08:37 BST

   It's a shame that today will not be a bit sunnier. Apart from at midday and 1pm, when there may be full sunshine, the day will only feature sunny spells. As I write this the sun is behind a cloud, and the whole sky looks a bit cloudy. The temperature could still rise to the forecast 27° C today.  Tomorrow could be mostly very sunny, but only 23° C.
 
  Yesterday could be described as exciting, or maybe traumatic, or perhaps interesting....or something else. The whole day revolved around waiting for my Amazon delivery, and what I did with some of the bits I received. What was delivered was two solid state hard disks, and two class 5 (one claimed to be a class 5.3) USB Bluetooth dongles.

  I knew my Amazon order would not arrive earlier than 1pm, and so I had time for a rest after writing, and then a nice shower. I would have liked to to do some professional level relaxing after my shower, but that might have involved having a snooze, and in turn that could mean missing my delivery if I was asleep. In practice that wouldn't happen because the man from Amazon managed to get the two small packets through my letter box ! That was a first !!

  I passed quite a lot of time having another look at the ex-office Dell Optiplex PC I bought ages ago with a view to replacing the PC I am currently using. It has a marginally faster CPU, but I doubt I would notice the difference. What may be a lot faster is transferring data between hard drives. My current PC, a Dell Optiplex 7010, is reported to have a problem where there is not enough bandwidth between the USB channels, and one going full tilt can slow another - not ideal when trying to copy data between drives.

  The probable new PC may not suffer from this, and that would be a nice speed up. Maybe it might be more pleasing to look at too, although after a while it just becomes a black box at the side of my desk. One thing that once put me off is that it only supports two Sata connections - one (usually) for the hard drive and the other for a CD/DVD drive. Although nothing was connected to it, it also has a connection for an M2 solid state hard drive.

  I had never even seen an M2 drive before, and so had no point of reference. That changed when I was looking inside a mini PC I bought as a potential replacement web server. It had a 128Gb M2 solid state drive in it, and it fits inside the new PC. I could put the operating system on that M2 drive, and my home (data) drive connected to the single SATA connection. The only downside now might be that it onoly has 8GB of memory installed. My current PC has 16GB fitted, but as I wrote this with half a dozen apps open, it is only using 3.1GB. That does go up a lot during something intensive like video editing, but I could easily shut down a few applications while editing.

  My Amazon orders were delivered just before 4pm, and although I would have preferred something closer to 10am, it was fairly reasonable compared to sometimes when they can arrive after dark ! The first thing I tried was one of the class 5 Bluetooth USB dongles. My hopes were rewarded. It has speeded up transferring pictures from my phone to PC by at least twice as fast.

  The next thing I did needed my laptop on. It was only to provide some of the services my big PC would provide - music player, web browser, and also getting some photos that I will be using further down the page. The only big downside is that the version of The Gimp, and the Gmic plug ins is different, and rather annoying. I then shut down the PC, and restarted it from a CD with the Clonezilla application on it.

  Clonezilla, as the name hints at, is an application/progam that can clone one hard disk to another (plus some other stuff, but that was my basic need). I had my new solid state, 2TB hard connected via a USB adapter, and used Clonezilla to clone the 2TB /home drive in my big PC to the new solid state hard disk. It did a splendid job, and as I type this it is now in the big PC, and working perfectly. The main catch is that accurately copying 2TB of data is a very slow process.

  The process started at maybe 6pm, and ran until about 6.30am this morning. So one of the first things I did when I got up this morning was to open up my PC and swap hard disks over. While everything is working fine now, I am not sure I really trust the cheap Chinese hard disk. It is made by Fanxiang.....no, I've never heard of them before either ! I am keeping the old Seagate, "spinning rust" hard drive very safely, and I think I will try and remember to make a back up to it at least a few times a week in case that Fanxiang hard disk decides to suddenly die on me.

  The other two things that arrived yesterday were another smaller hard disk (960GB) and a class 5.3 USB Bluetooth dongle. Both are probably destined to be used on one of my laptops. During all this messing about with PCs I didn't have a lot of time to read, and it seems I may not have had much time to eat. My lunch was a small tub of basil favoured pasta, followed my a small amount of crisps. I would have more crisps now and then, but I still have about half the 130gm bag left this morning.


  My dinner, eaten while watching Star Trek on my laptop, was an Iceland "My Protein" Chicken Tikka with rice. It was not bad, although for it to be only 364 calories it was a rather small portion. This time I made a point of not just looking at the nutritional information, but taking a picture of it (above). It says it contains just 6.5gm of sugar per pack. That is not too bad, but with it being such a small meal I thought I could get away with having a dessert - of Ice cream. It was the chocolate flavour from, once again, Iceland's "My Protein" range. The vanilla flavour is maybe my favourite, but the chocolate is sort of nice, but even more weird than the sort of creamed water feel of the vanilla flavour.



  I forgot to get a picture of the nutrition information of the ice cream until I had eaten it all. It then seemed to be easier, if a little bit messy, to cut out three sides of the nutritional panel. I still could not get it flat, but the most interesting things are easy to read. It means multiplying everything by three because presumably you are only supposed to eat a third of a tub at a time, but I ate the whole tub. Multiplying by three shows the full calorie count to be 308 calories. Added to the 364 of the chicken tikka give a total of 673 calories for dinner - which is not bad ! The sugar content was 11.7gm after multiplying by three, and with the chicken tikka added, 18.2gm. That seems rather a lot, and it would explain why my blood glucose was not as low as hoped this morning.

   I stayed up to 10pm last night so I could watch, and record another another new episode of The New Avengers - all done on the laptop. That laptop, my second best, but the only one with out a faulty touch pad (I think - damage done after I accidently sat on it while blind drunk), almost does everything the big PC does, but with the downside of a small screen, and a display that does not seem to render photos that well. It is more suited to office work than photo editing.

  Although I had some apprehensions about how well the hard disk would be cloned, I was feeling like it had been a very good day....I don't think I mentioned that I had also hand washed a small hand towel, a t-shirt, and two pairs of underpants in between other stuff yesterday. I felt I needed to read another short chapter from my book to try to relax a bit before I tried for sleep. Maybe that worked, or maybe I didn't need to, because as far as I can recall, I was fast asleep minutes, maybe seconds after turning out the lights.

  There is not a lot I can say about my sleep. I got up to pee a few times, although they could have been dreams because they left not substantial memories. I know I did have some dreams, and if I had not had to swap hard disks so soon after getting up, I might have remembered enough to say something about those dreams. About all I can remember is one dream had some sort of erotic possibility, but even that may just be my fevered imagination.

  The very first thing I did when I got up was the usual going for a pee (but no poo as yet). When I came back I got on the scales and was shocked (in a disbelieving sort of way) to see that I had apparently lost a full kilogram overnight. That didn't seem likely, and so a bit later, after having a couple of mouthfuls of drink, I tried the scales again, but before that I did the calibration procedure.  It still said that I seemed to have lost 800gm since yesterday morning. What a pleasant surprise !

  My blood glucose readings were not so good, but still not bad. The Contour meter read a very "ordinary" 8.3mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter gave a better reading of 7.8mmol/l, and so got a light green background on the spreadsheet to show it was good. The Sinocare meter was not quite as good, but still a light green 7.9mmol/l. I still want to get some dark green (6.nmmol/l) readings, but I can't quite seem to find the discipline to eat well enough for that, and I don't think I can manage any exercise to help keep things down.

 I am surprised my blood pressure is so low at the moment (100/50). It was only 10 or 15 minutes ago that my "friend" Lee called to spout a load of boring stuff. If I was doing nothing important I would not moan about it too much, but today is Wednesday, and I have to get ready to go out for my lunchtime drink in The Jolly Farmers, and getting ready includes the full trio of shave, shampoo and shower - and I still have to finish writing and get it all uploaded to my web server !