Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Tea Caffeine Hot

    So the knobs for tea caffeine levels are variety of tea (ignoring not-tea such as chamomile tea), how abused the leaves are, water temperature, and brew time. Maximum caffeine? Black tea, powdered leaves, boiling water, long and insulated brew. Minimum caffeine? White tea, minimal leaf processing (basically they dried the leaves a little), low water temperature (somewhere below 85C or so), quick brew time. There will also be flavor differences: white tea can be pretty subtle, while powdering the leaves and long brew times will extract more bitters.

  • Status Cafe

    Hey, I'm on Status Cafe! Take a look, it's the coolest, most minimalistic status update site I've ever seen.

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 9

    Having established roughly who is a member of the RMC, and how the RMC is theoreticaly governed (the homeowners elect directors who appoint a managing agent, "the MA") ... what are the actual responsibilities of the RMC and its MA?

  • Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, Part 10

    Now on this estate, anyone who holds a long lease on a flat, and probably anyone renting a house from a freeholder, and some of those who are renting socially or from one of the flat leaseholders ... is going to be paying a variable service charge. And variable service charges payable to landlords have to be both reasonable and reasonably incurred, per section 19 of the Landlord & Tenant Act 1985. A situation where two different managers arranging for mowing the same grass, or sweeping the same corridor or repairing the same roof is not one where tenants have to pay both managers, because it's not reasonable to mow already-mown lawn and sweep already-swept corridors. And if it's not reasonable, then it's not a recoverable landlord-tenant variable service charge, which means legally it doesn't have to be paid.

    The leases seem to afford the landlord (our housing association) the power to "step in" to the role of the RMC, and for service charge payments to be diverted to the landlord too. It's really unclear how this would work if the conditions existed for the landlord to "step in" to the RMC's role for some but not all of the flats in a single block of flats. Neither the RMC nor the landlord might have the funds to do repairs or cleaning, and so on.

  • the seven habits of highly effective cats

    I run the library in a Leader in Me (LIM) high school. For the uninitiated, Leader in Me is a program based on Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." Students get exposed to the 7 habits throughout the year, practice them, and see staff put them into action.

    This means all of us get training on the "seven habits" as well. Which means that, among the staff, they've turned into memes. Also they haunt my dreams. And slip out of my mouth at the most inopportune times. Like today, when the cat wanted pets, so she jumped into my lap while I was reading. I said before I thought: "you want pets and I'm a lap. You're thinking win-win."

    Anyway, here are the seven habits of highly effective cats.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Super ZZ Zero

    I am making a game engine called "Super ZZ Zero", which is like ZZT and MegaZeux in some ways, and is FOSS.

    Although it is not completed, it is probably good enough to make a game. Anyone who tries, can please report if anything seems to be missing, any documentation is unclear, or if there is a bug in the program. You might also make a review, feature request, complaint, etc, if you like to do.

    There are other features that I intended to add in future but had not yet done, such as: background music (although sound effects are implemented), graphical mode (currently it works emulated text mode like MegaZeux does; it will continue to have that even if graphical mode is also implemented), inventory menu, SMZX mode (the rendering is implemented but there is no way to enable it yet), and some other stuff. Some things are not fully tested, e.g. the joystick function is not fully tested because I do not have a joystick on my computer.