The weather
forecast correctly predicted that it
would be overcast this morning, and that
it would be 9° C. The latest revision to
the forecast says the sun should burst
through the clouds at midday, and then
shine until sunset. The afternoon
temperature should reach 12° C, but it
could possibly be more because it is
already 10 or 11° C - one thermometer
says 10° and another 12°. The difference
is in their heights above ground, and
probably because there is little wind to
stir up the air. That could be a good
sign that today really will feel warm.
The air temperature could reach 13° C,
but there may be no more than 5 minutes
of sunshine tomorrow. It should stay dry
though.
I was waiting for it to warm up
yesterday so I could carry out my grand
plan of going for a walk, possibly a
walk in the countryside, with bare arms.
I waited and waited, and never seemed to
get anywhere near comfortable. At one
point I was thinking of just believing
my thermometers, and trusting it would
feel warm in direct sunshine. I guess it
probably would have, but in my garden
and kitchen, both in the shade, it felt
bloody chilly.
Maybe i gave up too early because
it was probably 11am when I started to
do other stuff. One thing was feeding
the birds, and doing a few things in the
garden. One such thing was liberally
scattering seeds for flowers that
attract bees and butterflies. I had two
packets of such seeds, and one was in
the form of "seed bombs". The latter
were seeds mixed in dried balls of peat.
The idea being that when watered, or
rained on, the balls would break apart,
and the seeds would be washed into the
ground. The only problem is that they
are light brown, and look like cat poos
!
The other seeds were like dust,
and came in a box designed to allow them
to be shaken out through holes to give a
scattered coverage. The box said there
was enough seed to cover maybe 5 tiles
the area I was going to seed. I didn't
use up the whole box, and may scatter
more seeds just before it is going to
rain. If they all grow I could get a
very dense cover of flowers in summer.
Of course the pigeons will probably take
a lot of the seeds.
Another thing I did yesterday
morning, and it probably was the thing
that tipped the balance, and made me
decide I would not be going out, was to
wash a small backlog of stuff in the
sink. I had felt chilled in the garden,
and I continued to feel chilled in the
kitchen despite washing up in hot water.
It was my chest that suffered. I got the
typical aches and pains, remarkably like
a heart attack, that I get across the
scar tissue from my quad heart bypass
operation. The only improvement of the
years is that the aches go away faster
now when I warm up compared to some
years ago.
One other thing I did that was a
good way to warm up, and sometimes as a
cure to the sort of chest pains I get,
was to do some laundry. It wasn't a
great deal of laundry, just one t-shirt,
a pair of long pants and several
underpants. It seemed sensible to take a
chance on getting them at least partly
dry on the washing line. As can be seen
in the picture above, the sun is still
not high enough in the sky to do any
more than sometimes touch something on
the end of the line nearest the back
fence. At least it is now high enough to
warm up some of the flower bed at the
end of the garden,
I brought that washing in at
about 5pm, and it was still rather damp.
It did seem to dry quicker on a clothes
horse in the front room. I left it there
overnight, and it is probably cold but
dry this morning. While I had the heater
on in the living room I returned to a
project I started ages ago. It was to
install two operating systems on the
"second user" Lenovo desktop PC I had
bought from Amazon for just £47. It was
originally meant to be a new firewall
box, but it was far bigger than I
thought it would be.
It is a curious PC in that it is
both old and new. It uses a fairly old
processor, and chipset, but it was
designed to be like modern PCs - at
least that is my interpretation of it.
It makes it a bit tricky to set up.
There are lots of BIOS settings I am
unfamiliar with, but fortunately the
very brief help information did say, in
regard to one particular setting,
Windows XP may not like this - or words
to that effect.
Windows was certainly choking on
the 3TB hard disk I was intending to use
until I changed one setting, and let
windows delete and make a new partition
to install into. Messing about with just
windows wasted hours yesterday
afternoon, but it is installed in a
basic fashion. It needs loads of
drivers, and service packs 2 and 3
installed, but it is enough to now try
and install a Linux installation in the
rest of the disk space.
I was attempting to install, or
at least try in "live mode" Open
Mandriva Linux. This version of Linux
has it's roots in Mandrake Linux - the
first Linux I liked and started using as
my only operating system in 1998 (or
maybe even earlier). After several year
Mandrake withered and died when someone
else claimed the copyright on the name.
Mandriva was the chosen new name. The
full history can be read in
wikipedia,
but this finishes with only a brief
mention of Open Mandriva.
Open
Mandriva continues the line, and is
being developed by some of those who
worked on the last version of Mandriva.
When I finished, just before
dinner last night, I was at the point
where I could boot the live version of
Open Mandriva, but it was doing weird
stuff. It started with a boot menu that
maybe I should have paid better
attention to. There were options of
setting a few options before the system
started up. Once it started I was shown
what looked like a desktop background
picture. After a minute or so that was
replaced with a black screen with a
white mouse pointer. I could move the
mouse pointer, but there was absolutely
nothing to click on.
When I get back to this project,
maybe later today, I have three choices.
A good one may be to try one of my
faithful Linux Mints live disks. At
least I will be using something I am
familiar with. A second option will be
to have a look at the boot time options
in Open Mandriva. A third option might
be to see if a smaller hard disk will
make things happier. It is possible that
the hard disk controller on the PC
motherboard doesn't properly support 3TB
disks.
My lunch was cod in breadcrumbs
and nothing else yesterday. I had two
pieces and they were nice-ish. I had to
have the other two for my dinner because
they were completely defrosted, and the
box was opened too. I had them with some
part roast new potatoes. I had cooked
the last of a small bag of new potatoes,
and intended to have some with the cod,
but since I had precooked them before I
started cooking the cod, decided
to roast/fry them with the cod. They
didn't really get enough cooking to
brown them like chips, but if you closed
your eyes some of them were a bit chip
like.
I ended up watching a fair bit of
TV last night. I watched an episode of
The Simpsons, half a documentary about
the American's stealth bomber, an
episode of QI (thankfully without Johnny
Vegas in it), and an episode of Have I
Got News For You......actually I'm not
sure about the last one. I may be
confusing last night with another day.
Whatever it all was, I still read in bed
until gone 10pm. I was also doing one
other computer thing last night, and in
the night.
Some time ago I was given a 128GB
µSD card that seemed faulty. The man who
gave it to me was always buying stuff
from Ebay, and Ebay was rife with people
selling remarked cards that had been
programmed to report a far larger size
than they actually were. Typically a
16GB card would be sold as a 256GB card.
It would work until the 16GB was filled,
and the failed. I assumed that was the
case with this 128GB card, but it was
something else, and I don't know what it
was. It definitely screwed up if
formatted with FAT32, the standard for
use in Windows machines, but I tried
formatting it as ext4, the Linux
standard, and although it took hours and
hours to copy over 97GB of data, it
seems to have stored it all.
There was one other thing that
happened on my PC last night, and that
was I installed some new updates. One
was a Linux kernel, and that needed a
reboot to take affect (although unlike
Windows, I could still use the PC while
the update was taking place, and after
it had been installed). I think I had
fallen asleep before 11pm last night. At
about 1am I woke up, and after having a
pee, I copied the final batch of files
to the µSD card to almost fill it up. I
then went back to sleep for a few hours,
and then when I woke next time, probably
around 3am, the file copying was
finished, and I did a reboot. After
coming back from a pee the PC was up and
running OK, and I could sleep through to
almost 7am.
I didn't seem to feel any the
worse for my night time activities, and
I almost felt good, but probably
"normal" is a better description. Of
course a Wednesday meeting with Angela
added a bit of spice. After getting back
to a less mad eating regime, although
still not full on careful, my blood
glucose had dropped back to a reasonable
7.7mmol/l after yesterday's high of
8.9mmol/l. Probably the best thing is
that this morning I didn't seem to be
suffering like I had a cold, or bad hay
fever like I did yesterday morning. I do
wonder if it was hay fever or cold. I
was sneezing, and had a slightly sore
throat, and it was easy to provoke a
cough at times, but it seemed to fade
out by the end of the morning.
Today I was going to be seeing
Angela, but she has "called in sick". I
wonder if she is suffering from the same
as I had yesterday morning ? I think I
still intend to go for a walk in the
park today, but it will probably be the
Linear Park rather than Ladywell Fields
as I would be if walking to the pub.
There is a lot of blue sky to be seen,
but so far the sun has been very
intermittent. Oh well, at least that is
better that the latest revision to the
forecast. That only shows white clouds
until 1pm now, but from then it is
supposed to be full sunshine for
the rest of the afternoon. At least the
temperature might have already hit 12,
and possibly 13° C !