I’m half-nerd, and nerds create technologies (called “hacks”) which are half-prank and half-project to increase convenience in the lives of nerds, often involving coffee and other caffeine-oriented beverages, since caffeine is what keeps us upright in front of our computers.
Where I’m working now, the coffee is outright awful. Not only do they not clean the large thermos containers they keep it in all day, but the coffee grounds are the worst bulk discount over-baked watery stuff with a trendy name. To add insult to injury, people complain if the caffeine percentage rises. Consequently, my team makes its own coffee and it’s quite good.
However, we’re spread across the building, and so it’s a matter of chance to find a fresh pot waiting on the desk. Until now. Since one of our supervisory people has been on a tear to get us to adopt RSS readers on the desktop as a means of keeping current with the company intranet, an idea was hit upon: promote RSS through coffee by using an RSS feed to keep track of when the pot is hot and the coffee is fresh.
Not revolutionary, not new, but a fun evening project. Here’s how it works.
When the maker of the coffee puts on a fresh pot, he enters in a description and clicks submit on a form that sends the information to a server in our department.
In turn, this server stores the data, and then generates an RSS feed of the last six pots of coffee, with the new one on top.
At each desktop, our RSS readers — which are set to update every five minutes — see the change and alert us to the freshness. (Image shown is from Snarfer, the RSS client we use.)
It’s moronic little hacks like this that keep a geek active. If anyone actually cares for the source code, I will provide it.