Rudely awoken by the postman. Special delivery of my new helicopter. Work was dull, debugging some skinning issue.

So the new helicopter to the fleet is an Align T-REX 250. It was second hand off ebay, okay I got it dead cheap. This poor baby needs a hell of a lot of TLC. Oddly most of the parts are there, they just aren’t in the correct places. It certainly looks like it’s had a bit of a hard life and flown by a chimp. I think I’m just going to completely strip this one down and rebuild it. None of the servo’s are correctly aligned or anything. It’s going to be a bit of a labour of love this one. But it should be a lovely aircraft when it’s finished. It has a fully driven tail rotor geared from the main rotor, it’s also capable of autorotation.

Went for a run. That was kind of fun. Oddly got back and my legs didn’t hurt. Finished the rough edit on the new video.

I’m getting highly pissed off with a guy at work who takes three and a half hour lunch breaks, I shouldn’t let it get to me, but it’s beginning to get really on my tits.

After tracing a mystery white four pixels that have apparently been there four years, I pretty much wasted the rest of the day trying to trace an animation/skinning problem which still isn’t solved.

Walked Sasha, I’ve given up on Dillon, he’ll just get old and fat like Jamie. New washing machine being delivered Thursday. Went to gym, did Combat. Came back, did more unsuccessful work. Thought I’d see who was in the new ‘Celebrity Big Brother’, well no celebrities that was for certain. Maybe one old boxer who I’d vaguely heard of, it’s a bit of a joke really.

Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive.

So this morning started in a bit of a hurry. Fed everyone, including me. Then jumped in the car and drove up to Ian’s place in Windsor. Met up with everyone. I was surprised, I was expecting some catering company, but Ian cooked it all himself. After drinks and eats we boarded the coach for the very short journey to Ascot. We were there for the Red Bull air race. This is a bit of a strange thing. Aerobatic planes fly very close to the ground around inflatable columns. Anyway, I fought myself to the front, right by the course barrier and shot some 1,800 photographs. It was all pretty good and two British guys ended up winning it. We then ventured back to Ian’s. More drinks (Coke, I was driving) then drove home. A fun day all in all.

So started off with breakfast for three. Phoned mother and discussed washing machines. Then walked Sasha. Went to Tesco’s and ordered a washing machine. It’s stainless steel and has a dryer. Had a light lunch.

Drove to Thornbury, went to the ‘Model engineering and hobbies’ exhibition. The first thing I noticed on entering was strange, I was probably one of the youngest people there. I walked round the first couple of halls. There were just some fantastic models, all sorts, from Meccano to jet engines. The thing that fascinated me was that these men, in sandals and socks, in their eighties were producing fully working model engines in their little workshops at home, out of solid blocks of metal. These things were fantastic. I chatted to a couple of these chaps and they were absolutely passionate about there models, they’d answer any question and would chat all day to you if they could. The sad thing they both confirmed though, there were no younger people there, they would dearly love to share there knowledge and skills, yet no one was interested. The bulk of their clientele were other retired gentlemen. Give it another ten years and their models will be consigned to a museum and there skills would have vanished forever.

In the last hall I managed to meet up with the ‘Beaufort flying club’, which is the local club in Bristol. They actually fly very local to me. And just to prove that the world is a small place, standing by the small arena was Stan, this was the man I met a couple of weeks ago one evening to find a couple of geocaches with. I chatted to him, after I reminded him who I was I then asked him if he was a member, he said yes, and that he flew the model helicopters. So we had two hobbies in common. We then chatted for about an hour on anything and everything. He’s in his seventies, he thought I was about twenty-eight, I like Stan. Chatted to the helicopter guy there and he gave me lots of tips about setup. I may join the club at the end of the year when they renew their memberships. I learned quite a lot anyway, so hopefully I can put some of that into practice.

Had coffee. Rebooted. Today’s problem was all about detecting edges of ploy’s. Not going into the reason why, but needed to detect these in multi-sampling mode. So here’s the fun way to do it. Use the screen position passed into the pixel shader, this is the exact position, so in MSAA mode it can be on a partial pixel. Okay, so how do you get the edge? Well you need a value thats always inside the poly. So you pass in the position again, but this time you pass it in with the ‘centroid’ modifier. This means it will always be in the centre of a pixel. What do you do then? Well it’s quite simple, you subtract one from the other, if the difference isn’t zero then you have an edge pixel. Can it be optimised more? Well yes, but you have to be a bit clever. You need to pass in the position, but set it to no-interpolation, then do the interpolation manually, but once with normal and once with centroid.

Walked Sasha, Dillon wasn’t interested again. After much thunder and rain I managed a fairly dry run this evening, another eight odd miles. Started the rough cut on the new video, about half way through. This one will take a while.

Flying tomorrow.

So woke up at 6:20, which was fine, got Dillon to daycare. I got a text a little bit later to say there was blood in his poo. Considering what he eats I’m surprised there wasn’t a television in his poo. Now work was quite interesting. We have timers, lots of timers, and boy do they show up high in profiles, so I decided to take a look at them. For every timer we are basically calling a linux style real time clock (RTC). This does indeed store very accurate time, from the linux epoc. But every call goes via the kernel and then reads the clock, which is a hardware chip outside the cpu, so there’s loads of bus activity and loads of hanging about. So instead I changed it to the CPU tick clock. Now this is a handy hardware register that store the current cycle number. It’s a 64 bit unsigned int. Also there is a handy call that returns the clocks per second or hertz as it were. So simple you just divide the ticks by the clock rate and the gives you the time in seconds. But what if you want the time in micro seconds? Well then you have to multiply the current tick by one million and then do the divide. Ah, but then you run into a bit of a problem. If you start shifting the ticks up you then begin to run out of room in you unsigned int. So what you need to do is sacrifice a little bit of accuracy. You only multiply the tick by a thousand, but divide the clock rate also by a thousand. This still gives you a pretty accurate microsecond clock, but it then won’t wrap round for almost four years.

Took Jamie to the bank. Picked up Dillon. Went to the gym and did Pump. Finally got all the latest video footage imported and synced up. So now I just have to edit the whole lot.

While not being able to sleep again, Jamie broke the news to me that Robin Williams had just died. He had committed suicide. He once said, “I checked my self into rehab in wine country, so I could keep my options open”. There was a man who had everything, but suffered his own personal demons. He’s found a way out for himself, but left a lot of other people suffering. I finally got to sleep about 4AM.

So woke up still in a mood. Still, I did have a load of work to get on with, so got on with it. It kept me going for a solid eight hours, with a minor sandwich interruption. Stopped at about 7PM. Went out in the rain and ran about eight miles. My legs now hurt. Again. Couldn’t get James on Saturday, so booked on Friday instead, about time I had a stupidly long lunch break. Had a shower, ate salad. Think I may enter a half marathon somewhere, I seem to be running one daily anyway.

Just didn’t have the will power to live this morning as things haven’t really improved much since. Fixed a load of stuff to do with instances and ‘standard definition’, although I thought that went out the window a long time ago. Walked Sasha. Came back and started working on something rather strange to do with vertex buffers. Couldn’t get it to work. Went to the gym, gave Combat a good effort. There was a woman at the back who had the exact face of Conor Maynard, it was very off-putting. Came back and the dogs have ripped up their duvet which I only put there yesterday. They have both been duly shouted at. Went back to work. Finally got my vertex thing working. Now just can’t be arsed.

Dame Helen and Sir Ian were a few rows in front of me. A lady to my right said, “God that’s dame Helen Mirron”. I said rather casually, “Yes, I’ve just been in a film with her, would you like to meet her?”. We got up from our seats on the roller coaster and went to the entrance. But they exited of course through the exit. We were at a Charlie and the chocolate factory themed roller coaster. I said if we catch up with them again I would introduce her. We then got locked outside. Thankfully I then woke up.

Studied a couple more chapters in air law, after Jamie finally got me breakfast. We then had sex, which is the first time since we were in London. I put in a large amount of banging and Jamie did quite a good vocal performance. I then got up and cleared up all the fallen apples and dog poo. After a light lunch I then went out for a run, did about nine miles, in the wind and rain. Came back, had a shower. Then set up three cameras and lots of lighting. We then made a new video. It involved face painting. I did a tiger on Jamie and I ended up with what was supposed to be a Disney version of a Meerkat, it looked more like I was a member of Kiss. Still it was good fun. I now have over two and a half hours of video footage to try and edit.

Had a bath. I’m now going to have a chicken pie.