Relief

  So my wife found my bracelet, wrapped up in the towel I used to take a shower last night. I'm so relieved right now, that moment of dread and panic that you get when you realise something is lost or wrong has passed. Now I just need to get home and superglue it together so it never comes off again :| .

Upset

  Somewhere between going to bed last night and driving to work this morning I lost my bracelet. Where I don't know and despite some frantic searching by my here at work and in the car and my wife at home we can't find it. It hurts that I can't find it, almost as much as when I lost my original wedding ring (which didn't fit me properly but still). That bracelet was a present from my wife and has become a part of me now. I never take it off and play with it all the time. Really upset right now.

Long weekend

  Have a nice long 4 day weekend coming up starting tomorrow. No work to do, some chores around the house to do but otherwise nothing but relaxing. I need a relax for a bit, too much stress at the moment work wise and trying to get us the hell out of the house we are living in. Trying to get together the money to do that is not easy, not to mention finding us somewhere to live where I can either carry on with the job I have or find a job to support us in the new house. Le sigh.

  Now I need to go finish fixing some stuff broken overnight by our contractors who are "helping" us with a dull task. To be honest they are doing almost too much harm along with the help to be worth getting them to do some of the busy work.

Wii

  As I've said before I play a lot of videogames. I got a Wii on release day (even to the point of chasing down the delivery truck that was going to deliver it to the wrong address due to a cock up with the place I bought it from). I enjoyed it for what it was and saw the potential of what it could be. What it ended up being though was a wasteland of shovelware and mini game collections. It still is if this video is anything to go by. After a while I gave up waiting for anything worth playing and just played on my PS3. It was so long since I had turned on the Wii that when I did recently so my wife could play a game she bought we found out the DVD drive in it was dead and probably had been for almost a year.

  Which brings me on to the Wii U. It can now play all the games I play on the PS3. Great, but why would I want to do that? It can also play different games unique to the system thanks to its funky touch screen (single touch stylus only, really Nintendo, where is the multitouch?) controller. However nothing shown so far has been anything other than mini game crap or any form of intelligent idea. Any game that appears on the other systems is not going to use the unique features of the Wii U and any game that is unique to the Wii U is not going to sell enough to make it worth it for the publishers (which is why all the big publishers basically abandoned the Wii after a while). I have a hard time seeing how Nintendo can carry on as they are to be honest. Even the 3DS with its new glasses less 3D is not performing up to expectations and most people I see talking about it turn off the 3D after about 10 minutes and just play the games normally. The kind of games I would rather sit down at home and play.

  Anyway, just spouting off stuff on my mind as I wait for this code to compile and randomly browsing game websites I frequent.

Are you fucking kidding me?

  Seems another attempt is being made to basically outlaw abortion. This time in Ohio, who are trying to pass a law to ban abortions as soon as a heartbeat is detectable. They do this knowing full well that you can detect a heartbeat before most people know they are even pregnant. Yeah, nice logic guys, and I suspect this is most likely just men doing this. They are trying to drag this country back to the dark ages.

  I think my wife has the right idea on this, men should not even get to define this kind of law, it should be left up to women since it is their bodies and lives that are directly affected by this kind of inane law.

Lego on the mind

  Went hunting for Lego information after last night and this morning. Found some information on an old Lego set I used to have, this space Lego one. What is even better is the Lego wiki I found since I could poke through all the sets I remember. Somewhere my parents still have two of my old sets, this bulldozer one and this car chassis one with complete working engine, gear box and steering. My brother had a cool castle one that I think I spent more time playing with than he did. There was also several other smaller sets and one road set with 3 different shops that I can't find yet (since the "town" range of sets is huge).

  Ahhh nostalgia.

  I think I should ask my parents if they can send over my old Lego, no point letting them go to waste is there?

  Being hassled by other people at work so need to go deal with them for a bit. I'll probably reminisce some more later though :) .

Too cool

  My wife got me a present yesterday, being the amazing person that she is. It was this set of Lego as something to get me in to the Lego building again before a larger set turns up. It was simply too much fun for me to do even though it didn't take a long time to assemble the plane model. It brought back all those memories I have of doing it and just how much I enjoyed putting them together all those years ago. I am a big kid (heck, most people are deep down given the chance) in a lot of ways.

  I'm off to find some more to potentially buy but I feel like a giddy kid again. You would not believe the smile I had on my face yesterday when doing this or when I first saw it.

Finally

  Seems the supreme court finally got around to realising that videogames are just another form of "protected speech". How California could try to argue that they should be treated differently from things like films, tv shows and comics is beyond me but that is what they were trying to do. Turning the government in to a replacement for parental responsibility is a fools game. It should not be up to companies to raise your children, that is your job. You need to instill the sense of right and wrong in your children and be their protector while they grow up. The whole argument about videogames being primarily for children and hence needing special accommodations is a fallacy in the first place. The overwhelming majority of people playing games are in their 20s and 30s.

  I'm just glad finally the law courts saw sense and stopped any further attempts to badly legislate something that I enjoy a lot.

Long drive

  Just got back from a nice long drive. Not long in distance really (160 miles or so) but long in time, four and a half hours. We went in to the hills near us which are pretty much empty. Nothing out there except for a few ranches and some scenery. We went past the top of one of the local "mountains" which has an observatory on the top.

  We went out since my wife just wanted to get out of the house. She is feeling hurt and angry, rightfully so I think. I'm trying my best to keep her happy and let her know she is loved. She must be feeling bad though since we went shopping as well at a large outlet mall and we failed to find anything to buy.

  Kind of worn out from all that driving, it was all up and down hills with barely a straight section of road so it takes some work. It is nice though (in the dead grass everywhere California summer kind of way) with a lot of open area and views that go a long way when you are higher up the hills. A fair few bicyclists in the way though, the fools that they were cycling up and down those big hills in that heat. No thank you.

  Talking of driving, I think I managed to not hit anything on the road animal wise. The snake was hardest to avoid but luckily it was near the edge of the road. They are a bugger to avoid since the longer ones can spread out across most of the lane so you have nowhere to go to avoid them completely. They are going to end up flat in one section somehow like that. Squirrels on the other hand are pretty easy to avoid assuming they don't change direction, seemingly deciding to go back the other way when they are almost safely across the road.

  We went out yesterday as well, I found a state park nearby we haven't been to before. It was out of the way but a few too many chavs in the main area. We went for a walk in to the quieter bits, not the best of ideas in sandals when all the paths are mud/dust/gravel but it was peaceful.

  On an unrelated note, still have no idea of what I want for my birthday. I've put a few things on my amazon wish list but it was a struggle. I think I went through about 2000 blu rays on amazon and only found 5 I liked the look of. Very frustrating.

  Going to cuddle my wife for a bit now, make sure even more that she knows she is loved.

Feeling close

  There is one person in the whole world that keeps me content for want of a better word. Just being in the same room or in close proximity to my wife makes me incredibly relaxed. I'm not sure why (other than the fact that I totally love her duh) but it is that way. She is the only person I've ever known to make me feel like that. I can be calm around other people but quite often I get worried about things in those situations whereas I never feel that way with my wife.

  A lot of the time I don't even need to say something (given my general lack of chattiness this is quite common), just having that person there is all it takes. I don't want to explain why or how, it just does. I think it is something that everyone should have, the hard part is finding that person. I really don't make much contact with other people, I'm very withdrawn and solitary (in the way that a guy who has been with his wife for over 20 years now is solitary :| ). My list of friends and acquaintances over the years has always been very small so I consider the fact that I did meet my wife kind of extraordinary.

  I think I knew my wife was the one for me when I first met her. You know that slightly nervous feeling you get when talking to someone, that you aren't sure exactly what to say so you just say generalisations? I didn't get that feeling with her, I just said anything that came to mind. I didn't filter what I said in any way and told her how I truly felt about anything that came up in conversation. Admittedly there have been times when I've not told her something but that is when I don't understand it myself. If I find I feel some way and can't understand it I want to be able to work it out myself first before telling anyone else about it. It is part of how my mind works, it is always wanting to know "how does that work?". It led to what I do for a living. Once I knew how computers worked I knew I could make them do things. A simple thing I know but it is that sure defined logic (despite how random computers seem sometimes) that my brain can cope with. It is also why I enjoy videogames so much. Mostly they follow defined clearly discoverable logic. When a game hides its logic or just randomly does something with no indication that is was going to happen I get frustrated and don't enjoy the game anywhere as near as much. It means I generally don't play multiplayer games against other people due to that randomness factor (that and the fact that it means interacting with what is almost always a bunch of dickheads due to the "anonymity" of online interactions).

  I'm waffling again but as usual I'm just working things out in my head and writing them down as they come to me. Doing this allows me to speak to my wife clearly about them since as I said I understand what I'm trying to process with her. Exploring areas and ideas that I have no idea about with her is scary to me. I have no idea how to react and quite often what to say. I will clam up and just go quiet. This is especially so when my wife is upset over something and/or angry at me. It almost always makes her more angry but it is something I can't help. It just happens to me subconsciously. It is part of who I am. My wife knows that though and she copes with it along with my other quirks.

  Going to go and see if I can work out yet another annoying bug now. Try and find the logic in the illogical result that is happening. I like bringing some form of order to the world (see my early childhood where I would line up my toy cars neatly and get annoyed when my brother would come along and throw them all around). Having everything in its place and understandable keeps me peaceful even if its place is a messy pile on the floor. It has a system of being.

Can I get an Om Nom Nom?

  Just had to say had the most delicious home made chilli last night. Seriously good stuff. Chilli over hush puppies with a bit of grated cheese and sour cream. Absolutely wonderful stuff. My wife can cook.

All the 2s

  Took this picture on the drive to work this morning.

Fun with language

  It is interesting to note the differences in language people use in order to downplay or be polite about certain things. One of the things we do at work here is enforce code reviews. You can't check your code in to be used unless at least two people have reviewed it for functional and logical errors as well as adherence to design.

  I did one of these yesterday for a contractor we have. I found half a dozen problems from memory leaks to double free of memory to downright functional errors so I marked them as defects. I got an instant message this morning after this thanking me for my "suggestions". They weren't suggestions in the slightest sense dude, they are things you must fix before this code can go anywhere near a real live environment.

  Another favourite of mine is if people have "doubts". As in "I have a doubt". What they really mean is they have a question and they don't want to look stupid asking it. If they phrase it like that they come off as thinking about something and not looking like they have no idea what they talk about, at least that is what they think. It is a really strange thing to say IMHO.

  Anyway, just a couple of the strange ways people use language in my work.

Almost went home right now

  Hey guess what, losing power on one of the hottest days of the year sucks. Talking to my wife she lost power about 15 minutes ago, which would be bad if it had stayed off for too long. I was debating going home to pick up my wife and the cats to keep them cool. Luckily the power came back just now so the house can be kept cool. It may cost a small fortune each month to use the AC but it is so worth it.

Chill out

  There is a tester here at work that is the definition of Chicken Little. Every thing he finds is the end of the world, he always assumes the worst possible outcome on everything. Whenever he finds something broken he doesn't stop to analyse it, try and understand what is going on he simply raises a bug and declares to the whole group the the release is broken and we can't ship it. Gradually people are starting to understand this though and it is leading to most people ignoring him completely. This obviously has the effect of making him more vocal about what he finds which then leads to people ignoring him even more. You get the idea.

  What this guy doesn't get though is he needs to be sure about what he declares to the world. If people hear nothing but bad omens from him they will just ignore him. He needs to be sure of what is wrong and not live his life so pessimistic. Personally I try to make sure something is bad before declaring it bad. People have come to know when I say something is broken they know I'm telling them the truth. They know that we need to do something about this.

  I'm not sure what/why I'm saying this but I just needed to get it off my chest. Working with people like that is fucking annoying since I don't see how people can go through life where everything is doom and gloom. I know it isn't, I know my life is good since my wife is in it. I don't think I could ever understand how people can live like this person does.

Wide eyed

  My wife is all deer in headlights wide eyed at the moment after having her eyes dilated. The doc said everything was good and she could start going to see him less often which is great news. Her eyes have given her enough problems over the last few years so this is another thing that we can say is behaving now and not worry about it too much.

  Two days now until Boots is free. My wife is going to have to honour of carrying him out of his isolation bedroom to try and keep him happier with her. He is back to his normal self completely now and doesn't understand why he is still in there. He also seems to be eating/drinking normally, even more so now than before his treatment, so all this has been worth it from his health point of view as well. Now he just needs to live for quite a few more years :-) .

  Work seems to be having too many people just not thinking, from programmers that create simple code with a dozen bugs to testers that simply declare "It's broken" without even trying to see why it is broken or troubleshoot the issue. If we wanted monkeys that can simply follow instructions and shout when they find something we would hire them. We need people who can use their brain and come up with solutions to problems not just make as much noise as they can when something happens. This profession is meant to be something where you think not just blindly follow the formula and screech to a halt when something unexpected comes along.

Super

  Well not exactly super but pretty good. Super 8 is what I'm talking about which we saw this morning. It is sort of a cross between The Goonies, E.T. and a little bit of War Of The Worlds. Fun to watch if a little cheesy in places. Also yay for cheapo us getting the half price matinee tickets. The other fun thing, other than me and my wife there were a grand total of 2 people in there. So when during the credits came up and the other couple left I could truthfully say that half the audience had just walked out :| .

  It is getting hot here again, all week temperatures were in the 32 to 35 C range with it getting close to 40 one day. Summer has definitely arrived and the pool is just about at a useable temperature as well. We might actually use it this year.

  Also one last thing, we had a bit of a failure at shopping this afternoon, we tried 3 different malls and something like 8 different shops trying to find something but in the end only spent a grand total of $1.41. Slacking a bit there on the spending front.

Unhappy cat

  Boots is nearing the end of his isolation. Over a week has gone now with him being shut away from the rest of the cats and he is getting tired of it obviously. The poor guy can only get a little bit of fuss from me or my wife a few times a day and he is starting to express his displeasure with this situation vocally. When I got up nice and early as usual this morning he was doing his loud yowling. I went in there to say hello and fuss him a little bit but he only half purred, he really wanted to whine and get out. It is heartbreaking having to keep him cooped up in there with no way to explain to him why we are doing it.

  I just hope that when my wife lets him out permanently next week he gets a little happier once he can go back to his normal lifestyle. In the end this two week period will be worth it to give him quite a few years of better life ahead of him, especially since he will be 12 years old next month. We are hoping for him to be around for a lot longer yet, hence why we gave him this treatment (all $1400 of it....).

Failure and Success

  Well my experiment yesterday has failed miserably so far. It makes it stranger why my previous post about Nigella got so many hits unless she just is really that popular. Oh well.

  In case anybody was wondering by the way, I did find the memory leak the other day, about 30 minutes after I vented about it here on this blog. How bad was this leak in the long term? Even though it was just 17 bytes, after 5 days of running 5 calls a second a test system here leaked over 180Megs of memory, that is significant on something that runs an entire voice switching system in only 512Megs of memory. And yes that is the same amount of memory newer mobile phones have, kind of scary huh that such a relatively small amount of memory can do so much when used correctly.

  Hey, guess what? I got another new game. Shocking I know. This time it is Infamous 2, the follow up to a game I mastered a couple of years ago. Playing the sequel the improvement in the visuals is actually quite noticeable and the control of the main character is a little less floaty than the previous game. I'm missing less jumps than I did before. I didn't get much time with it last night but it should keep me busy for a while. I'm also still going through the Lego Pirates game finding all the hidden items, I'm somewhere around 90% done with that, which if you consider that when just playing the game straight through to finish the story you only get about 30% to 35% of the items there is a lot of stuff to find afterwards.

  Oh and I thought I would post this picture as well. It is something I came across this morning that just makes you want to slap someone. To make it clearer JDRF stands for Junior Diabetes Research Foundation.....

A little experiment

  After the amount of search traffic one of my older posts has gotten I've decided to do an experiment. This time with Kate Walsh to see if what I think holds up. So here we go.

Random facts

  Time for some random stuff

• I worked it out the other day and I've driven almost 460000 miles in the cars I've had over the last 17 years. I've had my license for nearly 23 years but didn't have a car for a long time.
• 221000 of those miles have been in my current car, at the rate I drive I'll hit 500000 total miles by sometime late next year.
• I have no idea what I want for my upcoming 40th birthday. At this point in my life I really just get things when I want them without too much trouble so thinking of things that I want is hard.
• I'm about to start my next project at work implementing the latest technologies, in fact this one is so new it was only invented in 1984.
• I think it is time to move on to another change of breakfast cereal in the morning (yeah I know this is the real reason people read this blog, the latest in cereal eating news). Maybe some Frosties or something in the flake category?
• I only have one really obvious scar on me, on the base of the palm of one of my hands where I slipped and fell over back in England. My wife came running out of the house when I did it and there was a chunk of flesh about 3/4 of an inch long flapping about that freaked her out even though it didn't hurt too much.
• My wife makes the best meatballs. We had them last night and they were so freaking good. I've got leftovers for lunch today, serious yum.

  Thats all for now, until next time.

17 bytes

  Gah, currently hunting a small memory leak of 17 bytes. How much is that you ask? "Enough for this!!" or at least the characters within the quotes. If I went unicode it would be "just this". Not much in the grand scheme of things but enough over time to kill a node in a few weeks. I'm betting it was all because of some sloppy programming somewhere as freaking usual. Ah the joy of other peoples shit to be cleaned up, even more fun when they don't work here any more.

  Why am I doing this you ask? Because most people can't actually track down this kind of stuff. It is not difficult but people just don't seem to understand memory management and expect it to just happen. Somewhere behind the scenes you need to clean up your memory. The bloat you see some programs with now (Outlook is currently using over 100Meg of memory on this PC for example) is because of this. People simple don't clean up behind them. Well, when you are running on a system where using more than 10Meg gets frowned on you can't get away with crap like that.

  Time to go sort this out and finish this venting.

It's done

  Finally finished my latest bit of coding at work. I wrote about 2000 lines of code. However we now automatically generate over 115000 lines of code. All of that code is guaranteed to be correct and have no bugs. Talk about time saving. Feeling kind of glad that I chose this method of solving this problem since if we had to write that code ourselves it would have taken forever and been very error prone.

  Now I get to go do something a bit more fun but probably also something people will never know they are using. Such is my lot in life, thousands if not millions of people use what I do and they have no idea it even exists.

Lego

  We've just been shopping for some toys for our nephew in toy shops. While we were there I was eyeing up some Lego, I miss playing with that stuff. Well less playing and more the construction and seeing the final product. Once it was made I never really used it as a kid, I would break it all down and then build it again. I'm getting the urge to do that again but looking at the price of some of those I can't imagine what it would cost today to get some of the cool Lego I had when I was younger not to mention the time to do it and a safe place away from nosy cats that would likely pinch bits and chew/eat them.

Need more time

  Yesterday didn't seem to end, a long work day, lots of stuff to do when I got home. Finally by the evening I got to sit down with my wife for a bit and relax. It really points out the need for me to find something else work wise and/or get us moved. We need to be able to live our lives not doing things to get by but doing things we want to.

  Boots is settling down quite a lot now that he is back home and really really happy every time we go see him in his room. Now he just needs to learn how to not completely destroy the litter liner we are having to use so we can keep his radioactive waste safely cleaned up every time he uses the litter.

  Ended up replacing the router at home with a nice new faster one since the old one stopped working yesterday. I did manage to get the old one working again after putting in the new one but we left the new one in since it gives us much higher speeds between computers and quite a lot of new nice features that we can now use (like hooking up a hard drive to serve as a media server, be somewhere to put all our media to play on other devices in the house).

  Going to go find ways to get rid of work piling up on my plate by getting other people to pull their own weight.

Quiet first night

  Last night went well enough with our boy back home. We cleared out the spare bedroom we were sleeping in so he could stay in there while we have to keep him away from the other cats. He has been really good so far and really hungry, basically his normal self. None of this lethargy or lack of appetite we were warned about. He purrs his head off every time we go in to the room to check on him so he is definitely happy to be back home. The three other cats were right outside the room for a bit when we first got him home, especially Fudge who I think was most pleased to see Boots back.

  In clearing out the spare bedroom it meant we had to move back in to our master bedroom, the one where the dog next door can be heard easily. It didn't make any noise last night and I actually slept really well. We shall see if it lasts since that bed is so much nicer than any other bed we have.

Being quick

  Trying to get things done quickly at work today so I can get out early and pick up Boots. Looking forward to seeing him and bringing him home. It is going to be hard to keep him isolated from the rest of us for 2 weeks so he doesn't contaminate everything but just having him there is going to be a great relief.

  I really don't think we will cope that well when we do lose him, he will be 12 next month so he has some time left but damn we will miss him so much when he is gone.

Tomorrow

  Get to pick up out cat tomorrow at 2:30. YAY etc.

   Busy day at work today with our main email server being dead half the day. Meant I got to get on with work without too many interruptions but it did hamper things a little. IM ruled the day whilst email was gone.

  Off home now and putting the caravan in to a storage place nearer to home. Two break ins within a month in the original place was too much. We shall see how secure it ends up being in this place.

  Oh and Wii U? Seriously Nintendo?

Missed my boy

  Got up this morning and as usual all the cats came to see me. All except one of course. It was so weird not having Boots casually strolling in to the room acting aloof but then demanding a fuss. We are not going to be able to even see him until tomorrow and then we have to keep him separated from the other cats for two weeks. We also can't have too much physical contact with him in that time which sucks because half of the fun of having a cat is having them come up to you and be fussed over. I know my wife is worried sick about him too, we miss him.

Radioactive cat

  About to go and take our cat Boots to be made radioactive. He needs to get his thyroid under control so he eats properly and doesn't send his weight all over the place. Going to be weird saying goodbye to him and not having him at home. We miss him (and the other cats) when we are on trips but to be at home without him is going to be strange.

  Had a good weekend away in the caravan with my wife (hence no blogging over the weekend). We went to Yosemite which is a nice place to visit. Unfortunately it rained all day Saturday which put a crimp on wandering around in the wilderness a bit but we did get to see most things. We also did our usual of turning up somewhere, seeing it and then since we were so early we are leaving just as it is getting busy. We seem to do that everywhere we go, even the place we stopped at for lunch completely filled up after we sat down. Either we have mad skills or a lot of stalkers who take it in shifts to follow us around.

Ill wife

  I hate it when my wife gets ill. She had a really killer headache last night and still had a nasty one when I got up this morning to go to work. It was bad enough it made her cry which she rarely does from pain. When she gets ill like that I feel even more useless than normal since I know there is little I can do other than make sure she has what she needs and let her rest to get better. I really can't image what I'll be like if she has something serious (other than the things she already has ... ) like my old school friend currently does. Trying to go through that with the one you love knowing it could take them away from you any day would break me.

Dumb pictures

  Now for something slightly silly. Pictures of Lego Jack Sparrow riding a snail and a goat. Yeah you read that right.

Close encounter

  Just had another close encounter with a skunk at the office when I got here today. It was just casually walking along by the building so I did what any sensible person would do, just waited until it was a safe distance away and bolted for the entrance and dived inside. I mean, seriously, have you ever smelled one of those buggers? It is absolutely foul. You can smell them when you are flying along the freeway at 70mph with the windows up and air conditioning on recirculate. The stench is horrendous. I could not imagine what it would be like to get that stink on you.