Blow up your terastation
It has been an eventful weekend of sorts. On Saturday morning I repeated last weeks fell run up Moel Famau, but this time in reverse, meaning it was a hell of a lot harder! The really steep climbing (1100ft) is done in the first 2 miles then the easy 4 mile descent at the end ;). The route I took can be viewed here (although it should be reversed). There was rather an unpleasant headwind which made going up even harder, but despite this I did the whole thing without stopping, oh yes. I was pleased to see some people on the way to the summit. It’s always nice to give them that knowing wink and a cheery “good morning!”, as though I do this sort of thing every day (then get around the next corner and practically have a cardiac arrest as my lungs are bursting through my chest!). I somehow managed a little sprint up the last vertical section, which was followed by a huge wave of euphoria as I reached the trig-point. There then followed a few moments of standing on the tower before the starting my descent. The descent was actually quite good fun for a while as the ridge drops sharply and then continues up and down for a good mile, before hitting the boring vehicle track and roads all the way back to Cilcain.
Also tried adding ginger (about an inch) to a smoothie yesterday which gave it a nice kick. May do that again, as raw ginger is very good for all sorts of things.
Saturday afternoon wasn’t as good as the morning as I managed to effectively render my 1.6TB Buffalo Terastation useless. At the time I was trying to free up space on its system partition by moving /usr to the larger shared array. I obviously moved something I shouldn’t have, as now it won’t boot. That was essentially the rest of the day wasted and resulting in my lounge floor getting covered in bits of terastation and PC components. I believe the problem can be solved by first mounting the RAID1 partition on a linux box, fixing the problem (or wiping the system partition), then flashing the terastation firmware. This issue is still on going, and the safety of over a terabyte of movies and music is hanging in the balance…
Today I looked around some houses in Chester with a friend who is thinking about buying there. Chester is a nice place with plenty of good shops, pubs and restaurants, and the prices seem to have gone up nearly 15% since I looked there two years ago - not so good news for non home owners or first time buyers. Looking for a home is also something on my vague and crumpled to-do list, but for now I’ll stick with rental and the maximum flexibility in case I want to bail out and leave for distant shores or far off lands sometime soon.
Shortly afterward I found myself walking on Moel Famau again and this time found a new alternative route to return to the Llanferres car park. Its actually signposted “Loggerheads” from the summit but is possible to turn off and follow a forest track (for a few miles) round the side of the hill and back to the starting point. It was well past dark when I got back at 6.30, but a nice warm evening and many stars in the sky to look at.
Felt like watching a movie tonight but then realised the terastation is still in bits all over the lounge floor.
