Yesterday was mostly horrible. If it wasn't raining it was still very dull, although an couple of times it brightened up, but not enough for any sunshine. It was forecast to only reach 17° C, but I am sure I can remember seeing° C 20° C on my thermometers for a while.
       

  It has been raining this morning, but as I type this I cans see some blue bits of sky, and the sun is trying to shine. The latest revision to this forecast insists that there will be showers right through to 4pm. I guess a few rays of sun between showers is allowed in such a forecast. It was just 13° C earlier this morning, but the temperature should rise to a mid autumn like 16° C today. Tomorrow should start bright with sunny spells, but rain might start at 11am, and start with a thunderstorm ! The rain will then continue until 7pm, and it might include some thundery showers...the BBC are ridiculously keen on thundery shows, and in reality the usually, but not always, come to nothing. Once again the highest forecast temperature will be just 16° C.
 
   I could describe yesterday as a very productive day. On the other hand I could describe yesterday as a day when I wasted hours and hours of time. The good thing is that what I did yesterday enabled me to write this, and upload it to my web server. Whether that is a good thing, or a bad thing, is undetermined.

  It would be far too boring to describe everything I did yesterday, and that is partly because it would mean trying to remember stuff I did that didn't work as desired. The main aim of yesterday was to replace the "spinning rust" hard disk in my web server with a solid state drive. I did achieve this, and it had the desired effect - namely there is now no need for the old hard disk to spin up after it has sat idle for hours, and so everything is a lot faster now.

  It all started out optimistically as a very quick and simple job.  All I needed to do was to clone the old hard drive to the new solid state drive. I even downloaded a simple to use tool to do it called Clonezilla. That, and another method that just involved copying and pasting the individual partitions from the old to the new disk, failed. The reason was that it seems like the old hard disk was already starting to fail, and there were some corrupt segments.

  I found some old DVD rip type video files on the old hard disk, and deleting them seemed to make the cloning process get a lot further, but it was still failing very near the end of the process. My next try was to make a blank, but formatted partition on the new disk, and copy the files from the old to new disk. That seemed to work with no trouble, but I could not make the operating system see, and use that partition.

  After wasting loads of time doing that I decided to repartition the new disk to add another partition that I could install a slightly newer operating system on (the original operating system had gone out of support years ago) The new one, after an update to a yet newer one (19.2 to 19.3) is supported for a while yet. It installed OK, and could access the home partition that the old system could not access.

  Now I had a working system I could refer to I could copy and paste the relevant bits from the new to the old operating system, and of course it should now be able to access the home partition...it couldn't ! I have no idea why, and by this time it was already late afternoon, going on early evening, and it was too late to try and research the problem. The next solution was to install the web server I use on the new operating system. I did that, and I could copy and paste the configuration settings from the old operating system to the new. I was then able to serve web pages as before.

  Of course there was another more minor problem. The new server on the new operating system had the wrong IP address. It should be, and always had been, easy to configure the IP address to a fixed IP address, but for reasons unknown that didn't seem to work properly, and I had to go into my firewall box to set it give the server the same (and correct) IP address. I could then connect from my main PC, and see all my web pages.

  The next problem was uploading stuff to the new server. For instance, I am writing this on my main PC in my bedroom, and once written I have to upload it to the web server. I installed two programs onto the new server. One was Pure FTp, and the other was Pure Admin. Installing both was almost a one click operation, but configuring the ftp server was tricky. The problem is that the latest versions of Pure Admin, which should make it a single point and click operation, do not work.

  The eventual solution was once again to copy the configuration details from the old to the new. That worked, and I got full access - almost - using my old password, and possibly some forgotten guest passwords - but adding or removing accounts will be tricky unless I can find out how to get pure admin working correctly. It was almost 9pm when I got this far, and it seemed good enough to leave it there.

  I did take two breaks during the day for lunch and dinner. I can't seem to recall exactly what I had for lunch, but I think it was probably rice crackers and cheese. Dinner was a ready made "classic salad" with added ham. It was because the pack of thinly sliced ham had been open for 24 hours or more that I decided to "cook it" in the microwave. It turned out to be a good idea. Four minutes of microwaving forced out extra fat, and other stuff. The meat had shrunk, and it was a lot drier, but not actually dry. it also tasted a lot like ham used to taste instead of like ham flavour wet paper !

  I think I was feeling rather weary when I left the laptop web server, and went back to my bedroom. At this point I can't remember if I watched, some, none, or all of Have I Got News For You at 10pm. Whether it was 10pm or 11pm, I felt nice and sleepy, and with no more than a hint of anything like indigestion when I went to bed. I read a page or two from the book I am reading, and after putting the book down, and turning out the lights, I was asleep in minutes.

  It may have been 2am, but I think it was more likely 3am when I woke up needing a pee. I had my pee, but before I went back to bed I took a couple of painkillers because I had a few aches that were a bit like indigestion, but may have been scar tissue aches. I am pretty sure I was asleep long before the pain killers had any useful affect. I am sure I can remember having a variety of dreams during my sleep, but this morning I cannot remember the tiniest thing from any of them.

  I managed a bit of a lie in this morning, but I had to get up earlier than I intended because I could feel cramp starting in my left calf muscle. Fortunately I was out of bed, with weight on my legs before that cramp became any more than a hint of forthcoming agony. Apart from feeling a bit cold (it is another cold morning) I seemed to feel mostly OK. The first bit of good news is that my weight has at worst remained stable, and is possibly lower than the peak I had the other day - and that is without doing a decent poo this morning. (what I did do a bit later seemed a bit disappointing).

  My blood glucose readings were very similar to yesterday - OK but nothing to celebrate. The Contour meter read 8.4mmol/l, or a little bit higher than yesterdays 8.1mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read 8.3mmol/l, and exactly the same as the day before. The Sinocare meter, like yesterday, read a nice low 7.7mmol/l, and that is a tiny bit higher than yesterday's 7.6mmol/l. I think this slight increase is the result of a late evening snack of pre-cooked "Mediterranean style" chicken with potato salad. My blood pressure is up a very small amount compared to yesterday, but is still a "better than normal" 110/45.

  Many things should happen today. One high priority thing is to finish washing some clothing that has been soaking for a day now. I meant to do it it yesterday, but getting the web serve working again was my top priority. I also have a sink full of washing up to do, although much of that is containers needing a good rinse before going in the recycling bin. I also need a good wash myself after not bothering at all yesterday.

  One good, but at the same time confounding thing, is that I am expecting a delivery from Amazon today. As well as some spare blood glucose test strips for the Sinocare meter, it will include my new battery powered strimmer. Of course it may not be until next Saturday, or possibly beyond, and further in the future still if I am in the wrong mood to actually test the new strimmer in the garden.

  Hopefully I will get a fair idea of when that Amazon delivery will take place because I would like to get a bit of shopping in from Tesco today. One other thing for today is to decide if I should do more tweaking to my old laptop web server, or if I should be sensible and leave it alone because it is doing what it is supposed to be doing, and anything else is irrelevant !