If the weather forecast turns out to be an accurate reflection of reality it should be a nice warm and sunny day today. As I write this the sky looks a little hazy - sort of grey blue - but the sun is shining. Hopefully that haze should dissipate soon, and the sky will turn a deeper shade of blue. The afternoon temperature should rise to 24° C, and although that may be only 4° higher than yesterday, it should feel much warmer - doubly so in the bright sunshine (assuming the forecast for a gentle breeze also turns out to be fact). Upon checking the latest revision I note the afternoon temperature is now predicted to rise to 25° C, but tomorrow is now only shown to be 24° C, and will probably feature less sunshine.
   Yesterday turned into a completely different day to how I imagined it. In the morning my health indicators suggested I was in good shape, but I didn't feel that way. I felt sort of tired, and I just couldn't raise the enthusiasm to have a shower, and go out for a walk. The final nail in the coffin was that it felt very cool during the morning, and despite the occasional sunny spells, it just seemed to dull to want to go out. I found I didn't really trust the weather forecast to say it was not going to rain. Some of the thick clouds that passed by suggested otherwise, although in the end it did stay dry.

  It was a sort of paradox that I did very little yesterday, and yet I achieved a lot. My big distraction from going out was another attempt at transferring a VHS to a digital format, and end up with a video DVD of what was on the tape. I had wasted hours in the previous few days attempting this. The potentially easy way was to use my old set top DVD recorder. Although I would prefer a more polished product by trimming the ends of the programme to get it all neat and tidy, that DVD recorder, if it worked, would produce a usable DVD. I could have ripped that to digital file I could edit on my PC, and reburn it to another DVD - and with a bit of patience I could also make a more presentable menu structure on the DVD.

  I did manage to record the tape onto the DVD, and I could play it back in the recorder, but it would not finalise correctly. That meant the disk could not be played on other DVD players or on a PC. My next attempt, as I think I have already explained, was using a cheap, and very nasty Chinese made digital record that recorded onto a memory card. I wasted loads of hours trying to get that thing to work without it corrupting the memory card. I did actually capture the first few minutes of the tape before all attempts at capturing more ended up as "File Error".

  Yesterday I dug out my Samsung digital camcorder that was a grey import, despite being bought from a well know big high street shop, and didn't have the external record function disabled. Virtually all camcorders had external record disabled to get around an EU tariff that would have classified them the same as set top VHS recorders, and attract a higher import duty. Being able to use the camcorder as my analogue to digital converter is the start of a long process, but one that does achieve very good results.

  The tape I was transferring to the camcorder was about 58 minutes long, and it had to be copied in real time by playing the tape as you normally would to watch it. The camcorder records onto digital tape, and the only way to copy that to my PC was, once again, to play the tape at normal speed. The program I was using on my PC split the incoming video into 1Gb segments. I then had to stitch those segments together. Fortunately that is a very easy job. At the same time I made sure the beginning and end were clean of any extraneous stuff (like anti piracy adverts !). It them took around 90 minutes, maybe more, to save the entire sequence to one huge (12.5GB !!!) DV video file. I didn't really need it in that format, but it would be the highest quality if I needed to edit anything. I also made a more useful copy in mp4 format, a process that also took well over an hour, possibly around 90 minutes, and from that I was able to burn a simple DVD.

  A very big chink of yesterday went into doing that job, and it is one that isn't really finished if I want to create a more professional looking DVD with added graphics and stuff. It will probably be the case that I won't do any more to it because I have other things I want to transfer to a digital format - fortunately mostly stuff I can leave in mp4 format. The DVD I burnt is for my friend Sue, and I am not sure she can play mp4 files because I don't think she really knows how to use her PC (actually a MAC clone) properly.

  One problem I encountered was that there was at least one off air recording, possibly recorded from a digital channel, that kept triggering the copyright protection circuit on the camcorder. That is going to be a real nuisance. I set aside that particular tape, and tried another. To my great surprise I found a couple short (around 4 minutes each) videos I had made using some very simple equipment in the mid 1980s. One was a video featuring Marion - a woman who wasn't actually, but was the closest I had to a girlfriend at the time. Another featured Imogen - a girl who I fancied like mad, but was only ever just a friend.

  There was a third video that used a load of random shots of people I knew well, but for some reason it may have kicked in copyright protection, and the camcorder stopped recording. The early copyright protection system was a signal just off the bottom of the picture, but was so vague that tape noise could trigger it. Even if I am never able to transfer that third video I am still very happy to have found the Marion and Imogen videos. A lot of effort went into making them, and even if I say so myself, they featured some quite creative editing. I have yet to transfer them to my PC, but I'll probably show them here when I have because I am sort of proud of them.

  It was hard to resist eating too much, or if not too much, then the wrong things while I had so much time on my hands yesterday. Fortunately most of what I ate was fairly sensible. I did give in to having an early lunch because of boredom. It was a strange sort of lunch that would have been OK except for the (seemingly) high sugar content of the sauces that two little tins of mackerel, and one little tin of calamari had in them. The latter was quite a bit after it's use by date. I had bought it from Aldi a long time ago, but until yesterday I had no inclination to try it. It turned out to be nothing like I expected. I expected it to be rather chewy rings, but it seemed to be cubes of a softer material. It seemed quite pleasant.

  I don't know if it was all the fish, or indeed the out of date Calamari, but later in the afternoon, and going on into the afternoon, my stomach did feel a bit weird. I did wonder if I might end up throwing up, but it never came to that. With that in mind, maybe it was a brave thing to eat the two Turkish spicy and garlicky sausages I had as part two of my dinner (part one being a fairly simple salad). By bedtime my stomach was feeling fine, and I had no trouble in the night.

   I did have a bit of trouble getting to sleep again last night, but fortunately not nearly as bad as the previous night. I think it was purely because I had done so little during the day - I think I had a snooze or two while waiting for those tapes to play, and while my computer slowly rendered the video files. I think I was asleep before midnight, and generally I slept OK. My lack of sleep did show though. I woke up just after 5am, and didn't expect to get more sleep, but after a while I fell asleep, and was surprised to see that another 2 hours had passed by.

  This morning my blood glucose is still above 7, but lower than yesterday. As the month draws to an end, it is looking like my morning average for the month will be no higher than 7.0mmol/l, and that is as good as it was when the hospital diabetes nurse praised my efforts....no, I just thought I had better check instead of guess. It is better than the reading I gave to the diabetes nurse - the average at the end of January was 7.54mmol/.

  My weight has gone up a little, but only by a few hundred grams, and if I work at it (and maybe have a second poo this morning) I should get back to, or below my really good reading yesterday. I guess I feel OK this morning, and with the weather forecast being very good, I guess I will be going for a long-ish walk today. Yesterday I checked some of the route of The Waterlink Way going north. It does get a bit vague as you approach Greenwich, but I am not sure I want to push myself that far today. I would like to get to the little nature reserve on top of an old but of railway embankment on the road to Deptford. That is possibly just a mile further on than Ladywell, and if I go no further it should be about a 3 mile walk (there and back). The question now is having said that I want to go there, will I actually get walking today ? I'll report yay or nay tomorrow.