So yesterday started vaguely early. Jamie was in the spare room again after he finished at about 5AM, twitting around on something. Had breakfast. Put everything back in the front room and tidied up. Walked Sasha. Then it was time to go to Sarah’s for lunch. We walked and were promptly late due to Jamie being unable to take more than four steps without pissing about on his phone. Within three minutes of arriving the vagina gags were flowing, so normal service was resumed. Mother still existed. After a few hours mother dropped us home. I showed her the bathroom, she failed to fall down the stairs. An hour or so later she picked us up again for the evening session. Much food was eaton. Then mother gave me a small box. Something that she had been saving for almost forty-three years. Not the off switch to her pace-maker. It contained the arm band from when I was born. The hand written hospital release form. My first lock of hair. Several extracted teeth. A piece of pencil lead that was extracted from my ear when I was about nine. Lots of birthday cards. My school selection form. Also a ‘play bill’ from a school play when I was about eight. It’s an unusual gift, but a very nice one.

This morning didn’t start at 6:30, it started at about 11:30. Those down lighters were not going to wire themselves. So after a couple of hours they were all done and everything was tidied up. Jamie eventually got out of bed. We took the dogs up to the field. Came back and I fixed the plank to the ceiling and wired the socket in. Then I went out for a couple of hours and found a Geocache a few miles away. Came back and put the projector up. All set up and working. Used a dust sheet to measure the image size, and it’s a big image. Need to order the screen now.

Back to work tomorrow. At least the game has passed submission today, so a bit of good news there.

So managed to start fairly early, okay, it was about 10. Jamie was asleep in the spare room, he said he finished ‘about 2’, I’m pretty sure I finished about 2, I imagine it was closer to 5. So started with the projector plank. This is a piece of wood that will go between two beams and support the projector mount. This actually required some quite intricate machining to get it bang on. Out with the laser level again as well to do the centre line. I reckon the whole thing is now done to a tolerance of about 2mm. So tidied up, had salad and walked Sasha. Then drove over toward town. Was a nice day actually, just a hoodie. Walked into town, picked up a couple of box sets that I had my eye on. ‘QAF USA’ and ‘Shamless 1-8’, I already have 1-3 but the cost was silly. Also picked up a packet of bolts for the projector mount. Came back. Had a coffee. Then started painting the ceiling. Did one coat. Did the accounts. Did the second coat. Then had a bath. It’s now midnight and I still haven’t eaton yet. Tomorrow I need to put all the stuff back, as it’s sat in a big pile on the dining room table. Then on Monday, time to wire everything in and finally mount the projector.

Tomorrow though, apart from the tidying and walking the dog I’m planning on having a day off, with family, some of whom I like, and then mother. I’m sure it will be fun.

So this morning started off with an email about the blu ray player being faulty. Now the VCR I pretty much expect is fraud, but this one is probably genuine damage by the courier which is just bloody annoying. So that set me up well for the day. Spent the next two hours with a laser level a ladder, tape measure and a wooden batten. Trying to measure a ceiling accurately by one self is quite difficult, thankfully I’m quite resourceful. So managed to produce a pretty accurate grid of 3 x 3. Then drilled them all. Then Jamie comes home. Fed wires across all the horizontals. Annoyingly there wasn’t a wire between the front and back lights. We walked the dogs. I then emptied a load of crap out of the wardrobe and sawed up part of the floor in there. Put a cable through between the rear and middle rows. To be honest that was fairly painless. Next job is to paint everything. Went out for a walk. Rewired the light switch which has been outstanding for about four years. Had a bath. Jamie is doing one of his ‘live shows’. I’m going to eat pizza and get pissed.

So started off latex, when I wanted to start early. I blame Jamie who for some reason desperately wanted a bum last night. It would have been rude to refuse. Anyway, back on h-tile, compute shader stuff. Finally had a bit of a breakthrough, actually it was due to the depth buffer being backwards. All to do with going from GL to a DX style depth format. Basically GL does everything in a cube, so projection space is all -1 to +1 in all dimensions. DX does it slightly different, x/y are -1 to +1 but z is 0 to 1. This means you have to change your projection matrix. Also the depth buffer then just happens to be backwards. So when I was using the h-tile min / max values they were the wrong way round. Anyway, after that was sorted it all started working. So quickly implemented spotlights, mostly working but some odd thing going on with specular.

Got an email via eBay about a DVD/VCR thing I sold, apparently completely dead, asking for advice. Strange, was tested before it went. Offered advice. Did a bit of digging this evening on this particular buyer. In the past couple of months they seem to have sold rather a lot of identical items. Very odd. My auction was marked as ‘no returns’. Lets see what happens. It’s only thirty quid, but I could have fun with this one.

Now watching the ‘leaders debate’, no punch up yet. Farage is coming over as a bit of a dick though and blaming everything on foreigners. They seem to be the cause of everything from NHS waiting lists to global warming.

Started at a reasonable hour. Still working on bloody h-tile shit. Already took Sasha to daycare at 6:20. Cleaners arrived, I went for a walk. Came back and they were about to go. Picked up Sasha and met the chap for the last of the eBay items. Did more work. Went for another walk. Did more work. Bought some shoes from Groupon, these are Sparco ones, for flying in. Ordered some more exam books as well. Oh the joys. Now time for bed.

So started at a reasonable hour. Cracked on with stuff. Back to h-tile and depth problems. Think I have it sorted now, its not fixed but it’s stable enough to carry on. Walked Sasha. Did more work, blokie picked up speakers. Went for another walk. Got petrol. Did two hours of studying on clouds. Ate, and it’s now 1AM.

Started at a reasonable time. Something slightly different today, chasing a memory issue which causes a problem as it’s not mapped to the GPU. The main question still exists about what the hell it’s trying to do accessing the GPU anyway. Joy. Walked Sasha, probably at the only time when the weather wasn’t shit. It was cold again today. Went to Combat. We did the new one. Liz is leaving, I find she’s fine, other people find her irritating, I find other people irritating, I’m sure she will be irritating elsewhere. Came back and did a bit more work. Think I’ll go to bed, very tired still from the weekend, want to get a reasonable start tomorrow.

So today started early again. No problem with that. I was the first to arrive in the car park at just gone 8:15. We cracked on at about 8:45, the only one missing was the Russian guy. We had a chat about a few things and then moved down to the hangar where we went through all the pre-flight on the R22. We used G-OJAN, which is the helicopter I fly. We found a couple of interesting things wrong with it which were quite worrying. It was absolutely fascinating though, the detail that had gone into the design and the redundancy of the systems. A couple of hours passed very quickly, we had a tea break and then Dick’s laptop blew up, literally. We went through a whole shit load more of stuff. Then we had a lunch break, I managed to cobble together another laptop with slides and things. After lunch we went through the operating manual and lots of numbers. We were asked a question about available power and how to calculate a few things. It all revolved around landing in the garden of a girlfriend, who’s daddy had a prized 400ft Beech tree. So we all did the calculation, picked up the GF and then all died and crashed into the tree. The one thing the whole room forgot to take into account was the weight of the over eating bitch. It’s all in the flight planning. Last part of the day was taken up with watching the R22 being safety tested to produce a thing called the ‘height / velocity curve’. Which is a diagram which contains things called ‘avoid areas’. This is to allow you to take off safely and also be able to recover in the event of a failure. The only problem is, someone has to come up with these figures. In 1979, when the helicopter was designed, two poor test pilots had to fly it at different heights and different velocities. Now as they had to simulate the ‘average’ pilot, they also had to incorporate a 1 second delay before they did anything. Considering the rotor only has the potential energy for 1.1 seconds they have fairly large testicles. So they fly at say 100ft at 50Kts and throttle chop, so killing the engine. Then wait one second. Then try and land it. Then they do the same thing at 40Kts etc. To the point where they crash. At that point on the video, where its just hit the deck, broken both skids, and slid alone the tarmac a few hundred feet you can hear Frank Robinson say ‘That’s where we’ll put the X on the graph then’. It is testament that it’s quite a hardy beast as these two test pilots got out, dusted themselves down and just got on with it. I still have the flying practical to do, which should be good fun.

At the end of the day I shook Dicks hand. He said, ‘Thank you for saving my life with this bloody laptop’, I replied with just, ‘Thank you for hopefully just saving my life’, and we parted ways.

Started this morning rather late. Anyway, trying to polish off my presentation and upgrade ‘Visual Studio’, reasonably successful, other than it won’t talk to Perforce. Walked Sasha. Went to Pump, which was taken by Ann, who is lovely, even if the contents of tonights class wouldn’t look out of place at a morgue. Did a bit more work. Got very irritated by people on eBay. Speakers say ‘Collection only’, you turn up and shove them in your car. I will not ‘carefully pack them’ so you can send a courier, and I’m not expecting them to fucking America, I’d rather just dump them at the tip.

Early start tomorrow, off on this safety course.