Buffy
I just want them all to be happy. Why can't everyone in Buffy be happy, like in the good old days? Some big baddy would rock up, Giles would read some books, Willow would cast some spells, Xander would make some smart-arse remarks and then Buffy would kick its butt, and they'd all go to the Bronze and drink beer and live happily ever after. Why do they all have to be so sad and emotional now?

I think I'm getting too involved with my Buffy watching. On the up-side, Willow is looking really cute again.

PerlMonks

Rabbit
Shadow 4, Telephone Nil.

Strange Fruit
One of the trees in our yard is a Medlar tree, which is of European descent. It's hardy, attractive and frost tolerant. Despite our tree having been planted less than a year ago, it's provided us with a good harvest of fruit for its size, despite the dry summer. To add to the tree's praises, it's one of the few fruits which are in season during winter, with the fruit just reaching the ripe stage now. Despite all this, medlar fruit are rarely available commercially.

Having had my first experience with this fruit recently, it's not surprising to see why. the fruit are about half the size of my thumb. While still immature, they're hard, orange-to-red, and taste something between pear and apple. However, while the immature fruit are nice, they're only slightly less hard than granite. The "mature" fruit are quite a different experience. One day, your lovely reddish fruit will have turned both the colour and consistancy of rotten apple. This fermentation caused by natural yeasts transforms the hard, inedible fruit into a sweet, soft, squishy delicacy. It tastes something akin to unsweetened apple sauce.

Picking and transporting the immature fruit would be a breeze, but convincing the public that something which has self-fermented is good to eat is another matter. Eating my first medlar was quite a leap of faith, all my previous experiences in puting brown squishy fruit into my mouth have been bad.

I'm looking forward to next winter, when I'm sure we'll have a larger crop and will be able to share this unique experience with more friends.

Pasta
Purchased an inexpensive pasta-maker and have been eating freshly made pasta for probably two-thirds of all meals since. Making pasta is quite simple, doesn't take much time, and tastes fantastic. Mind you, using five eggs per 500g of flour makes me happy that we've got chickens, although with the short days they've dropped to laying only 3-4 eggs/day.

The pasta-maker, while having a lifetime guarantee, has already broken the clamp which is used to affix it to the table-top. With a molded-plastic handle, I'm not at all surprised that it didn't last long. I'll be returning to the shop in the next few days along with receipt, guarantee, and poorly made clamp in hand.

The joys of hardware
I've been hearing an odd sound in the office the last couple of days. At first I thought it was the scanner, but it continued to persist after the scanner had been turned off.

This morning, Jacinta remarked that she could distinctly smell the odour of frying silicon. That filled me with dread, having already had two power supplies and a hard-drive die in our main server over the last few years.

It ended up the problem was a CPU fan that was on the verge of dying. The smell was caused by dust that had burnt on the heat-sink after the fan had stopped working. An easy enough job of swapping in a new CPU/fan. The old CPU works, but I don't have a replacement fan for it, and don't really have a use for it otherwise.