Didn’t sleep at all well last night. Thats after four sleeping pills and a cup of Camomile tea. So woke up grumpy. My day did not improve. I lost hours battling with what I thought was an SDK problem but turned out to be a kernel issue. Then did battle with an artist. Always fun. Walked Sasha in crap weather. Got a text from Captain James asking if I’d heard from the CAA yet. I said no, so he said to contact them. I did, sat on hold for twenty minutes. To be told that my application may be appraised in the next few days. So thats four weeks. Impressive. It’ll be five by the time I get it. I hope they process my noise complaints and runway incursions in the same casual manner. Went for a run in the drizzle. Finished off a little pet project I was working on. Bored with it now, ship it and move on. Sanded my second lamp. Both are ready for plaster sealer now. Hopefully after a couple of coats of that they will come up nicely. Got a delivery date for the new radiator, not soon enough. So tonight I’ve had a large Camomile teas and six sleeping pills, so look forward to at least ten minutes sleep tonight.

Wasn’t in the mood this morning. Mainly as it was Monday, also it was a real miserable day weather wise. Got going eventually. Spent the morning on a weird GPU bug, afternoon was all about HDR stuff. Didn’t walk to gym as the rain was just too much, so took the back way to avoid the traffic and that actually worked out pretty well. Did Combat, arms hurt a lot from yesterday and actually all last week I expect. At the moment I’m getting no ‘me’ time, or any time for relaxation. When I’ve finished the lounge I’m going to have a few weekends off, up to and including Christmas. On the way home I picked up some more pizzas from Iceland and some Camomile tea, this apparently helps you sleep. So I’m going to have one of those and half a dozen sleeping tablets before bed. See if that works better than half a bottle of wine. Meanwhile, back to sanding down a couple of wall lights.

I’m not sure it was my cooking or the rampant sex at 1AM (that was a bit random, Jamie started playing with the hair on my head, what remains, but slowly moved down to hair elsewhere, what followed was about 6 minutes of passion). Anyway, then fell asleep and had the weirdest dream. We had another dog, it even had a name which now I have forgotten. But it was lovely. The sad thing was I had to kill it, I ended up with some collar thing as that would slowly cause it to pass away, although I was after something that could be mixed with eggs. I was afraid that Sasha or Dillon may eat that though. It was a lovely dog, but was unable to take a shit, therefore it had to die. I have the strangest of dreams. So woke up, drank coffee and ate cereal, fed the two dogs which weren’t on the menu then got up. Basically a continuation of yesterday, all to do with wall preparation. Just after lunch I was waiting for a coat to dry so headed off to Homebase, which is a pain to get to, but they did have a great offer on paint. So got all the required paint. Came back and finished off. Basically everything is now ready to start painting, bar a couple of little bits. So I can get going on that next weekend. Ordered the radiator and got most of the electrical order sorted. So I reckon about three weekends and the job will be done.

Woke up later than planned. Not that I had any plans anyway. Had cereal and coffee. Fed dogs. Read paper. Got up and started shifting stuff to the centre of the lounge. Today was all about wall prep, and all walls were prepped. Tomorrow is final wall prep. I’ve got the base coat on now. Also put up all the match pot things. We’ve chosen ‘shit brown’ with some sort of orange and a red. I’m sure it’ll look wonderful, if not it will look the the output of my bowels after a good curry. Not that I’ve had a solid bowel movement in years. Still, after tomorrow it will be ready for the top coat. I cooked this evening, first time in a long time. Made one of my famous curry’s. It was ace. Busy day tomorrow.

Couldn’t really get into mush at all today, so spent most of it on my UDP streaming API. Considering the amount of extra hours I’ve done this week I didn’t exactly feel guilty. I did spend the rest of it trying to debug a DirectX driver using the kernel debugger. That proved fruitless. Walked Sasha in light drizzle. Walked to gym, did Pump, increased weights again, squats are now painful and my shoulders almost fell off. Did a session with Laverne afterwards and then walked home. Did another hours or so work.

Noticed the dog tins had all been put in the recycle bin. I though that was a nice move by Jamie. I asked specifically, ‘Did you swill them out?’. I got the reply, ‘Yes, I even moved all the dishes out of the sink to it.’. So the sink was dry, I brought the box in, checked a few tins, all still full of dog food. So I’m now living with a slob and a liar. It would have been better if he’d just left them where they were. It’s always nice to spend two hours on a Friday evening cleaning the kitchen.

So the day finally came. The same thing happened with ‘Southern fried chicken in a basket’. And alas, ‘Sausage rolls and chips’ nicely presented, chilled not frozen, ready to oven cook. Then long ago there was ‘La Mexicana’, by far the finest and most chilli filled tortilla chips of all time. Then came Tesco’s own brand tortilla chips, not up to the ‘La Mexicana’ brand, but not band. Then in the last couple years along came ‘Eastmans tortilla chips’, very good in the chilli department and only 99P.

Then today came the news. I knew it would come in the end, always does, it’s just a case of when.

‘Tesco no longer stocks this product.’

RIP Eastmans. I will fondly remember the hundreds of bags I ate.

So working on my little app which contains about ten tone mapping operators. Put various images through it. It is true though, it’s so subjective. What I like, the artists don’t. What the artists want, they can’t have, as it doesn’t actually exist. Still, it’s an interesting war. I’ve ended up with something that has a double parabola, mainly as it sounds impressive rather than works well. The weather was slightly better today, so walked Sasha. Walked to the gym as well, did Pump. Came back and did two more hours than I needed. It’s Wednesday and I’ve knocked up over three hours extra already. I doubt there will be any letup this week.

Spectre was great, sort of harks back to the ‘Live & Let Die’ style films. Hell of a late night though.

Today was all about tone mapping. And to cut a very long story short, it was hell. I sent the best part of ten hours taking various HDR images and converting them to eight bit. At the end of the day I ate a load of shit, had a bath and went to bed. I didn’t leave the house today at all, I’m mentally, completely exhausted.

So woke up. It was fairly uneventful. Started work, which again thankfully was uneventful. I was trying to convince people that an image that contained values no greater than about 0.9 was not exactly HDR. Walked Sasha, gone very cold again now. Walked to the gym. Did Combat, it’s growing on me this one. Walked home. Did a bit more work. Doing a small app to convert our HDR output to a BMP, saves buggering about in compute shaders. Base coat paint has arrived for lounge. We are off out tonight, late I know. Going to see the new Bond film ‘Spectre’, I’ll give my verdict tomorrow.

So this morning started with a bum. I must admit, I was quite up for it. It’s been the first time since Jamie’s birthday, so didn’t last long. Had a couple of coffees and then continued with the decorating. About ninety percent of the sanding is out of the way now, thank god. I put a couple of bits of base coat on as well. I reckon about four weekends to get it all done. A thick base coat ordered which I’ll apply next week and also fourteen ‘tester’ pots of various colours. We took the dogs out to the field. I did a couple of bits and then it was time to shower and head out to the city to see ‘Mary Poppins – The musical’. The sets were very complex and lavish. I must admit, I’ve never seen all the film, and it’s not exactly one of my favourite musicals. It was ‘okay’, if anything it was over-long. My ass went numb. Act two seemed to be all the songs from act one, again. Some good effects though. Burt tap-danced upside down from the very top of the stage and Mary did indeed fly over the audience. It was a good touring production. I think I just didn’t really like the musical. The two child actors were amazing though, very talented. We had a Chinese. This lounge is covered in dust.