So after waking up and doing coffee, I managed another chapter in my air law book. Not too bad. Read the paper, finally got up and took Sasha out. Had a light lunch, then we headed off and parked at Cotham. Walked right into town, across it, out the other side and then into Ashton Court. Took about an hour and a half. There we sat around for half an hour and watched nothing happening, apart from some bloke flying around on a sort of parasailing thing. It then rained. It continued to rain for the next two hours as we slowly made our way back to the car. We didn’t see one balloon. We did however see a Spitfire and a Hurricane, which I managed to grab some video of. Talking of videos, new one up today, it’s all helicopter stuff. Jamie is now going to cook for me, I may need a bottle of wine first.

So woke up this morning and wondered why Jamie was still there. He announced it was his day off. Still he got to unpack the shopping. Work was fulfilling, in that it kept me busy all day and most of the evening. I was converting instanced primitives from having their world matrix as part of a vertex buffer to having it all in a constant buffer. Was quite fun I guess. All works anyway.

Went to Pump. Then did an arm session with Laverne afterwards. Chest is coming back up to a good weight now. Came back and did more work. Then edited a new helicopter video. This is a bit of a long one but demonstrates quite a few manoeuvres.

Jamie has been working on my new outro. It isn’t bad. Okay, it’s a lot better than my effort. So new video has it on. That’s still currently processing for ‘rolling shutter’ stabilisation issues. Oh the joys of being a top-flight video producer.

Woke up rather early, but strangely Jamie had already left for work so can’t have been that early. I had a very strange dream, where I was viewing my old house. Now this is very odd as I never have observation type dreams, I’m always in them. Usually having sex with Keith Lemon and the Spice Girls. Anyway, there was a man there who was putting out fortifications around the kerb edge to stop people parking on it. It’s good to see that it’s not only me who would do this, okay it is, and my own mind. I got up and had coffee.

Work was quite annoying. Split the vertex buffers into position and everything else. Did absolutely nothing speed wise. Then I removed anisotropic filtering from environment maps, again, didn’t do anything exciting.

I walked Sasha. Then this evening I decided to go for a bike ride, first time in ages, quite a pleasant evening. Didn’t really aim to go anywhere, ended up going to the old house to check out any fortifications being added. There were none. Although the Leylandii needs a good trimming. The kerbs in a hell of a state and the bricks on the path have crumbled to pieces. They’ve also replaced the alarm by the look of it. The whole road is a tip, the only person who lives there still I think is lady chaverly. I have no regrets about leaving there. I also cycled to Frenchay, thought I’d pop by Mark’s place. No sign of the old Supra, it probably rusted away some time ago now. There was someone in the front room, I didn’t investigate further.

Came back and did the shopping list, had a shower. Torture porn night.

So got up far too early, took Sasha to daycare and had to wait for ten minutes before anyone turned up. Went back to bed. Today was basically all about testing and SDK update, which went to plan. Also looked at a bit of an odd one, combining the outputs of a light pre pass. That resulted in not much, it appears that multiple render targets have very little impact. I’m now looking at shadow rendering which appears to be a bit vertex bound. Cleaners arrived, did a half arsed job upstairs and vanished again.

Anyway, while data was building I took Dillon out for a walk. We had the usual row about him not having his nose harness on, but after I tugged him out from under the bed he was fine. We went out up to the nature reserve, he went in the water, was quite happy. On the back straight there was this woman, her kid and some small poodle type thing. As we got close, Dillon started pulling. So I said to him, ‘Oi nosey, come on’. Then suddenly this woman shot round and stared at me. I almost had to duck. God woman, turn that thing into wind or you’ll generate a vortex ring and your head will plummet through your neck. Fuck me, it needed a collision warning light on it. I’m sure she thought I was referring to her. No I was referring to my dog, I walked on, she kept on staring at me like a deranged weather-cock atop a weeble. I didn’t look back, I knew she was still rotating towards me as her nose caused a bit of an eclipse. We made it back intact, with no mid-air collisions.

Picked up Sasha. Did more work. Went to Pump. Drank protein shake. Did more work. Now sat down, thinking about work.

Today I looked at rain a lot. Both physically and in code, it wasn’t very interesting. Didn’t really make any great gains. Finished off doing an sdk update. It rained. Made a nice change really. Went out and bought some crickets. Then found the last sort of local Geocache, which has been outstanding for a while. The rest of the local ones are puzzle caches. Came back and took an air-law test. Got 75% pass, which wasn’t bad as I haven’t even read half the book yet. Loads of questions on the ‘quadrantal rule’, which I didn’t have a clue about so looked it up. It’s all to do with magnetic track. So if your true track is 80 degrees with a 5 degree west variation then the magnetic track is 85 degrees (west is best, so add it), so it will be an odd flight level in the thousands. Second quad would be odd plus five hundred feet, third even and forth would be even plus five hundred again. This is how planes avoid hitting each other in uncontrolled air space. Another early night I think.

I guess I can’t complain really. My cure for the metadata did actually work but there are some artefacts elsewhere so it wasn’t worth continuing with. It did lead to a solution for another issue though, so that worked out okay in the end. Then spent ages optimising another load of stuff. It was very dull and very repetitive. Walked Sasha, popped in the vets and got worming tablets.

Went to Combat, my calve muscles are still aching, that was before I went. Did more work, ate salad. Think I’ll have an early night. Oh, I have a small wart on my finger, I’m not paying a fortune for wart freezer. I bought a can of pipe freezer, same stuff, tenth of the price.

This morning started off with breakfast for three (I had coffee, they had a tin of something). I then decided to split the day up into hours of studying air law and hours of something else. So cracked on with the book. Then took the dogs out, then another hour, did some server maintenance, then another hour etc. By the end of the day I’d done about four hours, walked the dogs, updated the server, did some gardening and went out for a run. I didn’t go anywhere else as the weather was a bit hit and miss. Actually I ended up studying “Effects of thunderstorms on aircraft”, while sat in a thunderstorm, which was quite ironic. Did the accounts. Then we went to the Italian. I did have a complaint about the Bolognese ravioli, there wasn’t enough of it. So he went and got me another plate of it. We also had some ridiculous offers, so even after have a vat of lager it was only forty-two quid. Came back and went to bed. Same again tomorrow, only without the Italian and more flying.

So after yesterdays epic fail on packing interpolators I decided to do it all manually, which is a real pain in the ass. Anyway, after a couple of hours I’d finished it. It produces an extra 300 shader instructions and ran 300 micro seconds slower. Time well spent. So my next ‘great idea’ was sharing h-tile meta data. So compute shader was written etc. Tested, actually worked, was quicker as well. Then I looked at alpha to coverage stuff, completely twitted. So another epic fail. Although later that evening I think I may have a work around for that one.

Went to the gym. First time this week, thanks to Combat being cancelled and putting a woman behind a curtain. New Pump. Difficult to set the weights up. Anyway, battled through it, then did a session with Laverne afterwards. My neck now hurts.

Picked the dogs up. Sasha was very excited, they were only there one day. Work was all about packing. Well taking two lots of float fours and compressing them to one float four. Now the compiler has a feature to do this automatically. It’s a shame though that this appears to not actually fucking work. Still a fun day all the same. Did eleven hours. Went for a run. Still haven’t studied air law. I have flying on Sunday.