So today started actually quite well. I was working on splitting up a render task into multiple threads, it was fairly straightforward and worked first time. Which considering what a shite week it’s been was very nice.

Went to the gym and did Pump with Laverne. Afterwards we did are usual PT sessions, she keeps saying ‘wow, your getting really strong’. Massive arms, massive belly. Got some petrol, managed to get 12p off a litre which isn’t bad. When I came back Jamie was in the bath. I finished off a few things then joined him. We had a bit of an Archimedes problem, but Dillon was there to lap up the bubbles. We did adult things, Dillon was in the room but I don’t think he’s been scared.

Time for pizza. Flying tomorrow morning. Issuing summons in the afternoon, should be a fun day.

So started just before mid-day. Hey I was up half the night debugging, then other half of the night I was getting hammered after spending half the night debugging. Had another GPU bug, thankfully it also happened on DX11 so passed it on to someone else. Did some fun optimisations on memory copying. Then started on splitting up an environment map.

Walked Sasha, Dillon hid under the bed. Finished at about half five. Went to Spin. Came back and did about another half hour. Then I carried on editing the second USA road trip video. How the hell I’m going to do them live from the trip I don’t know. It takes around ten hours to get ten minutes worth of video and that’s if all the sound and colour are balanced and there are no effects to add. That helicopter music video I did took the best part of twenty hours. But hey..it was on Radio 1.

So tomorrow I’ve got one big task I need to do plus a small SDK update. Next week will be a bit of a biggie I think, Anti-aliasing.

Got flying on Saturday. If I die the game will ship with lots of Jaggies. (Google MSAA if you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about.)

So to recap, there’s a new video coming out hopefully tomorrow, then another one about mid next week. We’ll also hopefully be filming a new one next Wednesday, which isn’t anything to do with the trip, but will involve a lot of plasticine.

I’m now about to watch a film with Jamie Campbell Bower in, mainly because it has Jamie Campbell Bower in with very few clothes on.

Managed to get to sleep at about 4am. Woke up by the alarm at 6:30am. Took Dillon to daycare. Went back to bed. Managed a bit more sleep. So then it was back on to the fun GPU bug. Made the mistake of spending the rest of the trusting the GPU debugger. Very bad mistake, must of wasted the best part of ten hours believing what it was saying, when it was completely wrong. Bug was in a different area. Good news was it was finally fixed about 1am. Bad news is there’s another GPU bug to do tomorrow. I’m in no hurry to get up though, may take most of tomorrow morning off.

Did go to Pump. Worked on arms. There was so much on my mind that I didn’t really notice me straining on anything. Maybe biceps a bit. Trudie always plays it about 10% faster than normal speed anyway.

So, still have about three videos to edit. Holiday coming up. Just a couple of things to get for it now.

Have an interesting little story coming up. Need to wait a little bit as I may still have to issue a court summons.

Didn’t sleep well again last night. So woke up feeling tired, again. Started with being informed about some crash bug. Sorted that. Then wasted about half a day trying to sort something that just wasn’t actually doable. Was finishing off then found another two bugs, both are rather strange, but aren’t fixed. I also need to look at a speed issue as the frame rate has dropped by half.

Felt tired, but went to the gym anyway. Managed almost a full session on the cross-trainer. Came back and did some video editing, not happy with the way it was going so stopped for the moment. It is rather funny though. I may split it into two and do an ‘out-takes’ video as well. I did manage to get most of the audio synced though between the DSLR using the R0de Video Mic Pro and the Tascam DR-05. Needs lots of work though, forty-five minutes long, needs to be about twelve at the absolute max.

Sat down and watched some telly. Will have an early night again tonight and try and get some sleep. Dillon is at daycare tomorrow. Need to have a good run at work as well, will be nice to get those two bugs out of the way by mid-day and then this optimisation thing in the afternoon.

Woke up, felt tired. Started work. Today was all about verifying normals. Are they linear or sRGB? In the end, no one really cared as you can sample them either way and look pretty much okay anyway. Walked Sasha. Went to the gym and did Combat. It was actually pretty exhausting after yesterdays work. Came back and did more work. I was going to finish on time and do a few things, in the end I worked too bloody long as usual. Then did a bit of editing on the Mac. Finally went down to eat. Think I’m going to eat a bit more then venture to bed.

There’s a new video up, “The Great USA Road Trip – Part 1”, I’m sure this will be the first of many parts. Part two was filmed on Saturday, but needs a lot of editing and audio syncing. I’m still trying to work out a good way of reducing hiss on recordings, I found a good video about doing it directly to the EOS but want to get it working on the DR-05 as well.

So woke up this morning after a number of disturbing dreams. Can’t remember any of them, but I know since I’ve ceased med’s my brain is all over the place. Had breakfast, Jamie gave me coffee in a wine glass as we were out of mugs. Finally got up. Took the the bloody washing machine out again. Then got the new saw out. Cut off about 30mm in front of the washing machine. Then started getting on with the serious sawing. I ended up replacing five sections of laminate. It’s actually quite a challenge, because they are all tongue and grooved, so you have to be quite creative with a chisel and wood glue. I did a bit more trim around the edge as well. Basically I did an eight hour day, replacing damage caused by Jamie. What doesn’t kill us, just fucks our knees.

Had a bath. Drank vast quantities of wine. Need to cook food. Got a full week of complex work to look forward to. At least it doesn’t involve wood glue.

Had a bit of a lie in this morning, it was needed. Another week where I did far more work hours than I planned. I do get well paid for it, but now and then you just want to enjoy a bit of time off. So I had a lie in with Dill’s. Sasha was on the landing, she was quite happy, looking forward to breakfast. We all got up, had a pee, then had breakfast. I read the paper then went back to sleep. Some bastard stole my USB cable, I was walking round the office trying to find it. My mind works in mysterious ways. Spent a couple of hours editing a video on the iMac. I walked Sasha, had a light lunch then headed out. Went to B&Q and picked up a couple of bits, then to the reptile shop and got some crickets. I then parked up in Cotham and walked into down. Purchased nothing. Came back home. Did battle with the iMac trying to upload a video.

Decided then to do ‘The Great USA road trip Part 2’ video with Jamie. So we shot that while lying on the bed. It’ll be a while before that one’s edited. Part one is only just processing on YouTube. Did the accounts. Jamie decided he didn’t want Fajita’s so we’ve ordered Indian.

Forgot to mention that yesterday I managed to get ‘Having an existential crises’ into a work forum post, which I was quite proud of. Also, yesterday I did Pump at the gym followed by a really good session with Laverne. Is it wrong to enjoy almost passing out lifting half my bodyweight while grunting into a mirror? I actually really enjoyed it, I think it’s called endorphins. This morning I felt really wide and pumped up. I’m actually really enjoying these extra sessions, my upper body is almost something I’m proud of.

Now a difficult one. It’s coming up to my birthday. That I don’t have a problem with. But four days before is mothers birthday. (We will forget mothers day, which I’ve always consider a bunch of bullshit invented by the card industry anyway). Now traditionally we would go to bingo and then to the Indian (For some reason she actually thinks I kind of enjoy this, maybe back when I was going through a very confusing state of denial after breaking up with Nat it made sense, but now it just seems to be the worst possible thing on earth). Now, I’m still up for doing this. I’m quite happy to pay for everything, all she has to do is pick me up and drop me back. That’s actually not all. She has to keep her bloody mouth shut. If she can go the entire evening without talking about money, lack of it, bit’s that need doing or repairing, parts of either herself or her car falling apart or QVC then I may actually enjoy it. I have a feeling though that although she hasn’t bought a been off QVC for over a month now, she will revert to form and I’ll go back to despising her with a vengeance. Mind you, if she can’t talk about those things then what will she talk about? God she may have to listen to me, that’ll be hell for her for sure.

I woke up this morning after having a very vivid conversation with my mother about Stevie Nicks’ substance abuse issues. Which is odd as I’m not sure my mother had ever heard of Fleetwood Mac.

Work was hell. No shaders in sight. Today was all about srgb. That’s gamma correction. You want to know more? Okay, well you did ask. So normal diffuse textures are saved out as sRGB, that is they are gamma corrected. So when you sample them in the shader you reverse the process and turn sRGB back to linear. Now my concern was that all dds textures were being converted to sRGB. Normal maps are however linear, not sRGB encoded. Now the fun comes that the texture converter de-gamma’s a non sRGB texture, does bugger all to it and then re-gamma’s it again but sets the format to sRGB. This is then sampled as linear, but the header takes priority so its actually reading it as sRGB when it’s linear. And you think I have it easy?

This morning while I was waiting for shaders to build I did finish the first edit on my new video though. Hopefully get that finished tomorrow.

My new mini audio recorder arrived as well, so hopefully I can get really good sound on the next one.

Went to Pump. Afterwards had a really good session with Laverne. We went to the downstairs gym after pump as it had heavier weights. I surprised myself and her by doing arm exercises with 16Kg bells. I reckon I could do 18Kg now. Not bad considering I was really struggling with 12Kg a month or so a go. So these after class sessions are really working out for me. We then went upstairs and did some TRX work (basically adult bondage). Came back and did more bloody work. I’ve done far too many hours this week. Next week I may take a few mornings off to catch up with some personal stuff.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday. Me and Dill’s were watching a programme about dangerous dogs. Lots of Staffie’s. He went into cat mode and hid behind me on top of the couch. There was a very sad bit at the end where they said “These are the lucky ones, every year 10,000 dogs are put down”. There then followed an image of a perfectly nice looking medium dog being taken out of it’s kennel, tail wagging. The next thing you see is a vet with a stethoscope seeing if it’s heart has stopped. Please, if you are thinking of getting a dog or a cat (they are far cheaper to run than children) then go to your local animal shelter. Don’t fund puppy farmers, or people who flog puppies down the pub. There are just far too many abandoned animals. Remember, a dog or a cat is only a small portion of your lifetime, but to them you are the whole of their lifetime.

I’ll breeze over work as it was very dull, all about shader compiling. It finished with a compiler that was crashing and more questions than answers. I’ll give it one more day before I move on to something else if I don’t get any answers.

Nothing interesting happened. I went to Spin with Laverne. Did some video editing on my new video about our road trip.

Now to the title. It’s torture porn night, but I’m out of horror movies. I’d got hold of a copy of ‘Stand by me’ on blu-ray. This was a complete remaster in 1080p. Now I was quite interested in the fact it had a Dolby 5.1 sound track. This is one of my all time favourite films. Not just because I had a River Phoenix fetish (I met him once, story for another day). God I’d bang him so hard, if only he wasn’t dead. I remember that day, I woke up to the radio news. It was the day after halloween, he’d OD.’d on Heroin and cocaine outside the ‘Viper Room’, on Sunset strip. A venue that twenty years later I stood outside of. I was working at ‘System’s Reliability’ at the time. Anyway, back to the film. It’s on now. The video transfer is fantastic. Kiefer Sutherland looks about twelve, you forget that all you know him for now is ’24’. You also forget that even though it was directed by Rob Reiner, the acting is wooden and in some places bloody awful. River was quoted saying that he wished he was never in the film. It also starred Will Wheaton, who went on to do very little but have a weird part in Star-Trek next generation. Corey Feldman who went on to do a huge amount of films with Corey Haim, known as the ‘two Corey’s’. So looking back at the four actors in it, remembering this was made in I think 1985, one is dead, one is the friend of another one who’s dead, one went weird, grew very tall and disappeared with an alien and the other one I’ve never heard of again. Incidentally the film is based on a book, ‘The Body’, by Stephen King, bet you didn’t know that. It’s actually a short story, it contains two sub stories, one of which is about a pie eating contest which is on the film, the other one is about a dream sequence with lots of naked floating boys with placid penis’s, which isn’t, because it’s shit. I can’t remember the name of the book, it was something like, ‘Different seasons’. I reckon it probably holds the record though for the most amount of films generated from one book. ‘The Body’, got turned into ‘Stand By Me’. Then ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’, got turned into one of the highest rated films of all time. ‘Apt Pupil’, got turned into what I thought was a very good film, but few have heard of, then there was, ‘The Breathing Method’, which I think was also turned into a film. I bet he made a few quid from that anyway. All his other films based on his books have been shit. Apart from perhaps, ‘Maximum Overdrive’, which had Halter Graham in it, someone else who I’d bang. Film still going, a very young John Cusack has just popped up playing Will Wheaton’s brother. The film is narrated by Richard Dreyfus, who was old then and is probably older now (okay, no probably in that).

After my mild digression, can you generate a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack from the original mono and make it sound good? If you can they haven’t managed it on this film.

It’s still very weird watching a film I was pretty much obsessed with some twenty-nine years later. Things have moved on a lot, however I sometimes feel that certain parts of me are still back in 1985.

Remember folks, if you like my completely incoherent wibblings on various bollocks, you can follow me on twitter @mannmansion or you can see me talking complete bollocks in the flesh on my YouTube channel.