Actually started at a reasonable time. Okay, only started at that time as I was awoken by a courier. New keyboard had arrived. It sat in the box all day. Walked to the post office and sent back that faulty SSD, I didn’t send it tracked so may live to regret that decision. Went out with Jamie and the digs lunchtime, he gave up half way round, Sasha and I continued around the ‘duck route’, it was fucking hot. Went off to Iceland (the freezer shop, not the home of the penis museum (look it up)). Picked up my free pizza. Picked up some dog stuff and some petrol. Came back and then headed out to Cribb’s. Parked up and did three odd Geocaches out that way. Came home and did a lot more work. Connected the new keyboard, it’s horrible. It came with a mouse which is also horrible. Jamie is cooking tonight, so that may be horrible as well. It’s still fucking hot.

So started at a reasonable if not remarkable time. New machine now in-place and running. So got on with work, basically doing the last lot of stripping out. All was going fine until I tried to add a certain dev kit target, clicked on the button, nothing happened. Lots of buggering about, lots of trawling forums, in the end I found a post mentioning Kaspersky. Now, I’d given it another chance after the problems I had last time. I disabled everything in it and still couldn’t add the target. I uninstalled it, added the target fine. So sorry Kaspersky, you have to be uninstalled once again. After several opinions I’m now looking at ESet Nod 32. So far so good. It is somewhat on the pricey side though. Apart from that, had no problems with the new machine at all. Walked both dogs together. Walked to the gym and did combat, Laverne made an announcement that she was going to do next weeks together with Nick, so will be nice to see her back. Walked home, did another couple of hours. My mind at the moment is being overrun with a lighting issue, actually a full rendering issue, can’t concentrate on anything because of it, it’s becoming quite annoying. Installed some more SDK’s on the old machine and building all that back up. The ‘Hello Fresh’ arrived today. This is food you cook yourself and they just provide you all the ingredients. So tonight after spending ages cleaning the kitchen I promptly fucked up the pork. Actually I fucked up the pork coating, the pork itself was nicely cooked. Jamie’s turn tomorrow.

So yesterday started off without any form of sex, but it did have coffee, so not a bad start. The day did go slightly strangely though. I read the papers and did all that sort of thing, then got up. Kicked Jamie out of bed then we walked the dogs. We then decided it would be a great idea to go shopping as we were going out in the evening and all I have is skinny black jeans and all Jamie’s clothes are of course on the floor. It was actually quite late but we headed out to Cribs. So I went in Next and bought trousers. Jamie looked at a pair for himself. We then went in Top man, I looked at the cute staff and bought a belt. Then went in Superdry and found a shirt I liked. Then it was back to Next, bought shoes, Jamie got the trousers after having some sort of crisis over the purchasing decision. Then went back to Superdry and bought the shirt. We then decided that we didn’t have suitable jackets, so went to M&S, found they were all very expensive so went to T.K Maxx via Toys’R’Us. I ended up buying Jamie a jacket and bought myself a complete Ben Sherman suit as I liked the jacket. Trousers made need taking up a tad, please take note, Jamie’s jacket was bloody expensive. So we then went and bought items for the dogs, hairspray and lint rollers. Got home and meandered somewhat. By the time we shit, showered and shaved it was about 9PM. Then we had to double back as Jamie forgot the wedding card. The wedding was back in Almondsbury so a good forty odd minute walk. Anyway, nice venue, was a farm, big marquee thing. Cash bar, except for the large cider barrel on the edge of the table so I helped myself to that, it was very nice and about 8%. It was a fun evening, we even managed to walk home and order pizza.

So woke up this morning after a very strange dream. I was removing engines from a kart and carrying them to a bus. But I kept getting accosted by Callum from ‘five seconds of summer’ (he’s not even the good looking one), he just kept saying ‘You need to fill my bum up with cum’. Which is quite interesting for an opening statement. Anyway, he followed me back to the bus. I said that was fine but we needed to distract Jamie. So he grabbed this female friend with the plan of leaving her on the bus with Jamie. So we left the bus together but Jamie caught up with us. Based laid plans and all….

Still I woke up and offered Jamie the opportunity to take Callum’s place, but was told he was feeling rather ill. He shouldn’t have had so much bloody cider. So I had coffee and got up. It was raining so that kind of scuppered my outdoor plans so I started on cleaning my office and moving some stuff around. So I move the old PC out and replaced with the new one, then set about fixing up the old one. So vacuumed it all out and cleaned all the filters. Then fitted the video card in it which was what my new PC came with. Then set about formatting the drive and re-installing Windows 7. All was fine, except the amount of time. It’s probably taken the best part of five hours to get it installed and all the updates done. And I don’t think it’s finished it. This is just the base operating system, I haven’t installed a single program yet. Still it’s kind of therapeutic. We walked the dogs and then I went off and found a new Geocache up in Aztec West. I think I’m going to go for a run and then call it a day in here. New machine is all up and running, the floor has been cleaned and everything has been dusted. Ordered a new keyboard as I hate this one and it needs to be USB. Moved my monitor round and cleaned up the desk a bit. Also removed a previous generation dev-kit and shoved it under the spare bed and finally installed a current generation dev-kit in it’s place. Although I currently have no desire to turn this one on. So already for a fresh work week tomorrow on a new machine, it will be like the first day of term.

Today was going to be a long day. Started at about 7AM with coffee. Got in the car at about quarter to eight and was at Staverton by half-past. Had a wonder around then met up with Lee and James. Lee drove us to Denham. We had a good look at James’s new toy, ‘G-JKHT’, a rebuilt R22 with just 5 hours of test flights on the clock, a beautiful machine. James was also doing a ladies PPL exam while he was there, so I was left with doing a flight plan back to Gloucester. James had a little fly in his heli together with the guy who built it. I had a potter around the aerodrome, I did have some Geocaches setup but couldn’t really get to any of them in time. We eventually packed all our crap into the R22 and setoff at just gone 4PM. It fly’s great. We got to Amersham without any problems, then used my flight plan and headed towards Oxford. The weather got substantially worse and the black cloud rolled in and the rain started. I held the heading though. I now had the friction set on the collective pulling 20 inches of power, the map was on my lap and I was trying to work out where the hell we were. The headsets weren’t working properly, I could hardly hear any radio traffic at all. We did a MATZ penetration (crossing into military airspace) all okay and headed a bit too close to Brize Norton. Eventually over Oxford, we then winged it a bit and used the GPS for a more direct route as the weather was awful over this area, plus there was about 40Kts of wind, this little R22 was doing just over a hundred miles an hour in a howling gale. After we cleared Oxford and headed back towards Gloucestershire the weather greatly improved. I was then back to the map and actually managed to work out where we were. We’d now spent about an hour pissing about with the radio and I could finally hear traffic, so I did the approach over Bishop’s Cleve and round the edge of Staverton. Then landed it at it’s ‘new home’ of Staverton aerodrome. As time was getting on I had to shoot off fairly quickly. A good job too as the M5 was backed up again, had to get off at Thornbury and take the A38.

Shit, shower and shave, then it was a walk up to ‘The Swan’, where I met up with Carl. We had a lovely catch-up as usual. The beer flowed, together with the fish and chips. We finished the evening with a couple of rounds of shorts. We got a taxi back, I was dropped off and headed to bed. I think I was asleep in about thirty seconds, it was a long and adventurous day.

So after last nights torture porn not finishing until almost 4AM I didn’t get up at the crack of dawn. Work wise was still really getting new machine together. Everything now compiles and runs. Put the old pcie drive in and erased it, that’s ready to send back now. Mail all setup. Got one small thing on DropBox to setup and that’s it. Backed up old machine. I’ll swap them over at the weekend. Old machine will be cleaned up, I’ll put the 960 in it and then reinstall windows on it. Walked both dogs. Headed out early this evening to a Geocache right by the UWE, when I got there the GZ was just full of kids, so no chance. Managed to get one a few hundred meters from it, and that was it. Got back to Parkway station and then running low on time so jumped on a bus. Packed up everything ready for tomorrow.

So this morning started early with the arrival of the spur box and oven cable. Work wise was still all about setup and data building. It’s almost up to speed. Had long discussions about future tech. New pcie SSD turned up. Walked the dogs. Walked to the gym. Did Pump. Came back and took the oven out. Then managed to get the spur straight on the old cable position (I’d already wired the flex end into the spur). So that went on without too much of a problem. Oven connection was straightforward. Thankfully that all works. Then backed up the new machine again. Swapped the SSD over and booted Acronis. It failed to find any drives and died on its own ass. Rang up Scan again, they said it doesn’t work as it’s Linux based, so had to build a special version of the recovery tool. Burnt that on to a CD and had another go. That actually went without a hitch. It’s building more data now. Tomorrow I need to wipe the old SSD before sending it off as it contains a shed load of registered software, plus lots of first party SDK’s. Also had a pop with Windows 8.1 mail. Okay, it worked fine with all my mail accounts, just don’t like the overall look of it though. I’m going to give thunderbird a blast tomorrow. Then when thats setup, just some bookmarks to do and it’s ready to take it’s new position. I’ll then attempt to rebuild the old one to use as a spare.

So the day actually started fairly well. Still installing stuff on new machine, then tried to back it up. Sector read errors. This is a brand new SSD and it’s failing after one day. Another twenty minutes on the phone, new one being dispatched tomorrow. Thankfully it hasn’t caused any additional problems and I spent the rest of the day syncing to the data server, which is still going strong if slowly now. Then had a problem with one of the tools again. Plus it was boiling hot. Finally managed to get a login for this food thing next week, it doesn’t look very nice. I have a feeling we will cancel after one week. New oven arrived. It fits fine. Wiring wise though it’s all a bit shot. The house wiring is actually correct for once. Thirty-six amp trip, 6mm cable, isolator switch, flex spur. Then is where it all goes a bit tits up. The old oven was connected by 1.5mm flex to spur. Now here is the issue, oven is 2.7kw. The oven itself is not fused. 1.5mm cable will give you about 16 amps on a good day. So, if you have a short across the element in the oven it will draw as much current as possible, which will be 36 amps. So the flex connecting the oven to the spur will burn out instantly and catch on fire. Not a great situation. So I’ve ordered a 13 amp fused spur and some 2.5mm flex. So that’s good for about 20 amps, fuse is rated at 13, so that will blow first. So another day without an oven, still the end is in sight. So tomorrow a new SSD is arriving and the stuff for the oven.

Had a text from Captain James, we are all set for Friday, leave Staverton up to Denham aerodrome, then later that day I fly a brand new R22 back to Staverton. Should be fun, also it’s free. Fan turned up for new PC, thankfully all good now, so I’ve started setting it all up, it’s quite a long process, I won’t be able to switch over two it for another couple of days. Walked the dogs. Went to Combat. Ate salad after more work. Removed the old oven. Have an early night I think.

So this morning I was rudely awaken by a call from Captain James, “I’ve just spent 140 grand on a new R22 would you like to have a go in it for free?”. Well, call me a cheap skate, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Today was actually a bit fucked over as there was only one helicopter available as the other had broken down again, so we had an hour at midday. We did advanced auto-rotations, which were great fun. Basically, it’s how to stretch the distance out as much as possible during an engine failure, so you go at it at 75 knots and reduce the engine RPM to 90%, which means the horn is screaming at you constantly (It triggers at 97%), now remember that you will get irrecoverable rotor failure at 80%. So it’s quite fun, if incredibly dangerous. We also did constant attitude auto’s which is what you do at night, plus a number of other auto conditions, whole thing completed in 55 minutes from engine start to shutdown. Anyway, his new chopper needs to go to the other side of London for it’s safety check. I need to do some cross-country stuff, so is everything goes to plan I get to fly it pretty much for free to it’s service destination. That’ll be pretty cool. So anyway, came back home, had lunch and then parked up just west of Easter Compton. Did seven Geocaches that were very spaced out, so took around four hours but it was nice to tick them off.

So next week is pretty much more of the same, but with a few extras. The part for my new machine should turn up tomorrow. Then I’m having dinner with Carl on Friday. Plus this possible cross-country flight, so could be a fun week. Also a wedding thing to go to at the weekend, so that will probably remove any joy I have.

Jamie is cooking this evening so I could also have gastro-enteritis to look forward to.

For some reason this morning I woke up and decided to buy a new oven. You just get days like that. So I walked the dogs. Then a man was coming round about these cook your own food things, so I signed up to that for a week to try it. Picked up mother (in the car that is), she showed me her bruises, I showed her no interest at all. Did a home check for a cat. Actually it was a fairly old lady, the cat will be fine. Picked up some crickets. Then we went to a shop that sold ovens, looked at an oven, then bought it. I tend not to piss about in these situations, it was brushed steel, had a timer and a fan, was fairly well priced and they could deliver it Tuesday and take the old one away. Stopped off at a garage, bought mothers shopping. Had a cup of tea with her. Came home and then did about two hours gardening. Took the side fence panel down and cleared the lot all the way down to the front. Then put a plastic sheet over the whole thing to hopefully stop it sprouting up again. Then we walked the dogs again. Did the accounts. Captain James says tomorrow looks like a nice day. Quick look at the forecast and it looks warm and cloudy with fairly high winds, so that’ll make it interesting anyway.