So yet another sleepless night, but no more weird dreams. I did get a bit of sleep in the morning though. Work was rather dull if somewhat progressive. Fixed and went through a lot of bugs. Still more to go. Walked the dogs with Jamie lunchtime. Went to Pump and did a session with Laverne. Food consisted of two tins of macaroni cheese and two slices of toast. This is living the gourmet highlife.

Even though I was completely exhausted I still failed to get to sleep. At about 4AM I was drowning in my own sweat so got up and went in the spare room. There I actually drifted off pretty quickly. I decided I needed to buy a piano, so ended up in a shop which I’d apparently been in before, owned by some guy and his mother. No idea about the mother but the guy was really cute, he was in his mid-twenties, so it was quite odd, I usually lose interest by the time they have their A-level results. Anyway we got chatting, we ended up on the couch talking about god knows what. After about an hour of talking bollocks he turned and asked if I was going to stay the night. I gave him a big kiss, then showed him my ring, said thanks for the offer, but that I was married. I never did get the fucking piano.

Woke up and spent quite a long time implementing fences. These are not the sort you put round a garden. Although, oddly they were required around the grass code. I had a problem where the grass was being produced async, but due to various GPU buffer weirdness it was possible to do a buffer overwrite. So I had to add an end of pipe fence to just after the buffer was last used, this was to make sure the async event didn’t tank the buffer. Anyway, after multiple cups of coffee and lots of cruising porn I finally had that working. Then spent a few hours trying to fix a bug in a system that wasn’t working, then found out that system never worked anyway so gave up on that. I’ll probably rip it all out tomorrow just to tidy it up a bit. I spent the rest of the day starting to go through my vast outstanding bug list, thankfully a lot of them I’m passing on to other people.

Went for a run, about four minutes slower tonight, got held up in a couple of places by bad traffic. Finished editing part one of new video, it covers depression and mother, they are actually two separate subjects, but so easily be combined. Tonight I’m looking forward to going fishing with Adam Rickitt and then banging him senseless on my private yacht.

So failed to sleep yet again, so got up at 6:30 and took Sasha to daycare. Went back to bed, did manage to get an hours sleep then got up again to take Dillon to the vet for his kennel cough booster. Came back and started on work. Cleaners arrived later than usual. I worked all the way through until about quarter to six. Mainly working on a couple of odd bugs. Still a lot of work to do though. Went to Pump, average effort I guess. Came back, drank protein shake, did more bloody work. Was planning on finishing editing new video, ended up doing more work. Didn’t finish until very late. Ate salad, did more work. Now sat down and it’s gone midnight. Hopefully I will sleep tonight though. Back to running tomorrow.

Yet another fairly sleepless night, think I finally dropped off about 5AM. Started work vaguely on time. Tested a load a stuff I had from yesterday then spent the bulk of the day fixing a rather bizarre bug with a ring buffer. Anyway, got there in the end. Missed a parcel, postman I think got frightened off by the dog. Went for a run, pretty good, I’m always within a minute of the same time which is a bit strange. Came back, had a shower, did a bit more work.

Ate salad. So it’s now eleven days until the holiday. So nothing but salad, tea, coffee and water until then. Jamie is on this weird liquid diet, so I thought I’d make a bit of an effort. Plus I’ve ordered Speedo’s, so need to look good in them.

Sasha off to daycare tomorrow, Dillon off to the vets, then I’ll be off to Pump.

Had a very very restless night, got up multiple times. Eventually got up and started work. Nothing too exciting today, some more shader changes. Also fixed an annoying problem to do with rain. Took Sasha out for a walk. Went to Combat this evening, I do love standing at the front staring at myself. Came back, drank protein shake. Edited new video, I’m going to split it into two as it’s a bit long and rambling. Also today is the first day of my ‘thirteen day detox’. So no booze until we are on holiday now. Also no pizza. So it’s salad and low calorie stuff for the next couple of weeks. Just looking at trunks on Amazon, need something to show my fantastic body off.

I’m going to bed to read ‘Air law’, if that doesn’t send me to sleep then nothing will.

I was playing with the iPad, I’d just reset it so I could get it to run in GPS mode to play the game. It started up, I was moving the tank around, it started shooting things, I found after each shot a new thing would attach itself, eventually it blew up a building. I was in the spare room of a very old house I used to live in. Three girls looked on, I said to them that they could play now as I had to go, I also said that they may as well have the two half finished bottles of coke that were lying around. I gathered my stuff together and walked out the room. I walked past the doorway of another room, there I saw Jamie on the left hand side of the bed cuddled up to what can only be described as a small emaciated boy. To his right was Andy’s Justin. I walked in the room and got into the bed next to Justin. Jamie’s dad then enters the room, then looks at the boy. It turns out his name is Howard, he’s sixteen and looks somewhat afraid. He also seems to have a permanent hard-on which he’s failing to cover up with a flannel. I then said to Justin that I think we should have an affair, but this isn’t the short troll like Justin I know, this one has full chiselled features. He says that he really fancies lemon tea and do I have any lemons. I said the only lemon I have is the Beachams stuff. He says that’s fine as it will give a bit of a kick to it.

I then studied air traffic control from the air law book for an hour. Got up and picked up the dog poo. Then it was time to drive to Staverton. Got there in plenty of time to listen to stories of Dave travelling around Europe in his Ford transit van. There was a student out doing a solo cross-country, thankfully he returned in one piece. James duly arrived and up we went. It was all circuits again really, the wind was a bit of a pain in the ass today, flip-flapping, so all my landing spots were a bit crap. But all were safe. We had no end of traffic interruptions as well. Getting there really well though, once again, I felt fully in control. Drove back, did the accounts and went out for a good run. Had a bath.

I’m at a bit of a dilemma now, really I should be flying on the weekend we are going away, but that’s going to be too much. If I leave it until we are back that’s just going to be too long, so I think really to keep the momentum going I’m going to have to squeeze an extra one in, in a week or so’s time.

So this morning started off rather slowly, which to be honest was quite nice. I had nothing special planned for the day to be honest. So got up and found the flip-flops for the holiday. Then took Sasha out for a walk, popped in the vets and booked Dillon in for his shots. Came back and shot a new video, basically it’s an update on my life since February, imported into FCPX and done a very rough edit of the first ten minutes, don’t hold your breath folks, it’s got a hell of a long way to go yet.

Had a light lunch. Stopped off at the hair salon, booked in to see Mitch. She asked, ‘So half a head of hair highlights?’, I thought she was taking the piss until she explained, I still wanted to punch her though. Then headed into town via the cricket shop (as in reptiles). Walked into town, went round T.K. Maxx, didn’t buy anything, walked to Boots, bought some sun cream, waited ages at a till where some foreign women couldn’t understand the concept of paying for something, then moved to a different floor and paid there. Went to the Mac store, where they failed to have what I wanted. Went in the sports store and bought nothing, then walked back to the car, successful trip.

Jamie was about to have a bath, I started on the video edit, then joined him. He washed my hair, badly. I then refused to do anything more until he did a bit of a clean up operation, so did some more editing. Eventually he sent me a text to say he was ready. I then banged him like a jack-hammer breaking through steel, it’s something I’m very good at. Now it’s time to start on the food.

Today was all about shaders. Well basically shader optimisation. What I’ve been doing is removing ‘discard’. Now heres how it works, normally in a shader, if you find a pixel you no longer want to write you issue a ‘discard’ instruction. But on a certain console, calling discard really screws up the pipeline. But providing you are not writing depth you can get away with do a conditional branch, so instead of discard you can branch to a ‘write bugger all’, this is far quicker than a discard as it still supports early Z testing. So there was a lot of that, also reducing shadow sampling, I couldn’t really see the point in doing a smooth multisample smoke particle.

Went to Pump. Not my finest performance, chest really wasn’t happening. I then did a good session with Laverne afterwards. She said that it had been noted that due to my positioning in the Pump class and that I helped when the stereo broke down (which happens more often than not) that I must have the hots for black women. Laverne is a very very petite black lady. Pat, who stands behind me and I’ve known for years is a rather larger black lady. We always pass the time of day. But because of these perfectly harmless relationships, rumour has it that I now have the hots for both of them. Thankfully both very much know that lady parts aren’t really my thing, so we basically milk it as much as possible. Still it’s amusing all the same.

Jamie took me to the Italian, I had pizza with lots of toppings.

Spent the bulk of the day trying to get a console to talk to a PC ‘tweaker’ app. Getting it connected wasn’t so painful, realising that it didn’t support 64 bit systems as it was passing pointers in network messages was. I’ve left it to the tools guys, after hours of pissing about I really was getting nowhere. Have an interesting idea about GPU optimisation, shaders seem to be slower if they use ‘discard’, but may be I can get some speed back using a branch to cut out all the processing in the middle. Had a bit of a major headache by mid afternoon so took Sasha out for a walk. Then ordered a nice vest off Groupon and a t-shirt. Then continued with work and associated head ache. Had a bit of a rain storm but that thankfully cleared by early evening, then went out for a run. Another great time. Doing about eight point two miles in just over an hour.

Finally ordered a keyboard for the iPad air, well you wouldn’t want me to go to Turkey and not update my blog now would you?

So had a very sleepless night. Got up at 6:30. Took Dillon to daycare, he was very happy about the whole concept, from waking up, to almost pulling my arm off getting out of the car. Drove home and went back to bed. Then I had a very strange dream. We were on holiday in Turkey. Then suddenly a load of soldiers dressed in very old fashioned uniforms turn up with rifles. Then they keep pausing and start shooting at birds. I’m disgusted by this. I then start writing my trip advisor review. I woke up, admiring my pecks, Jamie stares at me, partly comatose. I say I’m staring at my breasts. He says, “With great breasts, come great responsibilities.”. Which is quite deep and funny for the fat whale like creature. I got up.

Work wise was all about weather and grass. Finished with grass, then on to rain drops. There was quite a lot of room for optimisation here which was pleasing. Went to the gym and did Pump, I gave it a bloody good shot. Came back and did more work. Did a bit of a late one. Going to relax a bit then head off to bed.

Tomorrow I have Zumba, or running, weather dependant.