Japanese lunch
While we were out today, we had a hankering for sushi. We got a Deluxe Nigiri Sushi Pack to share. I’m not a raw fish fan, and so Jac ate all the seafoody ones. I ate the inari (stuffed beancurd skin) and the tamago (omelette) .
We also shared this pack of chicken sushi. It was really chunky and moist with generous slatherings of mayonaise. When the sushi filling is as tasty as this I don’t even need to dip it into soy sauce.
And of course, our favourite, chicken karaage with bbq sauce and mayonaise.
When we got home I switched on the pc only to get an error when it booted up – my motherboard’s chipset fan was not spinning at all! ARRRGH! This is the replacement fan for the original failed fan, so you can imagine how annoyed I was! I powered the pc down and took a closer look. I found a couple of small dust balls (definitely balls!) in the fan, which I carefully removed, hoping that was the cause of the problem. Thankfully, the chipset fan worked when I switched the pc back on. The pc and fan have been running well for a few hours, so fingers crossed it was just a dust problem which has now been fixed (the chipset fan is very small, so I can see how the presence of dust balls could stop it spinning). While the pc was off I took the opportunity to clean the three case fans too: I have one front (intake), two rear (exhaust). I plan take the pc apart one of these days and clean it all up nicely with a can of compressed air. As a photographer of food my enemy is steam, and as a computer nerd my enemy is dust.
I’m seriously thinking about replacing the replacement fan with one of these though. Quite a few people with the same motherboard have switched to the Zalman chipset cooler and are very happy with it. The only thing that’s making me hesitate is my hot study – I don’t know if passive cooling will do the job in a warm, stuffy room on hot Perth summer days. Perhaps what I need to do (let’s hope nothing fails in the meantime) is save up for an air-conditioner for the study. It’s just one thing after another with this computer. Grrr. In other computer-related news, I now have the pc plugged into a UPS (I have the 1000VA model), and after waiting about three weeks for stock, I’ll be receiving one of these via courier next week. Hee hee. It’s just a drawer for my case. It doesn’t do anything really. Just a little extra case bling.
Some of you may ask why I need to use a UPS. Well, we tend to get these very short (less than 5-seconds) power outages, mainly at night or early morning. It’s long enough for the computer to shut down abruptly and the VCR timer to be reset to 00:00 (that’s so annoying!). I’ve been concerned about hard drive corruption or other damage caused by these regular outages, and so after lots of research and saving up for it, I finally got the UPS. My pc tends to be on for long periods at a time and definitely overnight, so it’s good knowing that I’ve got backup power that will allow the pc to be powered down properly in the event of a power outage. I’ve got it set up to automatically power the computer down properly after about 5 minutes if the power doesn’t come back on.
That’s enough computer-related crap. I’m tired, and might go to bed shortly. It is still so hot. The next house we get must have ducted air-conditioning.