So in 13 years I’ve managed 1.7% on investments

Got up, which wasn’t quite a big a challenge as it normally is on a Saturday, not sure why. Walked the dog. Took her to the vet, her weight is coming down nicely now. Tried to find people in so I could do some more re-checks. Only managed one fairly old cat (the owner answered the phone, not the cat).

Did the shopping. Went into town, failed to buy anything. Went to mothers, via the cat check. Delivered to her, two bottles of wine, an electric blanket and a dressing gown. Obtained, five empty bottles of wine, some spicy nuts, some bake shake stuff and a fruit cake. a fair exchange is no robbery.

Came back and did the accounts. I had a statement from one of the long term investments from Sun Life. In thirteen years I’ve made an average of 1.7% a year. In today’s markets that’s actually probably quite good. Going back all those years though it probably isn’t. Anyway I’ll give it another thirteen and see if they improve.

Bath and curry time (in that order, but not at the same time). Sarah’s tomorrow, so take the dog out first thing.

I bought a new sander, I named it ‘Emeli’

So started this morning off by giving Jamie a hand job to ‘Coldplay’. Had breakfast and then got through two more pots of paint stripper. I should buy shares in Nitromors. The whole room has had at least one pass now.

Practised a bit of Japanese with Megan.

Took Jamie and Megan to Toy’s R’ Us. I went to B&Q and looked at paint stripper, it’s half the price in Tesco’s. Dropped Megan off at the station. Went to Tesco’s and bought more paint stripper. Also bought a new dustpan and brush as I think I managed to bin the old ones in a rubbish bag.

Did more stripping. I think the door frame is about as good as I’m going to get it, so will have to tidy that up with the sander now. One piece of skirting is also ready for sanding. I still need to do more skirting and getting the stain out of the wood round the patio door. I’ll attempt that next work day. I reckon I have at least two days of stripping and sanding to do. That will then be the end of the stripping phase and on to the restoring phase, but one step at a time.

Played with the dog until she was knackered. Now actually finished at a reasonable time. Shopping and bits tomorrow, I’ll try and get at least one more home re-check in tomorrow as I’m slowly catching up now.

For once most things actually began to work

Had a random idea this morning about how to cure a specific physics problem. Took ages to get all the calc right, and then it didn’t work. In the end I had to put my spurs on and tie up my horse and bodge it. I then added a load more stuff. Also looked again at the application of torque position. This is quite an odd one. On a car where do you think the traction force is applied? Well, it’s actually at the contact point of the tyre against the road. Which wasn’t where I was applying it. So fixed that and a couple of other little things. I’m now at the stage where I’m fairly happy with it all, a good place to leave it for the four day Easter weekend.

Jamie has gone to London with Megan to eat some Sushi type stuff and see ‘Wicked’. I saw it a few years ago, can’t really remember much of it I think we were fairly pissed at the time as it was just after a meeting and dinner.

I did some more Japanese. I’ve separated out my flash cards now into words I know fluently and ones that I’m not sure of, so I can do extra practice on those. I’ve now run out of flash cards again, so that’s close to two hundred words in the vocabulary now. By the end of the course it should be about four hundred.

So just sat down and ate salad. Need to pick Jamie and Megan up soon. Busy day tomorrow. Lots of paint stripping and sanding. My new little sander has arrived, looks good. So will hopefully get the door frame and all the skirting boards done over the next four days. I’ve only really got two working days.

So, pick up them, then it’s torture porn night.

So 8cm gap is apparently touching

Working heavily in two areas I really don’t like, physics and maths. Which is surprising as I’m pretty good at both physics and maths. Spent the day basically trying to find out why a flat object travelling a couple of centimetres above a completely flat surface was randomly bouncing in the air. It turns out after god knows how many hours they are touching, this is because the physics library we are using has a margin of 4cm’s. This means any two surfaces which are within 8cm’s of each other are actually randomly touching. Great. Managed to sort some of it, but it’s going to be a real pain I just know it.

Went for a run again. Picked up the dog from doggy daycare, she is now asleep on the couch next to me. I’ve been doing research into springs, exciting evening for sure. Did a little bit of Japanese but didn’t get beyond writing down the new words on flashcards. I’m owed time again so will do a session tomorrow morning.

Constraints, pain in the ass

Today I fixed a couple of issues I was having yesterday. Actually I fixed something I had spent several hours on yesterday in about five minutes this morning. As usual though, you fix one problem and another one come along. I hope that one takes five minutes tomorrow morning. It’s to do with constraints, they just aren’t working how I want. I don’t really want to use them at all but looks like I will have to.

Finally went out for a run, which is the first time in almost a month due to the worlds longest cold. That, thankfully has now almost vanished. Jamie still has some sort of sinus infection.

I did some more Japanese, finished unit 4, so 6 units to go before we set off. Well that’s the plan anyway.

Convex hull, and not the northern town either

I spent the bulk of the day working with collision meshes. Which isn’t the most exciting thing on the planet, especially when you have to decode it from an XML file. Also rather annoyed that the debug rendering doesn’t really support it. So you end up making a convex hull shape from a convex hull. Anyway, worked in the end. Sorted out centre of gravity problems and now have other ones.

Walked the dog, it’s bloody freezing.

Went to combat, that was tiring.

Did a bit more Japanese, I can now turn verbs into the past tense.

TP Link modem / router thing arrived. I’ve connected it up in bridge mode so works the same as the Draytek as far as pfSense is concerned. No problems so far, seems to grab pppoe with out any fuss. It was reluctant to connect to the web interface after connection, but a reboot of pfSense appears to have sorted this. Anyway, will monitor it’s performance. I’ve a new faceplate turning up tomorrow so will see if that makes any difference.

A different brand of paint stripper also turned up. So pasted a bit of that on to check it’s performance.

Supposed to be back to running tomorrow, if it stays above freezing.

My brain works in mysterious ways

So this morning started off rather oddly. Sir Terry was on Radio 2 and I was drifting in and out of conciousness. He had a few girls on called I think, ‘The Sugar Girls’. They were very good. One of them played the Ukulele. Now here is the strange thing, they were on the radio. So what appeared in my mind? Well, one girl with a ukulele and another with a giant hand puppet. Not sure why there were only two at this stage. They then performed their song in the corridor of a pub, while the safe door kept getting in their way. Also it descended into a cartoon style where this rabbit was being tossed up a tree by various animals until you saw a baby balanced on a branch. As I said, my mind works in mysterious ways.

Anyway, I fed this mind a couple of cups of coffee to kick start it into some kind of normality. I then had breakfast and got up. Proceeded to make a rather bad job of sanding the dining room door frame. Time was cracking on as we had a dinner date with Jamie’s dad. Jamie gave the dog a disappointing walk and I tidied up.

We went to Jamie’s dads. Actually we went via the ring road rather than through Downend, which reminded me why I have a VXR rather than a Fiesta, it really is one of the last bastions of speed left in Bristol, I think it’s perfectly natural to be doing 70MPH in second gear. I never broke the speed limit once, but I was doing 0-70 in around 6.5 seconds, it was fun.

Anyway, at Jamie’s dads, Jamie spent the bulk of his time connected to a phone and talking to his sister. It’s no wonder I say I wouldn’t go on holiday with her to Japan, I’d feel like a very disconnected third wheel, I’d have to kill her.

His step mum was talking to me about a very dull CD she had on from ‘Munford and Sons’, I was dying for her to ask me what sort of music I liked, so I could reply, ‘Well I’ve just bought the new Huduken CD but I think after touring with Pendulum I think they sound too similar and much prefer it when they were more grime influenced’…but she didn’t.

We had beef, it was very nice.

His grandad was there, who is always good value. He didn’t disappoint. I think we are now both members of UKIP.

Came home, had a bath and watched the grand prix. Racing was dull, but controversy was high, so good fun.

Short week this week, good I can get some more DIY in.

Erotic dream? No, a maths A level paper

So woke up after a rather bizarre dream. Was it erotic and sexual? Well, depends on your preferences. I dreamt an entire Maths A level paper. I don’t mean I just dreamt thinking about taking the exam, no, I dreamt every bloody question, and I did all the working out. Worse part was that I couldn’t answer most of it, not surprising considering I’ve never done A level maths. So my brain is now capable of conjuring up exam papers. Looking forward to A level physics tonight and may be next week A home economics, at least then I can eat something. Obviously spending far too much time reading bloody vehicle dynamics books.

Went shopping. Did a couple of animal rechecks and that really was about it. Oh, did some more paint stripping of that bloody door frame. Still not finished.

Anyway, quick bath, glass of wine, then on with the curry.

Zen and the art of packet loss

Started a bit late. Wanted to do research into collision meshes. Bit of a messy day as far as that went. Spent a while peeing about trying to get an Orange sim car to work. Failed, ordered another Vodafone one. It’s only to test to see if a phone is properly unlocked anyway. Then the whole internet was just grinding to an absolute halt. Looking on pfSense, surprisingly it wasn’t Virgin, it was Zen. It was showing around 50% packet loss. This was somewhat odd. Got hold of Zen using online chat in about 10 seconds. They asked to ping my router, which of course then required me to piddle about with pfSense adding a rule for ICMP and route through to the WAN address. Anyway, got there without out two many problems. So he pinged me from Zen…trace route was all good until it got to the final hop, which was me. So he asked if I had an ordinary router, which of course I’ve got boxes of. So I decided the closest one was the Draytek I use as an access point. So connected that to the DSL line. It synced no problem. But ping wasn’t enabled. Now with this being just used as an AP I’d disabled DHCP on it. So it was guess the IP address time. I failed. So up to the loft for another router. Got another Draytek. This one synced. Also didn’t have ping enabled, but at least it did have DHCP on it, so was easily sorted, after I remembered the admin password. So he pinged this one, 100% good. Ok, so either pfSense was up the swanny or pfSense was up the swanny. So reset it. Worked fine for about two minutes then packet loss again. So I decided to look at the web interface for the Vigor 120, which is the ethernet modem. Took bloody ages trying to connect to it and then it kept timing out. This was very odd. It must have died. So prodded it a bit. Found a tiny tiny reset hole and shoved a paperclip in it. It did a factory reset. Then synced and worked beautifully. I haven’t had a packet loss since. Moral of the story, if it doesn’t work try resetting it…yes indeed, sometimes this does in fact work.

Walked the dog. Went to the gym and did Pump. Bath and wine o’clock me thinks. Not sure what’s happening this weekend, but it will no doubt be busy. This cold has now lasted for three weeks.

The cold continues into it’s third week

Again I wasn’t exactly too spritely up this morning. After I’d blown out about 3 gallons of snot it was back on to physics stuff. Got really stuck into it all today and once again did far more hours than I should of. But did squeeze in some extra Japanese. I’m still going through my flash cards each time and trying to remember all the words, it must be about 180 by now.

Nothing else done really. I managed to tank the pppoe connection by plugging the notebook into the Draytek and trying to look at the the current line status. It seems okay, but according to the Zen logs it’s been doing a resync every couple of days. I’m not losing any signel though so just something to keep an eye on. I want to see if the built in reset I’ve added to pfSense will kick the modem back online. Will have to wait to 4AM to find out.

Oh, so that’s no access to this before 4AM and no email for me either. Still I’m after a quiet night now. It’s torture porn night. Actually it’s the second half of the second Twilight film.

The sim card for my old Galaxy S turned up. My hacking attempts were successful and I managed to unlock it, so as a fallback I can use that one in Japan if I get a data sim.