Actually woken by the alarm this morning, normally I pre-empt it. Took dog to daycare and went back to bed.

Spent a full day on physics work again, already owed an hour and a half, now I’m owed two hours. I’ll put it to good use though and do extra Japanese tomorrow and Friday.

Picked up the dog. Another day without running, coming up to two weeks now. I’m able to do pump and combat, but the thought of running, just isn’t in me yet. Still, doing plenty of good work.

Did another Japanese unit, I hope to complete them all before we go, but will need to make a pretty good effort.

Think I’ll have a bath. Worked hard today.

Started slightly later than normal, but I had an hour and a half in hand from yesterday anyway. Still feeling rather full of snot, so still no running today and still coughing for England.

Working on physics again, got everything working near enough how I want, but seem to be getting integration issues. It comes down to the fact when one side has a positive slip I’m getting a massive force sent back to the other, this causes everything to reverse and then it all goes horribly wrong. I think it will require some kind of damping, a hell of a lot of it.

So didn’t end up finishing any earlier in the end. But did my Japanese as planned, all went okay. Had a look at my mini wireless access point to take to Japan, that works really well, impressed with that, it’s about the size of a matchbox. Read my mechanics book, I was right, please about that.

Sat down, ate salad. Looked at curtains. I think a blind will be too expensive and not really practical, so I think I’ll go with curtains, sort of ringlet style. Still a few hundred quid though. Anyway, need to finish the room off first.

Actually started today vaguely on time. Working on physics again, this time quite a lot to do with tyres and the Pacejka tyre model. After lots of messing about I’ve got a got setup mostly working now apart from a few issues with integration at low speeds. Such is life.

Took the dog out, it was very cold. Was debating for ages if to go to combat or not, as still coughing like hell. I went in the end and I was mostly fine. Came back and then worked far too late. But I’m going to knock that time off tomorrow for sure as I need to get back on with my Japanese.

Time for salad and then bed I think.

Had another very confusing day to do with forces, accelerations and inertias. At the end of it though I have something that seems to work reasonably well. It will certainly do for testing at the moment.

Er, walked the dog. Went and did Body Pump. Which is really the first kind of exercise I’ve done this week since combat. Still feeling a bit sick, but kind of on top of it now.

Another late finish, but will make up for illness this week.

Bath and wine time. Busy DIY weekend ahead.

Started vaguely on time and now finally finished after a ten hour shift with no breaks. All about torque again really. Getting confused with it coming out one end and how to apply it at the other. It’s all very annoying as I’m trying to get a system to do what it was really never designed to do.

New bread bin arrived, it’s a Brabantia.

I’m knackerd.

Got up at 6:30 AM to take the dog to day care. Went back to bed after not sleeping at all. So didn’t really start until gone 11. Got straight into it though. Still all physics related. Today I had to do something with Ackerman. Basically if you have a vehicle with turning wheels you want the outer wheel to turn at a shallower angle than the inner wheel. The question being, what is the angle? Well ok, if you take the steering angle to be the left wheel, so you are turning left. If the neutral steering position is at 0 then turning the wheel left will give you a negative angle. What you need to do is work out the intersection point of the wheel normal to the line of the rear axle. Which sounds more complicated than it actually is. Using basic trig, the angle at the wheel is half pi minus the wheel angle, so at 0 it will never intersect, then as it turns the opposite line length will get less. So using the tangent you know the wheel base and now the angle, so can work out the distance along the axle line. Now you know this, you have the centre point of the imaginary centre circle. If you then add on the axle width you have the adjacent, the opposite is just the wheel base. Using the arc tangent you can now work out the angle require to the right wheel. So what you are doing is producing two circles, one the inner wheel follows and the other the outer wheel follows, the object being that you then get less wheel scrub. This is called Ackerman steering.

Had another lot of cleaners turn up. They apparently got lost in Fishponds. I picked the dog up. Came back and did more physics stuff.

Did another Japanese lesson, still going well.

Had a bath as still feeling a little bit shit. Planning on drinking lots so I stand the chance of sleeping.

Didn’t start today too early as I felt somewhat fluey. So instead stripped the walls of paint stripper as that didn’t require too much visual focus. Then I had a very late breakfast and did some work. Still working on physics stuff, all coming together. Shame I didn’t get a great deal done.

Ordered more paint stripper. That should be the last lot now.

Going to have a bath and an early night I think. Dog off to day care in the morning.

So today I was back heavily into physics and integration problems. I couldn’t work out what the hell was going on. Walked the dog, still no improvement. Then just before I headed out to Body Combat I dumped out some acceleration figures, these were all over the place. For an object that was supposed to be accelerating I was getting negative accelerations.

So came back from combat and had a closer look. If I stepped through it in the debugger, then all was good, problem with that was, it was using a bigger time step. That was the root of the issue. I was taking the position of an object, then ticking it through physics and then taking the position of it again. Using the two positions I was then generating a velocity by taking the distance moved and then dividing it by the time step. Then using the difference between two velocities multiplied by the time step to calculate the acceleration. The problem is if you look at an object that’s being integrated by a physics tick of 1/60 of a second it moves all over the place. It’s then made even worse by floating point errors and then multiplying back by inverse times. So in the end I just stored the velocity and used that, everything then worked fine. The good news is I now know what the problem is. The back news is I need to write a whole load more shit to get round it all.

I’ve been feeling a little bit under the weather all day, so having an early night with some hot lemon and probably watch a bit of crap tv on the iPad.

Didn’t get up as early this morning as I was planning on. Put it this way it was heading more towards the afternoon than the morning. But I still put in a good eight hour shift. So that’s all the walls covered apart from the wall behind the bookshelf and the bit behind the radiator. I reckon I can peel off about Tuesday and nail the rest next Sunday. I also consumed about 15 cups of coffee, this meant that the last section of wall I no longer required a ladder.

Put the stuff in the bread maker, that’s now making pizza dough. Finished off the accounts. Ordered a new bread bin. Booked a hotel for our anniversary, also booked the Harry Potter tour thing in London, so will be a nice day away.

Right, I’m going to have a bath in the satisfaction that I’ve done a good days manual labour. I’ll then make pizza, I’ll probably be pissed by then.