Yesterday was fun. Went to Combat, walked the dog and then spent the rest of the day painting the bedroom. Finally had a bath and cooked. Today I had a load of bottling to do, which I eventually finished at about 10PM after doing everything else. I’m off to a meeting tomorrow and then a conference for a couple of days, I’ll be glad of the break!

Finished off all my light map stuff. Back on to console HDR which has its own set of fun issues. It’s gone bloody cold again. Still, popped out while it was still light and did a 15Km run. That’s 29Km this week. Not sure why people find 10K’s challenging, that’s like down to the pub and back.

Finally finished that task. All looked quite nice in the end. I won’t go into the internal politics, I just kept my mouth shut. First day of the year when I’ve walked Sasha without using a jacket. Even had to change t-shirts as the current one stank, hasn’t even done half a week yet. Walked to Pump, again a very pleasant evening, just want a bit more light now

So ended up scrapping the bulk of my ellipse stuff which was annoying but one of those things. Got something else to work in the end, but a great waste of my time. Weather has been nice last few days, almost like spring is here. Went for another 14Km run.

Put my weekend thoughts into action and failed. So had a look at the equations again and couldn’t work out why it was about twenty meters out. Then while debugging it I spotted a twenty that was from another calc. Sure enough adding the offset of that one finally gave me the correct results. Then I made the mistake of taking the limits on the axis to form the bounding box and ended up chopping half the bloody thing off. Still, once I’d produced the corners it all finally worked. So that’s about twenty hours on one set of equations.

Didn’t get to bed until gone 4AM. Was I out partying? No. I fell asleep on the couch after letting Dillon out. Got up at 9AM with one hell of a headache, I think I consumed more wine than I thought, about two bottles more. Still, walked to Combat, did that and walked home. Walked Sasha. Then came home, Jamie was back now. Continued with decorating the bedroom. Then some very sad news. My dear friend died in my arms. We’ve had a long relationship. We’ve covered many walls. But her heart started strong and slowly faded. First it just murmured, then eventually it stopped completely and she was dead. Goodbye Emily the sander, RIP.

Woke up this morning bright and early so sent James a message (I already knew Ben wasn’t in as it was his birthday the day before), he gave me a call and booked me in for 4PM after some negotiations. He said, ‘You’ll be going out with a guy called Dave, he’s ex. military fighter pilot, he’ll have you doing some low-level bombing runs’. Sounded exciting. I drank coffee, evolved a shit load of pidgies. Took Sasha out for a walk. Made some lunch into a box and headed out. Picked up some crickets, headed into town. Looked at a lot of shoes again and failed to buy any. Ate lunch in the car and headed to Staverton. Did a bit of a hot swap in the chopper and met Dave. Oddly we were due to go out in hotel-tango but it promptly broke down with the clutch failing to engage, so we ended up going out in alpha-tango which has the power of a slightly limp lettuce. I kept on abusing the power limits trying to get some kind of acceleration out of it. Dave was a lovely guy. He had a very similar temperament to Ben. I could easily be taught by him all day, he gave perfect demonstrations and encouragement and once again showed me a few new things which is always good. We did a few auto’s. My first was a complete shambles. You are meant to maintain 60kts, I managed to drop to thirty, he sat there with folded arms and said, ‘What are you going to do about that?’. I pushed that cyclic so far forward it almost hit the glass, got it back to 60 and flared at the end. We did a confined area which was fine and then went back to the airfield and did some quick stops which I’m notoriously crap at. I’m still notoriously crap at. My first one started at forty feet and we ended up at two hundred feet, to which I got the response, ‘Well, we stopped, but we are somewhat a little high don’t you feel?’. I liked this guy. We did a few more until we were pretty good. Standard flying stuff was all fine and dandy, it was really nice to get back into the air again after over two months. It is a bit like riding a bike, I was a little scared that I’d lift up into the hover (the most difficult thing a helicopter pilot can do) and be all over the place, but no, it was absolutely fine. It was a nice fifty odd minutes, I must do it more often.

To be clear, the most difficult thing a helicopter pilot has to do is within the first six seconds. In a plane you taxi along the runway, get it up to power and slowly rotate and it takes off, not that taxing. In a helicopter you have to get the balance and power points absolutely spot before you lift off into the hover, that is the most difficult thing in the world. When James checks out pilots, if they can pick up and taxi to x-ray then they are good to go. It’s been compared to doing complex algebra while balancing a beachball on the end of a pencil. I can do that. See I’m a clever shit.

This ellipse thing is really pissing me off. After lots of searching I thought I’d found the exact equation, except it does’ work. So went back to my original system, this uses ray casts, well line intersections. It’s pixel perfect in the major axis and I can also work out the midpoint, the thing I’m stuck with now is the minor axis radius. I think I’ve sort of worked it out. You need to calculate the new ‘height’ from the midpoint. So if you’ve moved five meters to the right and you were one hundred meters up, then just using pythagorus you can calc the new distance, then I think it’s just taking the tan of the alpha and multiplying by that. That should give the circle radius if it was going that distance. Hopefully that’s the last part of the puzzle.

Now to drink heavily.

Spent the day with some interesting trigonometry problems. Ended a very long day still with some interesting trigonometry problems. Gave the angles a wide birth in the end and now have a solution which uses line intersections and direction cosines using three dimensional cartesian coordinates. And I say my job is dull.

Walked Sasha, nice day. Went for a 15Km run. That was uneventful. Long day. Checking on weather. May give Ben a call, long time since last chopper session.

Spent the day rearranging some code to do light projection, not very exciting, but more interesting to come. Walked Sasha but phone was playing up so couldn’t get a decent Pokemon Go connection, so that was a walk wasted. Walked to gym. Started Pump. Halfway through chest and the fire alarm went off. So stood in carpark for half an hour in a vest. At least I brought my small towel. Fire engine turned up. There was indeed a real fire in the plant room. We were let back in but were told to just gather our stuff and leave, you could certainly smell the burning. Walked home. Soldered some thing for my nephew. Ate salad. Looked up cones intersecting planes.