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The Aquarion Tea Theory of Personal Organisation

The amount of tea I drink is enough to scare all right thinking people. Or left thinking people, come to that. My approach to life appears to be “Hmm. Problem. Hmm. Tea. Hmm. Solution” so I drink many cups of tea a day, mostly by the pint mug. But the amount of tea I drink is only rivaled by the amount of Tea I fail to drink. It sort of goes like this…

Think “Tea. Tea Good”.

Work on computer for a little while. Note lack of tea. Get up. Fill Kettle. Plug in Kettle. Turn on Kettle. Sit back down. Code.

Hear kettle click off. Continue coding.

Realise water is too cold for tea. rise. Turn on kettle. Return to desk. Code.

Get engrossed in making lose_html() be able to allow code that I want, safely. (The problem stems from Javascript, you see. Because allowing *any* HTML and it’s attributes would allow someone to put into a comment “<i onMouseOver="window.alert('Boo! Heh heh heh')">touch me, I dare you</i>” and get something like “touch me, I dare you“, or an OnLoad function that redirects you to the authors site, or goat.cx. The latest versions of PHP’s strip_tags function will strip some JS, but not enough for it to be safe and…

Get up and boil kettle again. Realise this is futile, and stand there watching Kettle boil. This seems to take ages, and on the way you realise that the way around this problem is to use UBB style codes. Kettle boils. Find mug, find tea-bag, put one in the other. Realise the mug looks silly inside the tea bag and reverse the positions. Boil kettle again, add water, leave to steep.

Write the regular expressions that will turn [url]http://www.aquarionics.com[/url] into http://www.aquarionics.com, embed them into /home/na/cvs/klind/addcomment.php and Test. Correct the spelling mistake, and resubmit. Yay! a fully working system so people can link to you. Neat.

Remember tea

Bounce spoons off tea to prove theory, pour brown sludge onto sink and reboil kettle.

Add code to turn [em] into emphasis, [b] into bold and get up to reboil kettle.

Realise reason why kettle is now silent is not because it’s boiled, but because you didn’t plug it back in. Fill Kettle. Boil Kettle. Apply water to tea.

Fire up Visual Basic and create a version of kteatime for Windows to remind you of when your tea will be ready.

Release winTeaTime onto the information superhighway

sigh

Unplug kettle. Withdraw milk from fridge. Withdraw tea bags and sugar jars from counter. Take mug from sink. Transfer all of above to desk. Plug kettle in and switch on

Hope you remembered to save the document you were working on, and attempt to find a new fuse for quad-plug

Plug kettle back into kitchen, and turn on again. Wait for it to boil. Collect mug etc. from desk

While at desk, apologise to IRC channel for sudden disappearance, and promise to explain it in an article later.

Start writing article about the Tea Theory of Personal Organisation

Begin to boil kettle again. Remain beside kettle. Pour water onto tea bag. Wait one minute. Add milk and two sugars. stir.

Take tea to desk, and sip triumphantly as you write an article on the process of making tea.

Finish article.

Realise tea has gone cold.

Swear.

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