A post of little significance: About a new blog feature and results of little competition

This post is just a short one, it will lead to a longer one which I plan to publish tomorrow.

a) The competition - what is the worst Xizihao I have had? If we were talking about price/quality ratio, the competition would be as tough as it gets - however, I decided to abstract from the price here. Today, I retasted the last competitor and knew he was a winner - the 2010 Laowushan. It is just impossibly impotent. I realized a way how God could create such a tea (Java-style):

class XizihaoLaowushan_2010{

    // properties

   TeaAroma aroma;

   TeaTaste taste;

   TeaAftertaste aftertaste;

   TeaMouthfeel mouthfeel;

//constructor

    public XizihaoLaowushan2010(Path filePath);

   { 

        this.aroma=TeaManager.getAwesomeAroma('Laowushan_2010.xml");

        this.taste=TeaManager.getAwesomeTaste('Laowushan_2010.xml");

        this.aftertaste=TeaManager.getAwesomeAftertaste('Laowushan_2010.xml");

        this.mouthfeel=TeaManager.getAwesomeMouthfeel('Laowushan_2010.xml");

   };

}

}

then the call: was like: 

XizihaoLaowushan2010 xlw=new XizihaoLaowushan2010("2010/Xizihao");

The idea was to read how the tea should taste, smell and all that from respective xml files... but God forgot to add the file path before the name of the xml itself... Sadly, in the year -10000 or so, when he wrote these world's core classes, Java was a mess (just look how it behaved ten years ago...) - and did not tell him about the FileNotFoundException - and as  the files were not found, the getAwesome* methods simply returned null... And that is, dear readers, how the Xizihao Laowushan of 2010 was created.

b) I found the way of "Sorted tea notes" to be less satisfactory than I initially thought. For some strange reason, links to some teas tend to disappear from there. And I thought I'd prefer something more flexible, easier to add, easier to sort and all that. That is why I created a GoogleDoc where the notes may be accessed (and some interesting scatterplots drawn, e.g., vendor X my contentment, etc.). The link is: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuguYb-CkGEwdHlkN0xnRWZ3UFlDUUoyMDJfd1ROb2c#gid=0

I'd prefer if you, readers, could sort it by any row you desire. Does anyone know if it is possible that you could sort it by any row, but could not change any data? It could be probably done via a bit of scripting and adding a buttton or two, but there are better joys to be had than scripting in GoogleDocs.

It continues the tradition of being subjective, I hope - there are two new columns - VFM - value for me - i.e., how much would I pay for the tea. This is very subjective, for some of these, I'd pay much more than other people and for some, much less. The second column is PQ - price quocient - it is 100* VFM/ how much I really paid. 

The friends who suggested these two columns suggested a third one too, the overall Parker-style rating. There are two reasons why I did not include it.

a) I did not drink enough tea to convert my feelings into a single number in a reasonably widely-used manner. 

b) I do not believe in "objective" labeling of tea. Some people stop reading here thinking "omg, what an idiot" (I know such people). Good for you. The post ends here. I'll try to shed some light on the matter in the next post.