Started at a reasonable time. Getting close to pre-cert build, very in fact, it’s tomorrow. So lots of buggering about with certification issues. Mainly to do with GUI scaling. Such is the excitement of my life. Captain James sent me a text and said he would call me tomorrow about Saturday, so God knows what’s going to happen then. Weather has all been a bit shit. Saturday is currently looking perfect with low wind. It will probably all go horribly wrong tomorrow and armageddon will occur. Walked the dogs, move wine bottles around the garage.

Went for a run. Came back and then washed out sixty odd bottles with my giant douche and bottle dryer. The white is unit clearing. Hopefully that will be ready Tuesday and then I can bottle that, then Thursday for the red. I need ti clear the garage out the weekend, so I have room for the bath. Somewhere I also need to stick in about one hundred and twenty bottles of wine. Plus I need to do my Naked Wines order, that’s another two hundred and forty quids worth of the stuff.

Today was still all about bloody GUI. And building data, all day hanging around building bloody data. Cleaners turned up, not sure how long they were here. But they seemed very proud that they cleaned my patio door. Then I come down to the kitchen and find the toaster has been relocated, the chopping board is nowhere to be found and the tin opener is now the other side of the room. Look, I pay you to clean my house, not Feng Shui my fucking kitchen. I’m sure I’ll come down one day and find the bed in the middle of the lounge. The excuse will be, “It allows the East-West winds to flow freely and the dragon can come in and savour the sun”, ah, fuck off.

Weather is still looking shit tomorrow, so that’s it now until the weekend I expect. Went to Pump, using by far the heaviest weights, this is just so I can gurn at myself in the mirror. Came back, did more work, then added the last lot of finings to the wine. Just wait for it to clear now.

Spent most of the morning building data and pissing about with GUI tools which kept running out of memory. Then did a minor render optimisation and finally finished off the day drawing black borders around a resized GUI. Today was bloody cold. Was going for a run but it was pissing down, so went to the gym and did it there instead. Came back and stabilised both barrels of wine, degassed, added the first lot of finings. Second lot will go in tomorrow. Then just need to wait for it to clear. Then it’s ready for bottling. Need t find somewhere to put it all then, that’s close to 120 bottles in total. Need to go to bed and study a crib sheet on R22 technical data.

Oh one pain in the ass thing that happened this morning. Couldn’t access bugger all. BBC news, weather, nothing. In the end traced it to DNS screwing over. Not sure if they’ve changed policy to stop different ISP accessing it, but in the end I just deleted the DNS entries and set it up for forwarding, this seemed to have got shot of the issue.

So today was all about the GUI. More specifically about the GUI and Guassian blur. And boy did it piss me off. Spent all day buggering about trying to stop it blurring one bit and blur something else. Multiple rewrites. Still wasn’t gaining ground.

Heard from Captain James, Thursday apparently looks good. Spoke to Rob, said I may be taking a few hours off Thursday as the weather was looking okay for a specific purpose. He enquired more. I said I needed to parachute from a moving helicopter. And then managed to milk it considerably more. I added that it needed to be done wearing a life jacket and arm bands and that the hardest thing was not setting alight the canopy with the flare. He then asked about the weather, I said, “Well you don’t want get blown on to the M5 do you?”. I kind of gave up at that point.

Went to gym and did Combat. There were four of us. Very intimate. Came back and had another attempt at blurring, this time it was more successful. I hate GUI.

So today after breakfast it was out with the Artex removal stuff. Goes on fairly easily, took a couple of hours but ran out just over half way. Cleared up the dog shit, walked the dogs and then went to the tip. Came back and then started on the scraping, that took a long long time. Part of it dried out by the time I got there, so that will need redoing. It’s a pretty good finish though. I reckon with a bit of sanding and filling it should all work out okay. Will need to order more removal stuff to finish it off. It’s really really messy.

Finished adding the annotations to the new video, here it is ‘The tin food challenge’.

So today started with a text from Captain James saying ‘I think we should wait for a nice day during the week’, which either means the weather was cack over Staverton of he’d had a bit of a heavy night. Either way, I went back to bed. Got up at a sensible time and had breakfast. I was going to shoot a new video today but Jamie was here, so instead I said we’d do another strange colab one. He suggested the ‘Tin food challenge’. So off we went and bought twelve random tins of foodstuffs. We came back, got right on it and produced about half hour of raw footage. We then drove off into town, decided there was nothing we actually wanted so stopped off in Toolstation and then drove to Cribbs, where we also failed to buy anything.

Came back and I put a little test patch on the bathroom ceiling. Left it for about half an hour and sure enough, with a scraper it takes all the Artex off. So tomorrow there’s a big job ahead of covering the whole ceiling with it and getting rid of the lot. Plus a couple of extra fun jobs of sealing the windows and going down the tip. But if it all goes to plan tomorrow I should end up with a fairly flat ceiling.

Edited the video, it’s now encoding and will shortly be uploading. I’ll probably make it live tomorrow and put a link in here. Now Jamie is about to cook, I may have been better off with what was in some of those tins.

So today was basically all about just one bug. Random crash, which thankfully one of my colleagues managed to get a 100% repro for. It was some lighting data which was being corrupted. Now we have this thing called ‘free block trasher’, what it does is on deallocation of memory it fills the block with a marker. This is so if you are accessing freed data it will then crash, as normally there is a chance the data would still be valid. Anyway, this lighting data was getting the free trasher marker all over it. Turned out to be quite interesting. As the renderer is multithreaded, theres a hell of a lot going on at once (well up to five things anyway), so there has to be some order and synchronisation between stuff. Now what was happening was the lighting data was being recreated at the same time some GUI code was trying to use it, so it was picking up the stale data on a random occasion. The GUI code wasn’t waiting for the lighting data to be written. So a prerequisite was added to the GUI code and all was well with the world.

Went to the gym and did Pump. Then spent almost another hour and a half working out with Laverne. I’ve got great looking arms. She kept saying I had wonderful definition so I kept staring at myself in the mirror and agreeing. Came back and fixed a problem with photo colour cubes.

Mother has signed up to a new social website called streetlife.com, apparently a way to meet your neighbours and make new friends. I did have a quick look at the site, it’s got a thing for matching interests but I couldn’t find a tick box for ‘self-centred shopoholic’, so she may be a bit fucked.

Possibility of flying tomorrow, but the weather looks a bit shit and really I want a bit of sun for what I’m doing next.

So today was all about rendering to a cube map. Now this sounds fairly straightforward until you try and actually implement it into the existing API. After several attempts at different ways I finally got it all sorted, one more job done. Walked the dogs. Sulked as Jamie only went to work for about ten minutes then spent the rest of the day pissing about. Didn’t speak to him. Went for a run. Came back and told him his household chores ethic was lacking. Oddly he’s now doing the dishes. They’ll need doing again as he’ll make a shit job of it. He still won’t shift the shit off the dining table.

Came back to an email from the plumber, all good, date sorted. So which plumber did I go for? Well not number three, he never even came back with a quote, which is just rude. One of the boiler people did that as well, came, talked the talk, buggered off and never heard of again. It won’t be plumber number two either, Mr Arrogant. He is just too expensive at over a grand more than anyone else. He would do a good job though, it’s the sort of thing archaeologists would dig up in a million years and go ‘Ah, yes, this is a bathroom done by Gregory’. So just like a woman picking a dress, she always goes back to the first one she saw. So I’ve gone for the first one, Mr. tiles on bonding, but the good part about that now is that it requires no bonding as all the walls are prepped. He’s agreed to what I’m supplying and what he’s supplying. So I need to sort the ceiling, seal the windows, reinforce the unit, do the template, get the marble done. Well, I’ve now got a couple of months to do it, so I’m pretty happy with that.

I was expecting Jamie to get up and go to work but apparently he was doing a ‘shift swop’. I’d already got up at 6:30 and taken Dillon to daycare. I went back to bed and got up at 10’ish. Today was all about finishing the SDK upgrade and getting that checked in. Which finally I did. At 3PM Jamie was still in bed. I moaned that he needed to walk Sasha and that Dillon was to be picked up at 3:30. He gave Sasha a three minute walk and off we went. Picked up Dillon, he’d been a good boy this week thankfully. Came back and carried on working. Jamie ate and created a mess. I went to the gym, cam back and did more work. Had to wipe down the walls in the winery as the red had got a bit too excited and jetted out the air-lock. It’s settled down a bit now but still producing more gas than me. Jamie now moaning about internet speeds, due to packet loss. Jamie makes tea, which consists of making an even bigger mess, towel has vanished, no doubt into his lair together with most of the dishes, where they will stay until they go mouldy. I change the bed, as I’ve asked him four times and given up. The kitchen looks like a tip, I really just can’t be arsed to tidy it up tonight. If I don’t do it, it will just sit there. I sorted out the recycling and put that out. I get moaned at about bandwidth again, oh and apparently I wake up with a hard-on thinking about doing the bathroom. Sometimes I think I only exist to provide a never ending stream of cash and a cleaning service. And the weekend weather over Staverton is looking shit.

Hmm. SDK upgrades. They are as exciting as they sound. Got most of it working early on, then I noticed shadows were all over the place. With about fifteen minute turn around times it was a real pain to track down. The fault? Well, nt mine, lets just say it was a certain compiler not written by me. Mind you it was building a piece of bloody awful hlsl code. I just it to something more boring, lost about fifty instructions and it also worked. So just a couple of libs to rebuild and that should be it.

Went for a run. Quite a nice evening, if bloody cold. But had multiple layers including plenty of lycra. Did about six miles. Came back and transferred the white into another bucket as it was just below 1010. Tested the red, that’s still about 1030, so I’ll test that again Thursday.

Plumbers obviously don’t want work, or have more than they can possibly manage. I’m sure there are poor plumbers, just like there are poor farmers. Maybe not.

Sat down to eat and put Children in Need on. S-Club 7 popped up. Now apparently they broke up twelve years ago. Now I can’t sing and 99.9% of people who’ve ever heard me murder Frank Sinatra will attest to that. This makes me a bloody good judge of other people who can’t sing. Now, S-Club, boy did you nail that one. They were flatter than fifty year old coke. Mind you they are ageing well, apart from their incomes obviously. Still, they put on a good show, every one enjoyed it and that’s what its all about. You may be total shit inside, but as long as you put on a good show, then every one is happy.