Life Update

Hey guys. It's been a while. I just want to give an update to you on things going on in my life. I haven't forgotten about the blog.

I'll start by saying thanks to everyone for your support. It means a lot. I never posted my retirement on my blog because frankly, I forgot. I received so many comments and it truly means a lot coming from the train sim community. I miss engaging with everyone, but life has really taken the front seat now.

As some of you may know, I have 3 PC's. A gaming desktop, a gaming laptop, and an older Dell Optiplex. Over the last month, I've been utilizing my little free time into making all of the computers talk to each other. The gaming desktop (which all of my TSC content was on) has been wiped and converted over to a workstation. I gave it a deep clean inside (it was pretty dusty) and rebuilt the entire thing. No tools exist on it now. I threw some more RAM in, installed all of the Adobe stuff, used the Nvidia Studio drivers, and now it's a workstation.

What triggered all of this was the loss of 4TB of data. Somehow the disk got damaged. I have no clue why and how it happened. I turned on my PC one day and the disk just stopped showing up. Partition was lost and all data on it is corrupt. It's not worth $300 to retrieve it because it was mostly small stuff, but I did keep it for sentimental value. This means all UTS, TruRail, AMT, and CT stuff is gone forever. I have since learned from my mistakes.

The old Optiplex now serves as a server for the rest of my computers - primarily backup storage. I don't want to pay for a cloud service when I have a 16TB IronWolf Pro sitting around doing nothing. Now that it's thrown in, all of my stuff backs up to the server.

The gaming laptop is still a gaming laptop, but I rebuilt it too. I despise Windows 11. I had the displeasure of purchasing this laptop with 11 already installed. I can't be picky about that since I had purchased the damn thing in 2023. The laptop now has Windows 10 on it (which was a battle from hell, thanks ASUS). I actually like this laptop now.

Anyway, nothing crazy going on these days. Waiting on another part for the storm vehicle today and then I can start building the PC that's going inside of the car.