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.

It was with sad news this morning I heard that Sir Terry Wogan had passed. He was old when I was young, and he was older now that I’m old. Okay, when I was a kid he was a bit of a joke, thought of as a bit of an Irish tosser who did the floral dance. But as I grew older he was always there and certainly in recent years he was there during the Sunday morning decorating. He had a distinct style, especially when interviewing, you had the feeling he really could’t give a shit about the answers that 95% of his guests gave. Michael Parkinson is similar, he would ask a question and then say ‘yes’, as if the answer was just an inconvenience to the next question. Don’t get me started on talk show hosts or we would be here all day. But it was his radio show where he was king. I was never awake for his breakfast show, but the Sunday show was a staple. He was a stalwart of Radio 2. You always got the feeling that he was only presenting to one listener, you. His Janet and John stories were so rude and full of double-entendres that you were pissing yourself laughing. His Eurovision commentaries were legendary. Also lets not forget that he did twenty odd years of ‘Children In Need’, plus the added controversy that he was the only one who got paid for his appearance. But it was his one appearance on ‘Never mind the Buzzcocks’ that was the epitome to me. No rehearsal, and I’m bloody sure he’d never even seen the show before, but he absolutely nailed it.

He’ll be up there interviewing David Bowie and Alan Rickman now, ignoring their answers and trying to get another Alison Moyet record on. Sundays with Emily will never be the same again.

Had a nice lie in. Jamie got up in the middle of the night and went to work. Dillon replaced him on the bed. At about half ten Sasha was getting really edgy about food. So breakfast was made for three, the dogs skipped the coffee option. Sat in bed and read the paper. Looked at the weather at Staverton, wind was okay, but there was a tempo about gusts up to twenty-eight knots, so thats a bit of a no-go. Got up and edited a new helicopter video, thats uploaded to YouTube now and just needs the annotations doing, I’ll make it live tomorrow. While it was doing that I took the firewall apart and set it up on the bench. Put the memory test USB stick in and let that run through. Walked Sasha. Then headed into town. Thought I’d pop into the museum and catch the new ‘Death’ exhibit, but the queue was massive. I did get to see the mockup of the ‘Dignitas’ room though, that was a bit creepy, but I think mother would be happy there. Will try again in a few weeks for the other exhibit. I have a feeling the wind at Staverton will not be gusty, but it’s saved me a few quid I guess. Bought some more model cars for my stop-motion video intro and some poo bags. Memory test was fine. So installed a new version (latest) of pfSense. This is running from a USB stick. The odd thing was, when it booted, it started reporting DMA and config errors, it appears it was still picking up stuff from the CF card. I removed that and it all started working. So now I’m running the latest pfSense, but booting it from a USB stick. I’ve taken the timer off the power cable, so will see how stable this version is. So far, so good.

Must say a thank you to a special person who sent me a valued message today, much appreciated, even though I know you have your own problems to deal with. Much love.

Started early, which was impressive as I didn’t go to bed until four and I’d drank almost three bottles of wine. Spent all day again testing crap, no end of issues with build tools. Weather was shite, walked Sasha at the only point it wasn’t raining. Worked really hard, got really stressed, had lots of chest pains. At one point I was planning on going to A&E, but subsided after I called the tools programmers complete cunts. Walked to the gym, it was threatening rain. Did Pump, followed by Laverne, it’s true we are having a torrid affair, once you’ve gone black there’s no going back. Walked home, in the pissing rain. Worked more hours than I was planning. Put the washing away. Now waiting for pizza to cook, joys of ovens with more than one button.