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 !