Managed to start fairly on time. Sleeping seems to be fine at the moment which is nice. Flipped over to new shader system today which is leading to a whole host of fire-fighting type tasks. Still, managed to get a couple of other things in at the same time. Dinkley’s got back to me, I need to make an appointment, apparently the first hour is free. Need to discuss the fact that I seem to be paying 60% tax on about twenty grand, not happy with that at all. The weather today was interesting, actually it was quite cold and very very windy. Sasha and I almost got blown away. Walked to the gym, did Combat. All gay front row again, the guy there likes to stare in the mirror more than I do. Walked home, it actually was quite a nice evening. Did final hour of work, I’m trying very hard to stick to a fixed time amount, it’s difficult. I’ve logged out of the forum from the laptop, when I finish now, I’ve finished. It’ll wait until the morning. Watched the X-Files again, blah, it’s okay I guess, it will take a while to get back into it. Good to see it’s back to ‘monster of the week’ again next week. See how it goes.

So spent the morning reading about a three month old paper briefly. Coffee, cereal, usual. Then did research into tax, looks like I have to spend seventeen grand to actually only spend ten, the fun joys of the UK tax system. Going to speak to a couple of people about it, but looks like an can get a new iMac out of it, plus a few other toys. We went to the Apple store and found the one I want anyway. We also went into the Virgin holidays place, and were offered beer, which is all a very odd concept. Came home and walked the dog in the rain. Then edited a new dog acrobatic video, okay they aren’t juggling, but running around with GoPro’s attached so quite fun. Then had a bath and poured some of this alcohol free wine. It was sweet and disgusting, so then tried the other bottle, it wasn’t as sweet but still disgusting. Poured down sink, had an alcohol free beer instead. Jamie cooking tonight, cheese and crackers on stand-by.

We spent the vast majority of the morning (okay, all of it) in bed. It is the most awful weather. I ran Sasha round the block. We ate and then ventured out. Parked up in the centre and then went to the piercing shop. I wasn’t getting pierced, I have enough. I paid for two piercings. We then walked into town, I bought new shoes, you can never have enough shoes. We then got Sasha a new bed for downstairs. I picked up some more non-alcoholic wine and beer. I’ve found the one called ‘Bavaria’, which is really good. Did the accounts, was playing with my tax spreadsheet and realised that I’ll owe almost four grand at the end of the tax year. I’m not overly thrilled about this prospect. I’m looking at writing off some serious capitol expenditure, so I may get a new iMac or something, put it this way, if I spend 3K on one, in reality it will actually cost 800 quid, the mad way the tax system works. I cooked tonights dinner, all very nice.

So I did the shopping list last night and thought I’d do a search for alcohol free products, as I’m on my fasting month. Surprisingly there are now quite a lot. I remember years ago you could just buy this truly awful lager called ‘Kaliber’, it tasted like sweet piss and after a couple of bottle of that your stomach felt like you’d consumed a vat of sulphuric acid. Now they do ‘alcohol free’ Becks. I guess they can’t get every last trace out, but it’s 0.05%, so I’d have to drink a hundred bottles to get the equivalent of one, I’d get bored after about six. Also, as it doesn’t have the tax on it, it’s very cheap, I think I paid about two quid for six bottles. And here’s the best bit, it tastes exactly like normal Beck’s, okay, perhaps it is just a little sweeter. It’s also only twenty-four calories, but still high in carbs. And here’s the best bit….alcohol free wine. Yes it exists. I did a bit of research, they take an ordinary Chardonnay and then distil it to remove all the alcohol, so I’m looking forward to that with my bath on Sunday. May be this month won’t be so bad after all.

Thanks to everyone telling me my server was down. I have external probes that ping it every 20ms, I know every packet loss, I know every outage. This was down due to and SSD failure. Nothing very exciting. Anyway, today was all about getting the new compiler rolled out, which of course I failed to do. I have one odd issue on another PC and of course one of the consoles is playing up. I’ve decided I’m no longer working crazy hours, I’ve built up an absolute shit-load, so I’m doing a thirty-five hour week now until we go on holiday.

Spent the day sorting out a certain console. I have this wonderful compiler I’ve written, but it needs to load and link to two very similarly named DLL’s which contain the same named exported functions. I think I’m going to have to load one of them manually, it’s like being back in Windows 3.1.

Going to eat salad and take a lot of pills.

So the month of abstinence begins, not long how long it will last, depends if I run out of sleeping pills. Its very very windy today. Started work, was fairly quiet I guess, finished off a few bits and traced a rather interesting bug. Walked Sasha in the hurricane. Walked to the gym, did Combat, it was busy, it even had a an all gay front row. Walked home, it was quite mild. Did more work than I was planning on. Ate salad, Ryvitas and cheese. All logged in glorious MyFitnessPal app and I’m still way under the daily calorie intake. Taken a sleeping pill, will give it an hour to kick in.