I didn’t sleep at all last night, so I made up for it this morning. I eventually got out of bed just before three. Still felt like absolute shit. Walked Sasha. Came back and made a new video. Then spent the rest of the day just sat in my office doing video editing. I really wasn’t in the mood for doing anything else.

Anyway, the fruits of my labours are now on YouTube, “I Poke Badgers With Spoons”. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow.

This morning the coughing had stopped. It was replaced by a thumping headache and blocked sinuses. I eventually fired up the system, but it was a hell of a combo of pain killers and coffee. Saying that, work wise, today was actually quite productive. There were a couple of long outstanding ‘flicker’ bugs. This is stuff that just glitches to piss you off and then every time you go to look at it it stops. I got lucky. Managed to fix the ….. lol …. just had to delete the platform I’m working on! pretty early on. Then I tested it on PC, it still bloody flickered. After lots of delving I finally worked it out, so that was pretty cool. That leaves me clear next week to sort out MSAA, will be good to have a clear week to do it.

Shopping arrived, no paper. Dragged myself to the gym, Pump was okay, but the session afterwards with Laverne was bloody hard going. Came back and checked in all my work. Then I got into the bath.

Oh, Jamie’s driving license has finally turned up, so that’s one less worry.

I picked up the phone and dialled a number that I haven’t for a hell of a long time. I wished my mother a happy birthday and asked if she enjoyed her day in Cardiff. She did, she also mentioned that she didn’t buy anything at all. I didn’t ask why she has three active credit cards logged on her QVC account. I then talked about me, helicopters, our USA trip, laminate flooring, she didn’t get a word in for forty-five minutes. I then said I was feeling ill so that was the end of it. Quite painless and quite tolerable. If only she can keep that up we will be able to communicate. She has invited herself over on Sunday to delivery my birthday cake. We’ll see how that goes.

After I got out of the bath I washed my hair and then went to bed for an hour. Had to get up as I haven’t eaton, and I would have had major stomach acid tomorrow. Just tried to explain to two dogs that if they behaved then they could have a slice of pizza each. Both are laying down nicely, I think they kind of got the message.

So Jamie had some lurgee a couple of days ago. Now I’ve got something. Okay, it’s not that I’ve got lost a limb or anything, but it’s yet another bloody annoying cough. The last one lasted about three months, I only stopped coughing with it about a month ago. Still, better get it out the way now.

Actually started work early this morning. Too early, so I stopped and went to the bank and put a couple of cheques in. They’ve both been credited to the account, but I still have a feeling one of them is going to skip. The cheque for Jamie’s license still hasn’t been cashed, I don’t think the DVLA ever want him to drive, probably wise.

Today actually I spent most of my time working on PC stuff while data was building. Not the most exciting task in the world. Walked Sasha. Went to the gym and did Spin with Laverne. Oddly managed to get through that without coughing.

Came back and was still waiting for some data to build, so I finished off my latest helicopter video. This one’s uploading. I have an idea for another one but it will be really challenging. I may do a new video on Saturday, plus a channel trailer which I’m missing, plus I need to do a constant end screen. Lots of work, lots of editing.

They’ll be a new video up tomorrow, I just need to add the annotations.

Had one bit of a surprise today, I rang up the insurance company to increased the value of personal possessions. No issue with that, the odd thing is they didn’t actually charge for it.

Still need to sort out normal travel insurance though.

Torture porn night.

Still very tired this morning, woke up by the alarm at 6:30am. Took Sasha to daycare then went back to bed. Got up eventually. Today was all about materials and sorting out shader parameter arrays. Basically it all needed a bit of a re-write. Got it all finished, just a bit more testing to do before I check it all in.

Now, got an email this morning. A returned item to QVC. This was a Nina Lemon bolero, I still don’t have a clue what one of those is. Now QVC has a thirty day return policy. So if I got this email today then it must have been purchased in the last thirty days? I may have to do a bit of account hackery here. I hope she isn’t up to her old ways. But as she has refused our help then I think I just need to let her get on with it. Shame, I was perhaps planning on seeing her for her birthday, we shall see.

Picked up Sasha. Went to Body Pump. We had some of the new CD today. As it’s a new month I increased my bar weight by another 2Kg. All was fine, except for biceps, which due to the movements was pretty much impossible. Came back and did a bit more work. Feeling tired again, so will head off to bed in a minute. Got a good idea for a new helicopter video.

Taking of which, if you can’t find my YouTube Channel, it is here.

Here are my last few videos:

Helicopter Flight Over Tewksbury

Prohibition and Prozac

USA Road Trip – Pt1

USA Road Trip – Pt2

Don’t forget you can also follow me on Twitter using @mannmansion

Felt very tired this morning after Jamie and I kept each other awake. No, not through rampant sex, but through his snoring and my tossing (…I give up). So started quite late. Working on the excitement which is array alignment in shaders. Here’s a fun thing, if you declare an array of floats in a shader it will pack them with sixteen byte alignment, which is rather inconvenient when the source array is packed with four. So several hours later it’s half done, but at least its all correct now.

Jamie is still coughing up mucus so i walked Sasha. Went to the gym and did legs on the cross-trainer. This is to stop me looking like an ‘ice-cream cone’ according to Jamie. Came back and edited another helicopter video. Got all the footage together, now adding the effects. Ate salad. Followed by more food. Decided to try and eat a bit more (but less crisps and cheese), to try and bulk up a bit before we go away. May have arranged something rather fun for Las Vegas hopefully. Sasha at daycare tomorrow.

Woke up this morning to what sounded like a diseased cow eating a tractor. Jamie was in full flu mode, which was quite impressive as he was right as rain last night. I think it is flu as his sister has got it as well. The rest of us are fine as I imagine they have had the injection the same as me.

Work all went according to plan. No major upsets. I have some compiler additions to sort and then finally it’s on to the MSAA implementation.

Walked Sasha. Went to Body Combat, it was fairly empty. Talked to my sister. Apparently mother started babbling about, ‘I have no idea where Tim got his calculations from as they are wrong, blah blah blah’. She told her to shut up. We’ve offered her help, which has kind of refused by just ignoring us. She did ask if she was going to see me for her birthday. I was actually planning on it, but if she wants to just have a go at me over my calculations then it’s an evening that I’ll be doing my hair. She hasn’t bought anything off QVC since, but she’s got a hell of a long way to go to repair the damage.

I was about to say that I was going to have an early night, except it’s now 1AM.

Finally got Jamie to get out of bed, let the dogs out and make me breakfast. After Jamie continued to snooze we eventually got up and took the dogs out, they had a good run out at the field in Almondsbury.

We then ventured down to the mother-in-laws.

Now I’m going to waffle, stick with it. I was using her Kindle to access my helicopter videos on YouTube and opened up the web browser. It was set to this blog….awkward.

Okay. So the MIL reads my blog, should I change my political views on people who claim benefits? No, that would be rather two faced. Plus, this is the interesting thing, I think we could quite happily put each others views across and agree to disagree on certain points.

Now this is a bit weird. I’m sat there talking about flying helicopters at four hundred an hour in a council flat that would quite happily fit in my living room with space left over for a few more cats. But what do I see in front of me? This is the odd thing. I see someone who is perfectly happy and content. Her flat is beautifully decorated (if you like teal) with great attention to detail. The garden has had a huge amount of effort put into it, but not just for her benefit, she has a whole load of elderly and incapacitated neighbours (who seem to pop-off with alarming regularity) who’s gardens she also tends. We had a lovely dinner, she went out of the way to provide me with a bacon free version. I felt welcome. Now, this is a lady of a certain age, I’m sure she has ailments, her husband for sure suffers from great back pain. I can really respect back pain as I get it a lot, it feels like a spear has been jammed up from your asshole up to your neck. Yet she was sat there asking me about my problems, my depression and what I was up to. Not once did she mention that a leg had fallen off, she had cysts on her arms or her breasts were oozing oil. Some people bang on about, “You must always have aspirations”. Bollocks, if you are happy you are happy. I just have total respect for the lady. I suffer from the fact that no matter what i have, I will always aspire to want more, one day I’ll do some sort of Icarus and fly an R22 into the sun. I’m sure sometimes she thinks that she can’t connect to me, but that’s totally my fault. I’m just not used to people asking questions about me and my life. I’ve been brought up with my mother who’s entire life revolves around her. I was never asked about me. Okay, may be I was, but it was more the case of ‘How are you?, Oh, my kitchen light keeps flickering, my leg hurts, I’m out of money because I spent it all in shit’. So yes, when someone does genuinely ask about me, I suddenly get a little bit introverted, as I’m just not quite used to it. I respect you for your principles and the fact that you just seem so happy. I think perhaps you could have taught Jamie to be a bit tidier. A couple of complaints though, four sausage rolls to take home is a bit of a disgrace and you have Sky+ HD, even I can’t afford that. You really could teach my mother a thing or two. Where as you seemingly spend your time helping your neighbours, mine seems to spend her time moaning about hers. If I lived next-door to my mother, I would have had her knocked off by now.

So in conclusion, happy mother’s day! To my mother-in-law.

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.