Yes really, its my 39th today, I apparently don’t look it, just a lot younger. However, there is more to this story.
So finally 39, well over half my life (I think!) its come with a lot of problems and still not the most stable person. I do have some tasks before I turn 40 though, one being my own place as I still live with my dad. Finanically, I’m better off than I ever have been as I’ve avoided kids and marriage somehow. I’ll discuss another aspect after this bit.
How does it feel? I need to lose weight and I’ve been trying that since June 2024 with the gym, there are other aspects as well but job wise, everything has been massively better than it has been. I am now getting to the state where my body is making itself known however. Like my skin, developed Ezcema according to my doctors and think I could be potentially asthmatic with one of the illnesses I’m getting.
Your next question is what did I get for my birthday? See below:
To be honest, I don’t ask for much these days, most of which is what I got and to be honest, I am not interested much else as I am saving up for a house and the Blue Espace which needs about 2,000 pounds (US keyboard) of work done on it as the cambelt on a Renault Espace Mk3 V6 requires an engine out. You could always start a go fund me page if you want as I would like to enjoy it and restore it, even if I have the money. But that money is for other things (housing).
I actually also got 4 items, a DNA kit to find out my ancestory, a book for dog walks (thats going with me everywhere where the dog and I go), hand cream (for previously mentioned issues) and one missing. In a pub, I got a prick, in my finger. I found a new fear of needles and the idea was to find out what blood group I’m in… I found out and its not good.
O NEGATIVE!!
What is so significant about that? For me, don’t have an accident as it’s like liquid gold to the NHS. So now I find out I’m pretty much an alien. Thats what my dad called me and I agree. I’m an alien, a legal alien. For those that don’t know me, what doesn’t help is that I’m 6ft 2in nearly, ginger hair and blue eyes. So with the ginger hair and blue eyes, I’m already 0.17% of people with that combination because of recessive genes. Now I find out I have a rare blood type, makes things worse. For me, I’m now in pretty small numbers. I was shocked and worried, but then I do have a blood donor across the table, my younger sister has the same blood group, so I’m sort of OK.
Now that was my birthday, 2 days before is valentines day. Then something unexpected. I had a date, not with the lady on the train sadly, I bottled it talking to her (I get a lot of glances), however, on the dating front, I did get a date and I went out on an inpromptu date. Who is it? My ex, from Kazakhstan! We havent spoken to each other for 5 years, matched on the same dating site about 8 years ago and I do admit to missing her a lot as there were positives, so we have been talking for a while. The problem can forsee is that we both do different jobs, she does permanent nights and I do office hours. Previously, I worked shifts (earlys and lates, with one night shift) and she did 12 hour days which strained both of us massively. Plus my mental health fell apart completely.
So, this time, I’m rushing but not at the same time. I’m seeing what happens and keeping an open mind, but I got thanked afterwards as I did buy 2 boquetes of flowers and a large chocolate bar, as well as taking her out. So things maybe going forwards or backwards, we will see.
On the other hand, my week did go wrong, apart from doing loads of overtime and suffering from the lack of sleep due to it because I had deadlines to meet. It happens, its the work I do, in the process, I’m at the very end, so if someone is late down the line, it affects the crew I work with which affects the work we do. Its nothing I or the industry can sort as sometimes, Network Rail have to work to short deadlines when something breaks, like a cracked diamond crossing, 3 weeks before we have to publish a plan. It happens. Sometimes, certain tasks get complicated like for me, helping with a blockade in the Portsmouth area.
Finally, the worst bit, I spent most of my birthday, fixing my Network Attached Storage device, looks like this:
Ok, what happened here? Well, 2 problems, the first one is these 2, one works one doesn’t. They’ve been together for a year and a half and one wanted to divorce the other – not great.
So, 2 drives, one dead one part 2. What happened? 2 words, THINK WISELY. When you set up your NAS, at least on these, they use software RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks. This NAS supports 2 modes, RAID 0 and RAID 1, aka, striped and mirrored. You can guess I went for the striped (maximun capacity) modes and you’ll be right. It was a huge undoing of mine. I knew beforehand and I wanted to go over to RAID 1, but that required moving 1.5TB of data as changing the RAID setup deletes your data and I didn’t have a spare disk I could use to move it all. Until… it all went wrong. So the hard drive, started refusing to recongise anything, 2 clicks and it was dead. Wouldn’t work in another PC and it just.. died suddently.
Thats it, I lost 1.5TB of data or did I? You may of noticed underneath the NAS is a USB drive, its only 3TB but has a backup of the NAS and it stayed there for a VERY important reason, so I didn’t accidentally delete any data from when I was reducing the size of the folder on the NAS as there was a lot of duplicates.
I also prioritised the data, so I see 4 categories, A, B, C and D
A – High risk, irreplacable
B – Medium risk, difficult to replace
C – Low risk – easy to replace
D – Replacable
Of course, high risk data is projects you worked on that will take a lifetime to replace if not more, like my meshes. They were at the top of the list to save and I have them not in one location, but at least 2 or 3. We are talking about 20 years worth of work if not more. Current projects live on my onedrive, so are quite well protected. The downside is that I lost a lot of photos that were on the drive after my backup date, 08/05/2024! Ouch!
So I would be upset right? I reckon I didnt lose a huge amount, about 1GB worth if that. What saved me is fragmentation, yes, I wiped an early hard drive and sold it, but I have 2 other backups of that from later. That was affected. My camera photos on one got wiped, but I was able to recover them using a program which recovered most of them and some of it was backed up to an online drive. So some survived that way, I’m annoyed that the computer didn’t complete the task. I used a free version of TeraBox for that, so thinking out of the box, shows what is possible.
So apart from my estimation, is there anyting else? I’m still assessing the damage, but I’m positive. Plus I am positive that the drive could be recovered by a specialist.