Hello?
Is anybody there?
No.. No they aren't.. Because Virgin Media's Landline network has gone super wonky!

-=-=-

As if anything else couldn't go wrong, this weekend, the smegging phone died on us.
I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but for most of Sunday, there was nothing on the phone.. No dial tone, and if you tried to ring the house it came up with a busy tone.. .. But not the usual "Engaged" tone. A different sort of busy tone.
Hmm..

I've now joined the VirginMedia Community, and had them check it all out. There's been other messages in the forum from other people having similar issues, and what's left of Twitter has a bunch, too.
Definitely more than just us, which is nice to know. At least it's not them cutting us off before we move.
Ho-hum..

Meanwhile...

Waiting on the Estate Agent to ring so I can discuss what's going on with the freeholder guff, and will be no doubt ranting about other stuff whilst they're on the line.

In all, however, it's not really been as stressful a weekend as it appeared it might be at the start.
Given how much has gone wrong, my mind has stayed alarmingly calm this weekend, and has managed to focus on the small amount of coding that I've been doing.
Perhaps it's the fact that the heatwave has started to fade away, and my head is no longer melting. Or maybe it's that, by this point, nothing can honestly surprise me any more about how horrific this entire venture has been.

... This crap shouldn't ever really be normalised, though. This is far from normal!

Meanwhile, Meanwhile...

Over on GotoJSE I've been experimenting with different draw-call methodology, but what speeds one thing up will typically slow down another, which is incredibly frustrating.
One of the biggest issues of the engine, as shown by the recent Optimisationalism 4 test, appears to be the text drawing..
Today I'll be stress testing other methods of doing that, but the biggest issue with changing from "Standard" font rendering to, for example, Bitmap font rendering, would be the lack of recolouring when drawing bitmaps.
I'm not sure what other font-drawing techniques are out there, but I'll be having a hunt to see what I can come up with.


"" by #DrawThings