There was a bit of sunshine earlier, but now it is dull - just as the early forecast predicted. The latest revision shows sunny spells for 10am, and the rain shown above for 7pm has now changed to sunny spells. The BBC forecast is a lot more optimistic about sunny spells, and that feels right somehow. It should be a little bit warmer today with either 20 0r 21° C expected. Apart from shading the clouds a bit darker in the late morning, tomorrow looks like it could be otherwise identical to today - unless you are a BBC believer. They predict rain from 10am to 7pm, and typically throw in a thunderstorm for 11am. The more important future forecast is for Saturday. That is when Petts Wood Calling happens. At the moment it is looking like wellies, a sou'wester, plus waterproof camera will be the least part of the survival kit !

  Yesterday morning was mostly a matter of waiting. Waiting for the thunderstorms that never came, and waiting for the postman who also never came, but the parcel delivery man did come. My parcel arrived at just gone 1pm, and that was too late to go to the pub, although I think if I had timed it right I might have made it to the pub, and possibly home again, without getting too wet - despite both weather forecasts saying I would be completely drowned.
  The mini PC that came today was the size I hoped it would be. I have pictures it standing on end with a DVD case for a size comparison. It's depth is just under half an inch shorter than the DVD case is high. It was exactly what I wanted with one minor caveat....maybe two.
  It is not very informative, but I sort of liked the tracking page of the Royal Mail when I was trying to get some idea of when my newst PC would arrive.

  The most annoying thing is that it uses a modern UEFI BIOS, and i couldn't seem to find a way to switch to a legacy BIOS setting. On my first attempt at installing Linux Mint 21.2 it wouldn't boot. I could have done a lot of experimenting, but decided it might be simpler on this occasion to let the installer set up the disk partitions, and the booting stuff. One further complication in all this is the solid state, non SATA hard disk. Only when UEFI booting was turned one could it see that solid state hard disk. That was another annoyance.

  One thing that was good was that it could also take a conventional 2.5 inch SATA hard disk (solid state or spinning rust). Fitting one may have made the boot setup easier. Maybe I'll find out one day, but for now there is plenty of room on the solid state hard disk for my needs. I didn't spent long admiring it, and poking around inside before I installed the Linux Mint operating system on it.

  Once that was boot OK I installed a few bits of software I needed. One program was Filezilla - a graphical file transfer client. That simplified copying all the contents of my web server to the new server. The next, and most important thing was the Lighttpd web server program. That is nice and simple to set up and use.  I was about to say it wasn't long before I had it serving all my web pages - the whole web site in fact (apart from today's blog). I'm not sure how I noticed it, but I found that somewhere back in time I seemed to lose the whole of June 2018. I even checked on the hard disk used in the previous incarnation of my web server based on an old PC before it got cranky and I transferred it to the laptop that is still in service as I write this. I have a vague memory of a blow up in 2018, and that might have been why June 2018 got lost. Of course if I could read it I would probably find I wrote about it !

  The next application to install was pure ftp. It is a ftp server I use to transfer what I write on my desktop PC, and any pictures I use, to the server PC. I can only just configure the settings for the program, but there is supposed to be an easy way using "pure admin", but that doesn't seem to work on 64 bit computers - either that or I need to edit some config files enough so that pure admin can take over and put the finishing touches to it.

  I really was paying very little attention to the time while playing with the new PC, and sooner or later I realised it was Star Trek time. In fact I missed most of the first Star Trek. Earlier on I had only lightly snacked on cheese on some crackers and also on some Marmite flavoured rice cakes. I had nothing prepared for dinner, and not all that much in teh fridge that I could prepare. I decided that I would order a couple of kebabs straight from the shop, and thus saving a pound or two on Just Eat's surcharge.

  The last time I used the kebab shop I used today I thought they were very good. The portions were nice and big, and rather tasty. Today the portions may have been even bigger, but for undefined reasons I didn't think the kebabs were as tasty. I still enjoyed them, and hopefully they will be very kind to my blood glucose reading this morning.

  I didn't get to bed as early as usual last night, and that was partly because i didn't seem to feel tired, and partly because I started doing other stuff, although that is also because I wasn't feeling very tired. Once I did go to bed it took a while before I finally fell asleep. That was probably very close to midnight. One thing I started doing last night was drinking chilled water. it was mainly to conserve my dwindling supply of Diet Coke. I chugged down, although far from all at once, almost 2 litres by the morning.

  It was no surprise that I was having to get up to pee quite a few times in the night, but otherwise I seemed to sleep OK. I did need an extra hour of sleep this morning, and I expect I'll be snoozing sooner or later. I did have one dream that was very annoying, although not scary or threatening. It was about attending the Bromley Beer Festival in the Whitehall Recreation Ground. The real thing happened on 23rd June, and I missed it. Maybe I missed it deliberately because the music line up didn't look good, or because the new, apparently council rules, meant restricting access and bag searches etc etc.

  My dream was inspired by all the new rules that seemed to make it a less happy event. In my dream version of the event the bands were all tucked away in odd places, and only allowed to play two songs. I was having some sort of problem with my camera (as well as it's viewfinder being a tiny, and hard to view). I kept missing the two songs from each band, but still ran around the place like a loony trying to catch the next band that might be anywhere on the big site. To make matters even worse, because the bands were tucked away in odd corners, they sometimes didn't even face the audience. For one band all we could see were the back of their heads. It was almost a relief to wake up from that madness.

This morning, mostly aided by the kebabs for dinner, although the copious water consumption probably helped a bit too, I got two very nice blood glucose readings - both very similar to each other. The new meter read 8.1mmol/l, and the old meter read 8.2mmol/l. It is going to take a few more low readings like that to get my rolling average for the month looking good !

  Several things should or could happen today. One of the first will be to finish washing a pair of shorts and some underwear that I put in soak yesterday, around lunchtime, and then almost forgot about. Ideally I should be gong to Tesco today. My cupboard is not exactly bare, but it would need a lot of imagination to make a dinner of what I have available at the moment. It is why I had a takeaway last night.

  Today being a Thursday it should be a drinking afternoon. Jodie won't be here. She is at the Great British Beer festival at Olympia. I expect I'll still be having a few beers with Michael. We will probably drink here, but maybe we might go out to a local pub. I know Michael still wants to visit the roof garden of The Catford Constitutional Club in the old Argos building. Having been there once, I am less keen on going again, but if needs must....