Yesterday's forecast for today showed almost non stop sunshine for today, but early this morning the forecast changed to show just sunny spells for the whole day. The latest revision has reverted to half the day (in two separated quarters) being back to full sunshine. As I write this the sky has lots of high streaky cloud, and the sunshine comes and goes. At worst today may not be totally sunny, and at best it will be very sunny for most of the time. Whichever it is, it should be dray and quite warm with a maximum temperature of 24° C. Tomorrow is currently shown as being almost, but not 100% sunshine, and getting hot at a possible 27° C.
 
   It seems I devoted most of yesterday to playing with, and then actually using my new laptop computer. It was delivered at about 9.40am, or roughly in the middle of the predicted one hour time slot. Once it arrived I couldn't wait to open it, and see how it looked, and it looked nice. It is not in the latest very thin style, but is fairly slim. Being designed as a "business laptop" it is built for work rather than show. One of the things that means is that it has plenty of sockets for various uses.

  One of the first thing I checked was whether it had a CD/DVD drive. It did have, and that was a minor relief. The description on Amazon was a bit vague about whether it would have one. I have a suspicion that some may have had faulty drives, or even not have had them fitted in the first place. At the price I paid it was probably not worthwhile for the company selling it to check every one when dealing with pallets loads of the things.

  They obviously check the more important things like the state of the case (mine was almost certainly touched up - I could smell the new paint). Mine definitely had Windows 7 installed on it, but I never did let it fully boot. Having found it had a working CD/DVD drive I booted it from a CD of gParted - a wonderful disk partitioning utility that loads directly from the CD. gParted seemed to suggest it was a conventional hard disk fitted, and that it was a 500GB disk. That was bigger than I was expecting.

  The next thing I did was to shrink the Windows partition on the disk to less than 100GB so I could use the free space for Linux. I then partitioned the free space in readiness to install Linux Mint 17.2. That is not the latest version of Mint, but it is still supported for a short while. The best thing about it is that it does not use SystemD - the cancer of Linux (it is too much like the Windows registry, and that is the source of a lot of Windows troubles).

  Having installed Linux Mint I found it "just worked" - sound, video, networking, both wired and wifi, USB 3 ports, keyboard controls for brightness and sound - everything ! It only has 3GB of RAM, but for most tasks that is plenty. The CPU has two cores, and each can run at 2.5GHz. That is not exceptionally fast, but I didn't notice any lack of speed. One of the best things is that the USB 3 ports worked OK, and didn't seem to slow the thing down when moving large files to or from an external USB 3 hard drive.

  Apart from the fact that I have no real need for a portable computer, although maybe I can find some now I have a good one, I think I got a bargain. At least that £109 will last a lot longer than £109 worth of beer ! Once use I put it to yesterday was to rip some more of my CDs to mp3 files. I don't have a formal CD player at the moment, and play all my music from a PC. Yesterdays CD ripping was of CDs that have been tucked away for a long time. Some where actually copied disks that I copied when I used to work in the TV repair workshop. Some of those disks must be 20 years old, and yet they still play OK. It is probably good to have them backed up as mp3 files for the day when those CDs finally start to corrupt (which can also happen to legit shop bought CDs).

  One other thing I did yesterday was to wash a bath and a hand towel. They dried on the line outside quite quickly - which was nice. What was not so nice was to learn more about the leak from where the bath waste pipe joins the main downpipe to the sewer. I made a point of tipping the water from the big builders buckets I use down the toilet. I thought that would bypass the leak - it didn't ! The toilet joins that main down pipe above where the bath waste is connected. When a huge deluge of water, more than a usual flush, roars down the pipe there is considerable leakage at that junction. Repairing that leak seems even more important now.

  I did stop for a can of soup for lunch, but that laptop, and hand washing the two towels, kept me occupied enough that I didn't stop for any other food all day. As dinner time approached I didn't feel like another salad, and I didn't really have much else I could use to make dinner. That seemed a good enough excuse to order a takeaway - my first, and maybe only order this month. I was going to get my usual shish kebabs, but then I noticed another option.

  I have never seen a Greek restaurant listed on Just Eat before, and I thought I might try it. On the whole it was not a good experience. For a start it seemed quite expensive, although the portions did seem quite big when they arrived (and delivery was quite quick). There seemed to be no option not to have chips and pitta bread with most meals, and so there was a lot of wasted food. One dish was "lamb gyros". I had heard the name, but I didn't know what it was. It turns out it is more commonly known as doner kebab !

  The worst sin of all was that the drink I specified with each main course (it was all part of the set menu) was Coke Zero, but what was delivered was full sugar coke - another waste. The meals was delivered with the till receipt stapled to it, and that confirmed I had definitely asked for Coke Zero - sugar free cola. On the plus side the sausages were very big, and similar to Turkish sausage in some ways, and I only ate one of the three. I will be having sold sausage today - probably for dinner. I can have it with the Greek salad (which also came with unwanted bread). I peaked inside the salad container - it looks very nice, but I didn't taste any of it.

  I watched a bit of TV last night, but not much. The last thing I watched was a documentary about Deep Purple's "Machine Head" album. It was followed by a 2 hour Deep Purple concert, but I headed for bed instead of watching it. I was probably asleep, after reading for a bit, by 10pm, and maybe a little earlier. I can only conclude by how little I remember that I must have slept quite well last night. I probably got up for a wee a couple of times, maybe more, but I barely remember even those couple of times.

  This morning I was very pleased to see my blood glucose was back down to a very nice, spot on my personal target, of 7.5mmol/l. That means I'll have to be a bit careful that it doesn't get too low if I end up fasting for a lot of today, although trouble doesn't start until blood glucose gets below 3mmol/l, and I've never seen a drop in over 4 points in one session ever, and I guess I could quite happily fast for 48 hours before I started to feel some nasty effects.

  The main course for today is another street gig. This one is going to be just the other side of Hither Green station. That still means walking up and over the hill - twice for there and back. The really "interesting" thing, as in the Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times", is that the drummer is going to be Angela's lover boy. I didn't even know that he knew Dik and the others, but he was described as "their good friend". I rather hope that Angela may be there as well, but I will have to be very discrete if lover boy is there.