging. Then I finished off editing the new video and started the upload. Walked Sasha. Had a light lunch. Picked up lots of petrol. Then drove down towards Cheddar. This is a journey I haven’t made for a log time, actually the last time was for Nat’s funeral. No traffic really, considering it was a bank holiday weekend. I stopped off in Shipham and managed to get the car jammed in a farm entrance. Basically I grounded it. Had to jam a load of stones under the weeks and drive out very slowly. Thankfully apart from a few scuffs, no real damage. I then continued on to Karen’s house. Joe was there. I hadn’t seen either of them since the funeral either. Tea was made and we got chatting. I’m not going to discuss what we talked about as it’s a very private matter. Joe buffed the side of my car. He made a really good job of it. I picked up the remaining disco equipment which I hadn’t seen for about ten years, including my smoke machine. I’m sure it will stay in the loft for the next ten years. Also picked up the spray brush picture that Nat and I had done in Orlando. I drop back via Shipham cemetery. I had a few moments to myself. Drove home without any further car incidents.

Went for a run. Did the video annotations. Forgot to remove the audio on one of the outro trailers, never mind. Takes too long to upload. Had a shower, then made myself a Phal curry. Quite impressive hotness. Now sat here waiting for Jamie’s train to arrive watching the new Doctor Who.

Work once again was all about CPU optimisation. Lots of prefetching data. Basically analysing where data cache misses are, then putting in prefetches in good places. Managed to get a few fps increase. I was watching this T-Rex 450 on eBay, it was going for about fifty quid with a few hours to go. These are big heli’s, well almost half a metre as in the name. But they are very stable to fly. They are also over three hundred quid new and this one had a case and a load of spares with it as well. All it was lacking was lipo’s and a receiver, and I don’t have a shortage of them. Won it at just over the ton mark, plus I managed to get a nice stand as well. Plus it was in Bristol.

Washing machine arrived in the correct time slot. Unpacked it. Did more work. Jamie came home, so removed the rest of the packaging and then I installed it. It fitted with about 2mm to spare. It’s stainless steel. Well, it’s stainless steel coloured plastic. It looks nice. I put it on a rinse and spin to clean t out. Walked Sasha. Went for about eight mile run. Had a shower, then drove to the other side of town to pick up this heli. Met the chap there, he was nice, went through it all. Very pleased. I think I’ll do a rebuild on this one first as it’s a bit easier to work on. It has a blown servo, apart from that it all looks complete. Not the sort of thing you can fly in the house though, if it hit you it would take your head off, no problem at all. Just need to pick up a few extra tools.

Got Up at 6:30, took Sasha to daycare. Cleaners arrived just after 10. Working on CPU side optimisations today. The compiler we use is supposed to be very good, yet it sometimes manages to produce some pretty awful code. So spent the bulk of the day rearranging bits and prefetching data. Quickly walked Dillon who pulled so hard that he threw up. Picked up Sasha. Went to Pump, worked on my arms, they are looking mighty fine. Came back and did more work. I’ve built up a bit of extra time now, so will do the next lot of video editing at some point tomorrow. New washing machine also arriving tomorrow.