Working on more maths trig stuff. In the end it was a little pointless as most of the stuff I was trying to get it to use was double precision. Anyway, that’s all done now. Then did a couple of CPU bits and now back to GPU. I’m trying to time the amount of time it takes to draw nothing, which at first seems a bit naff but it is useful. You can see how much overhead your draw calls are taking. So things like shader and buffer sets still take time. The object being to optimise this down as much as possible.

Went to Combat, was fun I guess. Came back and did some more work. Think I’ll have an early night, what to try and start early tomorrow so I can get out early evening.

Mail server seems to be getting a lot of spam recently. I’ve updated some of the mail rules, which will probably mean that it will fail completely.

This morning I could have quite happily woken up dead, I just wasn’t really in the mood. Jamie brought me breakfast and buggered off to work. To cut a long story short I parked up at Thornbury leisure centre at 12:45. I then had a great time, almost six full hours walking across fields and being very solitary, except for the point where I came across Shrek and Princess Fiona, who were doing the same circuit but in the opposite direction. I managed thirty-five caches, I needed thirty-seven to make two fifty, but if I don’t do that Tuesday I will need shooting. So to the person who is reading this…I’ve ordered the t-shirt and the patches, it will be going back with Megan Tuesday. Came back and logged everything then had a bath. Watched the world cup final. Germany scored in extra time and to be honest I think they actually deserved it, so well done them.

I’m looking forward to a week where I was rather better off being dead.

Oh, as a side note I received this email from my mother:

Hi Tim,
I will let you know when I make the cake – I bought all the ingredients yesterday.
I have washed your curtains and they look nice but the colour ran into the rubber inside the washing machine door, so it has orange stains on it now. Your dining room floor must be sloping as two of the curtains have a 3” hem, one is 2.25” tapering to 1.5” and the fourth one only has a 1” hem and they were obviously made to measure. I made yours all the same length, so that is why two of them are longer, so I feel happier now that it was not my fault. I will hang yours as they are and then pin them up to just above the rad and cut them off, as I have the same sort of problem, as my rail is not level.
Love,
Mum

….

I’d like to officially point out, that I really just don’t give a fuck.

Woke up fairly early but couldn’t really be arsed to get up. Managed it eventually. Read the paper. Walked Sasha. Went to Tesco’s and stocked up on petrol. Then I drove over to Cotham and walked into town. Visted ‘Pride’ briefly and then walked bad again. Did the accounts. Then it was time to head off to town for my sisters birthday. We went to a place called ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ which was a magic club. I didn’t really have great expectations but we ended up having a really good time. I drove, so was very sober. All our group ended up on stage at one time or another even Jamie. Sarah was up first which was dead amusing. The second ‘magician’ I must admit wasn’t really my taste. But the act after the interval were great, they were called, ‘The wizards of odd’. They did a great forty-five minute set. Drove home via the Chinese.

There’s something going off at work at the moment which I’d like to comment on, but I’m just doing my best to avoid at the moment. I’m just going to see if it blows over.

So got up this morning at 7:15, I was at the garage by about 7:45, dropped off car. Had to wait until 8AM for the curtesy car to arrive. It was the bloody Agila again, but this time a red one. With no petrol in. It’s still like a shopping trolly but without the charisma. I put a fiver of fuel in, I did about twenty miles total so I guess that was fair. Got home by about 8:20 so started work. Far too early. They rang at just gone twelve to say it was all done. There is some bush thing broken on the turbo which needs replacing. They said they would phone when it arrives in. And they will. They also won’t charge for fitting it. I do love Dan Harford, it’s a main dealer and it’s family owned, the same service manager has been there for years. You never get the feeling you are about to be ripped off. Although the service and MOT was over three hundred quid. Still that was a main service, it won’t get that again for another three years, based on the mileage I do. I’ll probably dump it before then anyway. Picked it up at about two, dropped off the trolly.

Work wise was hectic, changed all normal libc trig calls to use a vector library, it’s about five times the speed. Also had some fun with running out of system resources on semaphores. Went to Pump, did PT with Laverne. Started editing a new dog video from the footage we took last week.

Things to do tomorrow, then out in the evening for a few hours, Jamie is working Sunday so we won’t stay out too long.

Spent all day basically replacing trig functions with a mapped copy and sorting out issues between single and double precision versions. It was heavily grunt work, but it did make quite a nice change from GPU stuff. Tomorrow I have to do some fun vector ops to replace sin / cos / tan. There’s also some odd issues with modulo, still one for tomorrow.

Received an email from mother. Offering to make cake.I should have spotted something coming at that point. So I replied and just said I was very busy. Then came what I was expecting, ‘So we won’t be going to Weymouth then?’. You just know everything must have some kind of ‘pay load’. I look forward to my cake.

Walked the dogs. Finished a bit early after last nights mammoth session. Had to take Jamie out to some customer. Bit into my evening.

Anyway, I went out, walked all the way down the A38 to Filton. Found a geocache I have been looking for three times now. Walked back the exact same way. Found a provisional drivers license. It belonged to a fairly cute looking nineteen year old. Googled the address, it was about an eighteen minute walk. It was a truly beautiful evening, very warm, it was about nine thirty but thought I’d make the effort. Found the place, dad answered, he was very grateful. Son appeared, looked nothing like his photo, very greasy black hair. I didn’t want to bang him, I just wanted to wash through a couple of bottles of shampoo. Anyway, that was my good dead for the decade. Walked home, didn’t get back in until ten thirty. It was still a beautiful evening. Came back and did the shopping list.

Up early tomorrow to drop the car off for it’s service and MOT.

Sleep wasn’t bad. Wasn’t great. Got up at 6:30, took Sasha to daycare. Went back to bed, cleaners arrived just after eleven. Jamie was at work for once. Spent the morning tracing a rather odd issue with fat render target formats. Beats shader debugging anyway. In the end went for a thinner format as it caused less problems. Walked Dillon in the nature reserve, he’s actually a pleasure to walk on his own as he’s not aggressive at all. Spent the afternoon shorting out some other stuff. Picked up Sasha. Went to the gym and did Pump. It was so damn hot I almost passed out. Came back and then worked far too late again, I’ve got just so much to do.

Confirmed that the car is actually booked in Friday, so up at the crack of dawn then and get it in so hopefully get it back in good time.

So this morning started with more shader debugging, more of that excitement later. The car was booked into Halfords Autocentre at 12:30. I got there at 12:30. Then waited at the desk. Then waited longer while the guy behind the desk moaned about having ‘all these orders coming in’. Yes, well I ordered these Friday, it’s now Tuesday, so now I have to wait while you sort through all your fucking emails. Then you don’t find it, then you ask what size tyre it was, don’t ask my name or registration, no go for the fucking complex question. Then you say that you have to see if they have arrived yet, sorry, I ordered fucking Friday still. If they were available on Amazon prime they would have been on the car Saturday. So he procrastinates longer, then finds the order, then after another ten minutes manages to print it out. Then asks which tyres I want replacing, I was a little pissed off by this point so responded with, ‘The ones on the car’. We settled on the rear, I asked for them to then be rotated to the front (so new tyres on rear, then swap front and rear so new on front). He then had to produce a job card, which took another twenty minutes. By this time half an hour had passed before the fitter even got the job card. Now, no issues at all with the fitter, he was built like a bus and covered in tattoos. Did a great job, exactly what I asked for, even didn’t lose the valve caps. Took him about an hour, fair enough no problem there. During this time a lady came in for a battery for her key fob. This was ordered over a week ago, it hadn’t arrived, from the parts store, across the car park. It took over forty-five minutes to get a battery from a 100 yards away and stick it in a key fob. Meanwhile other blokie at reception was asking when my service and MOT was due, I said tomorrow and it wasn’t being done here. Several other customers arrived, he was obsessed with trying to sell them fuel additives. It’s interesting as he was explaining to one customer how it improved the performance of his diesel. Then the next customer he oddly now changed to a petrol. These two were like the old codgers from the muppets. Everyone was told to wait and there was no sense of urgency. My keys and job card arrived back. This was passed from Burt to Earnie to produce an invoice. This took ten minutes. I didn’t want to have a discussion about how I had a timing belt and not a chain, I also wasn’t going to go into what a stage two upgrade was. All I wanted after almost two hours were my bloody keys back. Did he have them there? Oh no, had to vanish off out to the back room and get them out the safe, what the fuck were they doing in there in the first place. Now the fun bit, he hands me a bundle of bile with the invoice in and says theres a card on front to fill in a survey and I could win a hundred quid. He then said, ‘Remember to give us ten out of ten for customer service’. I enjoyed filling out the survey, they got ten, but without the initial one.

Anyway, shaders. Had some serious issues with barycentrics. I’m still having serious issues with barycentrics. This has gone back to developer support, they are now having issues with barycentrics. Had enough by about seven, so headed out, was going for a long one but the GPS was playing up, so ended up doing one I wasn’t planning on then came back and did a bit more work to make up for lost time.

So car in for a service Thursday, or maybe Friday…but that’s a different story.

Today was all about shaders again. Trying to debug them is a frighteningly complicated task when you are doing at at an assembler level. Also it processes 64 threads in parallel, so you just have to think 64 processes at a time, which gets quite fun. Think I’ve found a flaw in the whole thing as well, which means I may have wasted quite a bit of time.

Booked the car in for a service, pricey. New tyres tomorrow, pricey. Still, it will save me pumping up the rear left again, four years I’ve been doing that, it’s got a nail in it.

Booked the holiday, couldn’t deal with too much stress so just booked the same one as last year, we won’t get as nice a room though, so may be we will spend less time in it this time.

Went to the gym and did Combat, not one of my best performances. Came back and did more shader debugging, not fun.

So why haven’t you subscribed to my YouTube channel? It contains lots of great videos. Look all you have to do is click here:

Saturday to be honest nothing much exciting happened. I got up late, walked the dogs and then went off to Easter Compton to do some GeoCaching. Found about four, was then going to head into town but decided I couldn’t be arsed so went home and edited a video instead. We went to the Italian in the evening which was lovely, but empty. Had an early night and read a book.

So Sunday, we stayed in bed too long, I had breakfast. I was just going to go out and do some GeoCaching but decided it would be nice to do something together. Normally, unless we are on holiday (where we try to avoid each other anyway) we don’t really see much of each other. So we went to the Swindon outlet centre and went to the SuperDry store and bought some nice clothes. The discounts offered actually far outweigh the petrol. We also did a GeoCache. Came back, then we took the dogs out, attached to cameras. So that’ll be a fun one to edit.

Still trying to find somewhere for the holiday. Ho hum.

Spent most of the morning fairly gripped to the live feed of the court proceedings of Rolf Harris. He was eventually given five years nine months. He will spend three years in prison. One an end for an 84 year old. I’m still not 100% sure where I stand on this. One part of me says this happened so long ago that we should have some kind of statute of limitations and it wouldn’t be possible to prosecute, the other says ‘throw away the key’. One things for sure though, I’m disappointed. I met him some twenty odd years ago, when he had the parody of ‘Stairway to heaven’ in the charts. He was doing pant at Bath theatre royal with Leslie Joseph and Sylvester McCoy. He was on the phone at the reception saying that he was getting ‘piss all royalty’ for it. Will always remember that, it was the Bath Spa Hotel. Another thing that is quite disappointing is back when Nat was alive, she went to his last gig in Bristol. The charges had just been brought against him. There he read out a letter of support and got a standing ovation. She has now passed, he is now a poedophile, she will be spinning in her grave, if she was alive she also would be very disappointed.

Work wise it was still all about shader debugging and divide by zero errors.

Walked the dogs. Went to gym and did Pump, followed by a session with Laverne. Finished the new helicopter video.