Category Archives: Diary

Give a toddler a bone and that’s child cruelty, give a dog a bone and she thinks it’s Christmas.

Posted on by
Reply

Busy day today with trying to finish off the mobile game. Fixed various problems in routing tables. Also had a lot of other minor stuff to fix and found a couple of crash issues. Only just finishing up now, so will keep this brief. There was actually a post on our internal work forum to do with depression and coping day to day, so I thought I’d add to it with my thoughts. I’ve removed some of the names, but it’s pretty much verbatim.

I know you’ve already taken my advice and got a dog X and I hope that it’s brought you and your family some happiness. Here are a few other tit-bits for managing day to day (just my opinions).

1) Get a dog. Dogs are great. But if you are considering one then please go to an animal shelter rather than a breeder or puppy farm. There are loads of really lovely dogs looking for a new home, and like marrying an ugly woman they will always remain grateful. If you need a change of scenery take the dog for a walk, if you want a quick break throw a ball round for a bit, when you’re done, dog will curl up and go to sleep. They are energy efficient and cheap to run (A* energy rating), I have a self cleaning model, she goes to sleep muddy and wakes up clean (unlike my self cleaning oven, which I’ve never once seen attempt this feat). You no longer require a doorbell. There is no need to remove crumbs off the kitchen floor. Unlike children they do not require clothes, education, their own room or a mobile phone. Give a toddler a bone and that’s child cruelty, give a dog a bone and she thinks it’s Christmas.

2) Get a good wine supplier. I recommend NakedWines.com (I always have vouchers available). Whether it’s red or white, independent vineyards always come out on top.

3) Get a cheap wine supplier. I recommend TescoWines. When you’ve had a bottle of the above and really appreciated the fine taste, you can then move on to the Isla Negra as you no longer care.

4) Get a good coffee machine and good coffee (I recommend talking to X about this). Fine wine is good, but at 10AM when you have a dozen walk grids to hand edit then reaching for a bottle of Chardonnay is not the answer, getting a large mug of fine arabica is though.

5) Get a gym membership and use it. Being stuck behind a desk all day isn’t good for you. Get some good exercise. If a treadmill is not your thing then try a class. I do ‘Body Combat’, it’s great fun.

6) Steer clear of anything like ‘living life to the full’, been there, done it, it’s shit. I don’t want to know about how to eat an elephant (Answer, One chunk at a time). I find self help books and courses do not work for me at all, others may have had success though.

7) If you require it and a lot of people do at one time or another, choose your medication carefully. Citalopram, Sertraline and Fluoxetine, all good (Citalopram made me sweat a lot). You get amazing dreams. Steer well clear of Amitriptyline, your head will be on a different planet to your body and you’ll spend all day poking your mouse wondering why it doesn’t squeak. To get off antidepressants see 1.

8) Avoid fad diets. You’ll stick to it for a couple of weeks then you’ll see a cream cake in a shop window and that’ll be the end of it. Just eat sensibly and do a bit of exercise now and then. I’m currently addicted to cheese.

9) Life’s too short, so get somebody else to do the stuff you don’t want to do. DIY is great if you enjoy it, but if you haven’t got round to painting the bathroom in 3 years, it really is time to get someone else in.

10) Get a cleaner. (See 9.)

11) Get a pool boy. (Even if you don’t have a pool, this may only be applicable to me though.)

12) Avoid render.

Skyfall

Posted on by
Reply

Didn’t start at the crack of dawn, mainly as I don’t do that shit anyway and I didn’t finish until 3AM. And then when I finally got to bed, Jamie was as horny as hell and demanded his version of kinky sex, well it would be rude to not oblige.

So today was mainly about tidying up, finishing off and testing. So that’s exactly what I did. Last minute bug fixing and testing.

Took the dog out for a walk and for once it was a pleasure. I think she did actually learn something yesterday at doggy day care.

New motherboard for pfSense box has arrived. It’s still in the box, hopefully look at it the weekend. Went to gym, ran, not very exciting. Ate salad.

Then at ten to ten I went upstairs to Jamie and said ‘lets go then’, to a rather shocked Jamie, who had completely forgotten that I’d got tickets to the new James Bond film – Skyfall. M32 had a junction closed, so we were slightly late, the good point about this was we missed all the ad’s for Gordon’s Gin. We had the posh seats in the ‘Director’s Lounge’, if you are going to the cinema then do it in style. My mother would never have taken me here. The film itself was easily the best Bond I’ve seen in many years, it was pretty much non-stop action all the way through. Really enjoyed it.

So, probably one more day on the mobile game and that will be it.

Doggy Daycare and Cleaners all a big success

Posted on by
Reply

Okay, so I woke up at an ungodly hour, one which should have been the end of a good evening, not at the beginning of a good morning. Dog didn’t really know what the hell was going on, she went out for a pee then ran back upstairs to bed. She was then slightly confused when I started to pour her breakfast out. She decided to strike while the iron was hot and came downstairs and ate it. She then dutifully went and had a poo and got rather excited. She got bundled into the car in the dark and driven to “Paw Stretchers”. Where she shot out of the car got attached to a man with a lead and didn’t look back. I drove home and went back to bed.

Today work wise was mainly fixing a few bugs and doing play testing, all went according to plan really. Fixed a few things, tested lots on iPod and PC.

New cleaners arrived, one called Mandy, one called something else. They spent about five minutes unloading their van of various containers of ‘stuff’ and a couple of hoovers. They then proceeded to do cleaning type things for the next three hours, which wasn’t bad when they are only being paid for two and a quarter. They didn’t get round to the dinning room but did everything else. I must admit they actually did a really really good job, I was very impressed. Now they’ve got on top of a few things it, (hopefully) won’t take so long next time. So that’s “Welcome home cleaning”.

By the time they went it was time to pick Sasha up. So sat at Aztec West traffic lights for twenty minutes then arrived at doggy daycare. Sasha was led out by a rather cute looking guy. She had apparently spent three hours running round in a field, followed by various other activities. I was disappointed that I wasn’t given a painting that she had done to stick on the fridge. She’ll be going back next week. She’s been asleep since.

Did a bit more play testing. Due to my foot being bad, no idea, some sort of ankle twist, I gave the gym a miss and had a bath instead. Caught up with a magazine. Ate salad. Sat down. Jamie keeps asking if I’m going to plough his buttocks, well as long as he doesn’t hurt my ankle.

Going from A to B

Posted on by
Reply

So started fairly early, well normal time, I just didn’t read BBC news for an hour first. So back on to routing, Al was moaning about a couple other frame rate cases. So did more research on HPA (a variation on A-star) but all involved building graphs and lots or preprocessing which I didn’t really have time to do. So came up with a simple solution which would involve a bit of manual work but would give me good results and importantly not use much memory. What I did was dump out the maps to a text file. Mark walk-able squares with a 0 and non walk-able with an X. Simples. Then manually went through the text files and grouped all the closed off areas, so for instance a closed off bit at the top of the map would be allocated section 1, then the next 2 etc. I had up to 16 areas that could be grouped. All I did then was add additional routing hints. So to go from one area to another you would just do 0:3:2; meaning to go from area 0 to area 3 you needed to go via area 2. All other areas could be disregarded in the A-star search. This reduced my maximum search nodes down to about a sixth of what it was. Total memory requirements…512 bytes. Ok, so manual editing, but it’s only a couple of maps, gives great results and only took about one mug of coffee per map.

Walked the dog. Finished work vaguely on time. Did a home check and went to the gym. Ran, only thirty eight minutes, on a short week this week. Did a home check for a kitten. Sat down and ate salad. Actually watched quite a bit of TV without any distractions.

Sasha is off to doggy day care far too early tomorrow morning. New cleaners starting. Need to order stuff for new pfSense box. New server seems to be running fine. Think I’ll have some fruit cake, may be a glass of wine and an early night.

More routing – It’s over there not there

Posted on by
Reply

Got up. That was an event in itself. Spent most of the morning, well the bulk of the day actually doing research into routing and trying to optimise the search of the mobile game. I looked at quite a few different ways of improving it, but most require additional trees and memory. That’s one thing I’m very short on, so ended up just tweaking heuristics. Still got a bit more to tweak and tidy up. Get a good run on it tomorrow I think.

Walked the dog, I think I’ve decided on our new winter route. This is mainly tarmac based due to bad flooding down the nature reserve.

Went to the gym, did Body Combat. Couldn’t really be arsed to do any further running.

Came back, did some more work. Also moved the server to it’s new case that arrived today. It looks very smart and eats about a third the power of the small form factor HP. All working okay. Next is to do something similar to the pfSense box.

Tried to get dog sick out of a carpet, that didn’t work.

Feeling very tired. Thing I’ll try and have an early night.

I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay

Posted on by
Reply

Started off this morning pruning a tree. I now have a garden full of said tree and no where to put it until the wheelie bin has been emptied. I reckon it’s a good two loads worth. Asked the neighbour if she minded if I cut one of the uprights out over her side so I could reach it, I got the response “Do want you need to do Tim, the things a pain in the bloody ass.”. I don’t think she minded.

After that we went up to Cribbs and walked round various toy-shops. Didn’t buy anything. One toy shop had a couple of storm troopers outside and a rather fat Jedi. Inside though there were quite a good number of cute male staff, far better quality than Toy’s R’us.

Came back, had lunch (boiled eggs, It’s a Sunday). Then Sarah and Shaun came round. We sat down and had coffee, followed by more coffee and chatted mainly bollocks about boilers, bathrooms, work, ailments, cars (breaking down rather than driving them) and dogs. Mainly as ours was trying to leap up and kill them.

Afterwords I got my new steamer out, steamed things. Tiles mainly. Then decided that wouldn’t it be great to clean the over door glass. The inside of it. Two hours later, half a tub of something I had sat in the back of a cupboard for ten years and said steamer, it’s now actually transparent. It’s something I’ll replace sooner rather than later anyway.

Then I briefly hoovered and played with gadget No.2, the carpet shampooer. This was great fun, the colour of the water when emptying the tank was darker than my soul.

Found the memory card with all my honeymoon photos on, so stuck those on the i-Mac, then finally got round to doing mothers photo album thing. That’s only been pending since June.

Was going to buy some shoes off Groupon, but they have sold out. You can never have enough shoes.

Set up the iPhone5. It’s an iPhone. It does stuff I’ll never use. Siri is quite amusing though, I said, “Tell me about sex with camels”, It did a Google search for ‘Sex with Carols’. Also rather amusingly I asked “Tell me who I am?”, it responded with, “I don’t know who you are, but you can set that info in settings.”. It did correctly tell me though what armadillos taste like, always essential info, when you end up in a Central American Synapsida restaurant and they have run out of Pizza.

Right, bath time. It will be nice next week to not have the entertain plumbers. Well it’s not like I put on a show or anything, I didn’t open the airing cupboard to Chris Tarrent sat on a stool, saying, “Just 15 questions between you and 3 litres of inhibitor.”. I digress.

“How does the dog hold the golf club?”, “I have no idea.”

Posted on by
Reply

The morning started off pretty well. Jamie wasn’t wearing any pants which is usually a good sign that some vague action could happen. It did, well for me anyway, I didn’t recipricate. Then he asked what the dog was planning on doing today, I said that she was planning on playing golf as she wanted to get her handicap down. He then asked how she could hold a club. It was far too early and I was still out of coffee so couldn’t be arsed to come up with a witty response, so just said I had no idea. He went off to work, obviously thinking intensly how a dog could play golf without opposable thumbs. However she would have managed it, she would have still played better than me.

I went and did a house check for a kitten, all fine. Then I picked up a sim-card for my iPhone5 and did the shopping. Both rather dull activities, oh, also got some crickets.

Ate lunch, toast and cheese. Then assembled my new Bissel carpet shampooer. It looks very impressive, now need to find somewhere to keep it. Also got one of those steamer things. The new batteries for the doorbell turned up together with some new garden tools. I may take them to the bedroom later.

Walked into town, bought some drain cleaner, walked back again.

Visited mother, which was a good time to catchup on FaceBook. Mind you she has got back into baking again and does make a rather mean fruit cake. I cleaned out her Magnaclense (had to get a boiler reference in their somewhere) and increased the pressure on her boiler.

Came back, did the accounts and bits. Also got this rather nice little bluetooth keyboard iPad case thing, which I’m typing this up on. I’m very impressed works really quite well.

So all done, just going to fry the chicken ready for dinner, which is something I can’t spell so won’t bother as the spell checker doesn’t seem to be working. Then a quick bath I think, may be some wine.

Bought three lots of coffee beans so going to have a few testers. Getting very used to having it black now, makes me stoned.

Lots of fun house/garden work to get on with tomorrow. I think Sarah is popping over as well to test out the new coffee machine.

Euclidean heuristics Vs a modified Chebyshev

Posted on by
Reply

So today it was back on to the mobile game and optimising some routing. It uses an a-star search with a modified Euclidean Heuristic, modified in a way that’s actually doing it wrong, but it does give reasonable results. I was doing length squared rather than length, which gives you quite wildly different answers when added together with the normal distance cost, even if you square that. So instead I decided to do it properly and change it to a Chebyshev. So the normal costs are just the distance either in a straight line or diagonal, then the heuristic is just a max of the absolute distance in x/z plus a couple of bits to handle the diagonals. It works quite well for some routes and not so well for others. Proof of the pudding will be in the iPhone4 testing. I’ll chat to some of my work colleagues who have a bit more experience on this.

Walked the dog. Went to the gym. Did body pump and a bit of running. Came back and carried on working, only just finished. I’m feeling very tired, time for wine, bath and bed. Oh my carpet shampooer and steamer have turned up. Will play with those the weekend.

Not a boiler man in sight

Posted on by
Reply

So today it was straight on with a couple of issues with the mobile game. Got those all sorted. Then it was back on to GDB and Android.

My iPhone5 arrived. It’s an iPhone, I won’t reach orgasm over it. It looks a bit big. I need to get a nano sim for it as it won’t activate without one.

Took the dog out, Jamie’s day off so he came as well, which didn’t work out well as there was a delivery while we were out.

Got a new quote from boiler man no.3, this was for the same boiler as boiler man no.6 but was £1600 cheaper. Okay, so I have to do my own electrics and get Paul to check it, but that’s not going to cost £1600. Haven’t had a quote from no.5 and no.1 has vanished since I basically mentioned he didn’t really seem to know what he was on about and wasn’t gas safe registered. Anyway, boiler man no.3 has been given the job, it will hopefully be done the beginning of December. I’m still waiting for a bathroom quote from the same man.

Made some good progress on the whole GDB thing. I can now compile in VC2010 and it produces all the correct files in all the correct places by using a vast amount of scripts. Only a couple of bits to solve now.

Went to gym, ran for seventy seven minutes. That’s around 45 miles this week.

Looked into balancing radiators, they could do with doing again before new boiler is fitted as they haven’t been done since all the insulation was added.

Anyway, Midsomer Murders now, followed by torture porn night.

And tomorrow I promise no more boiler talk.

Boiler man No.6

Posted on by
Reply

Started this morning far too early as Sasha had her induction at Pawstretchers doggy daycare. They had 59 dogs there, she failed to eat any of them, so she’s going back for a full day next Wednesday. That’ll get her out the way of the new cleaners anyway, so hopefully they will last more than a day. On the way back in the car I didn’t put her anti-reverse colour restraint-escape-device on, half way down the A38 she’s sat in the passenger seat staring at me.

Came back, did a couple of updates on the mobile game. Then gas man No.6 arrived. I was slightly disappointed as he wasn’t a tosser. He measured the place (not intimately, just worked out the volume) asked about loft and cavity wall insulation, looked at the tank. Then sat on his laptop for ten minutes making pointless small talk. To my surprise he was only a grand over priced. Mind you did quote for a smaller boiler than any one else. Then he made a couple of fatal mistakes….first was to say he’d give me the same discount that was available last month ‘if I signed up today’, hmmm. Second was to say that if a normal plumber did the electrics they wouldn’t be 17th addition approved and therefore wouldn’t get a part-p certificate but I could get it checked for about 300 quid. That bits horse-shit, and I bet half the British Gas engineers are only gas safe safe registered and not NICEIC approved, it’s questionable if pump overrun cables require part-p certification anyway.

So enough of bloody boiler men. I may just say fuck-it, spend 1500 quid on another holiday and just use some of Jamie’s blubber as a giant candle.

Then continued with getting GDB to work. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that for it to work it really has to be under Cygwin. I looked at a few other shells but they just didn’t work. So in the end I’m just working to get vs-android output everything in the correct place so I can launch a bash shell and call ndk-gdb. It ain’t pretty but it will certainly do for the time being and is better than what we have currently.

Went to gym. Ran for seventy seven minutes. That’s over a marathon distance already this week. It isn’t very interesting and the tread-mill keeps electrocuting me every time I touch it.

Finally got to the end of the Abu Dhabi GP. Not a bad one. Suppose it’s bed time now. May be have a banana first.

Oh, apparently my iPhone5 has been dispatched. That can sit in a box until I can be arsed to sort out a micro sim card for it.