Category Archives: Business

Serendipity Maximus

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Life is strange, life has been playing tricks on me for over six months now, life is tough but amazing at the same time, life is about unexpected surprises… Last month I wrote about looking for an apartment, I’d been looking for a couple of months already but it took me at least three to four hours to go to a 15 minutes viewing each time. Time that I had to make up for later. So I ended up working chaotic hours, evenings and weekends too, just to make up for time wasted on viewings. I say ‘wasted’ because it happened too often that I arrived at a certain place only to find out that to some others it was their second viewing already. Meaning they’d had time to read into the documents and prepare to put an offer in. It also happened a few times whilst visiting that the real estate agent told me to put an offer in within the next two hours (…).

I thought that by buying something everywhere bút Amsterdam I would avoid these issues. So after another pointless apointment I changed my strategy and decided to ask an agent to look for me instead. Following on a viewing -where I met this really nice agent- I made an appointment and had a chat with him to discuss my wishes. To make a long story short, within basically a couple of minutes my then real estate agent could no longer represent me as he offered me an apartment of one of his clients. Within a few days I’d seen the apartment and had put an offer in. Within the next couple of weeks I’m supposed to sign the papers. And once that is done and the bank’s approval is in, I’m officially owner of a most gorgeous, sunny, bright apartment in a mostly quiet green area, only a 10 minutes walk from the beach…

Things have been so chaotic and weird this month that I didn’t even realise how fast it all happened until I had to write my monthly evaluation for my passion planner. What is even more odd is the fact that I had written in previous planners over the last two years that my three year goal was to obtain a studio space so I can extend my jewellery business (which by the way is also going fast forward all of a sudden as I sold four rings within 10 minutes posting them on Facebook two weeks ago) ánd look for an apartment to buy. So far each and every goal I had I reached way before the ‘expiration date’ *wink*. It’s insane. I have NO clue what is going on but like one of my best friends wrote me earlier this week: ‘don’t forget to also enjoy all the change’. That was such a great lesson he taught me that moment, as I tend to rush thru it all asap.

So I should be contemplating every now and then, be still for a moment and realise how freaking grateful I am for everything that is going on in my life at the moment. There’s one thing left that needs to be done after all these years. Probably the hardest too as I know this might still take a while before everything is arranged. But that’s something I’ll keep to myself for a while until the time is right. I’ve met wonderful people over the last two years, people who support me no matter what, people who don’t expect anything in return either, loving people. There are friendships growing and at the moment there are more people welcoming me to this other city I’ll move to than friends I have in Amsterdam. There’s a few still and I’m sure they’ll come and visit me wherever I am or the other way around. I’m so about to start a brand new chapter…

Time-consuming Backups

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It was bound to happen one day, I couldn’t trust my backup system anymore as it was giving errors. So I’ve been busy for at least a week sorting out my digital footprint. Just like I’ve been busy sorting out boxes for months it keeps surprising me how much stuff a person collects over time. I have two external hard drives in raid that I’ve been using to make backups for years now, but the time had come to change to an upgraded version which I bought a couple of weeks ago, a NAS with two 4TB harddisks. Copying over the network seemed to come with some hickups as well but I’ve managed tonight to sort all the information (2TB of ‘stuff’) on the new NAS.

In the past I’ve made use of TimeMachine but I stopped using it a couple of years ago to manually make backups instead. TimeMachine keeps making copies of the same files over and over again and since I had a couple of crashes over the years I ended up with several copies of system folders and copies of a folder structure of things that I wanted to keep. I’ve been going through each and every folder to delete duplicates and arrange a new filing structure. Some months ago when I started to sort out those boxes I’ve thrown out each and every item that I nolonger used, either giving it to charity shops or putting it in bin bags to have it collected and destroyed.

I was surprised by the -insane- amount of ‘stuff’ that I had managed to collect over time as I wasn’t using most of it anymore or I simply nolonger needed it. Cleaning out each and every box made me feel better and better as it was lifting a weight from my shoulders. Decluttering is the most effective thing to do to me, making space around me and also in my head. But I didn’t expect the amount of digital clutter and I found out that I felt less comfortable deleting system files and backups I had made because of crashes, tho I’ve managed to delete about 180Gb of dublicates by manually comparing files. Yes a total drag but I kept in mind that I only had to do this once ;)

I always got the impression that all my photo archives would take most of the disk space but boy was I mistaken. It was good having to go through each and every folder to see what was in there and if I really ‘needed’ it still. Most of it I got rid of anyway and the largest folders where the ones containing software and those system backups. Folders with 200.000+ files in them, old system folders, folders that nolonger had any use since I’ve bought at least four other computers after making the first backup and changed OS about three or four times as well. I guess the largest is my music collection but since I’ve started buying from iTunes this issue has become more organised.

Sorting my digital history was a total pain but I’m happy that I’ve managed to finish it within a time span of two weeks on and off. It was something that had been dragging my heels for years. I was extremely reluctant to act on it because of the time-consuming copying and checking, but as the other backup system slowly became unreliable I was forced to do this after all those years and I feel relieved now the job is mostly done. I still have some really old IDE disks to check but these are so old, I don’t expect to find anything spectacular on these that is worth saving. Still… I need to see what’s on them before I will use brute force and destroy all the sensitive data ;)

The challenge now, is to keep things organised and tidy… but when I think back of all the aggravation caused by having to go through many folders containing 200.000+ files I’m pretty sure I can keep an eye on that to make sure!