Tea and computers

Huh... I never knew that. I'm a computer guy (and have been for 14+ years) and always thought I was pretty well-versed on early computer history/trivia. Learn something new every day.

I'm always amazed at the strong link between tea drinkers and computers/science. I know that when I read Mike Petro's bio a few years back it almost could have been copy/pasted in for my own. A lot of diverse hobbies and interests as well as a computer/science tie is almost always the case. I had a waiter the other day who struck up a conversation with me and it came to tea and he was super knowledgeable of real teas and was waiting tables due to having trouble finding a computer job. It's a neat link and probably could be a life's work of study.

- Dominic

In message , Lewis Perin writes

Well I did for one.

Lyons were certainly a prime mover and the first to implement a commercial computer system but they didn't develop the actual machine themselves.

LEO 3 was also used by Dept of National Savings.

I can recall in the late 60s/early 70s they decided to order more LEOs rather than update to ICL System 4.

There was a witch hunt around the company for all those who had ever worked on Leo and they were dragged of kicking and screaming to commission the new machines.

They then discovered that they had recently had a clear out at the production factory and all the jigs for the metal work and been sold off to a scrap dealer, so they had to go and buy them back.

I'm used to drink tea on a daily basis, including at work. As I often forgot the tea in the tea pot, and as I am a computer guy to, I was looking for a way to avoid too much bitter tea cups ...

So, I wrote a very small and simple Firefox (which I use very often when working) Extension to warns me when my tea is ready. I would really appreciate if some connoisseurs can tell me what they think about this extension, and if they have some advices to improve it slightly.

If you are kind enough to do that, you can find it here :

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

It looks nice, but I would have trouble with the steep times, which for my purposes are long and, what's worse, fixed.

Disclosure: I use a tiny program I wrote myself that beeps a number of seconds after it's started; the number of seconds gets typed on the Windows command line. It's kind of stark, but it gets the job done for me.

/Lew

Do you mean that :

1. the steep times are way too long, but I don't know where to find a list of common durations. Have you noticed the option "tonic" that cut off the times ? Do you think it may be useful ?
2. you would prefer to be able to provide your own prefered steep times for each variety of tea ?

Yes, they're too long for me. But there are other people for whom they aren't too long, I'm sure.

I noticed it in the screen shot in the documentation, but I don't understand its purpose. I confess I haven't installed the plugin; I've only looked over the documentation.

For me that would be a minimum. But really, I like to be able to just tell the program how long it should wait before rousing me. I doubt I could get used to having a standard duration - even one set by me - for, say, all green teas. But hey, I'm old-fashioned enough to find the keyboard more comfortable than the mouse.

/Lew

I used to use a one-liner which beeped (Unix operating system, in my .cshrc):

alias tea2 'sleep 120; echo ^G; sleep 2; echo ^G; sleep 2; echo ^G'

and so on for tea2, tea3, tea4, and tea5 (I don't steep longer than 5 minutes, or if I do I don't bother timing it).

But then I would keep e-mailing, etc., despite the alarm and my tea would get stewed. A catastrophe. So I wrote a new one:

alias t2 'sleep 120; mpg123 ~/News/mp3s/SUNARAC.mp3'

where SUNARAC.mp3 is the Red Army Chorus singing the Soviet (I think, perhaps Russian; the tunes are the same) national anthem. Works like a charm.

Best,

Rick.

I made I think a very nice GUI wxpython app that's very handy not only for regular tea timing but also for gong-fu timing because you can define presets in advance for 30sec, 45s, 1:00, 1:15, etc using any times, and there are a few rows of buttons that can be setup like that. That makes it very convenient for gong-fu when you're doing a dozen or more steeps. Unfortunately I almost never do gong-fu but I find this app still very useful for regular tea timing, as well. I can also quickly type in custom time in the main gui windows. Here it is:

Dear Tea Lovers,

Heard of the famous human computer and Mathematician Shakuntala Devi? One of her famous quotes, which I read in a book by visionary Vijay Dudeja goes thus:- "Every time I challenge a computer, I drink a cup of Tea...."

Tea Cheers! Jayesh S Pandya.