yssah said

The Cataloging & Rating Tea Thread :) (edited title)

watch the intro video at http://www.thebrain.com/

it has helped me a lot to avoid doubling samples from swaps

32 Replies

love mindmapping, did not love this version of it.

yssah said

you can revisit it later on. it took me a while to figure out that it was the best way to catalog my teas :)

I’m very happy with the mind mapping programs I use now.

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I always figured the moment I need to spreadsheet/etc my tea collection, I have a very bad tea addiction.

Emily M said

Same.

Think most of us should admit we have a problem. I have a hyper addictive personality though. I’d rather be addicted to tea than other things.

yssah said

addiction to something healthy cant be all that bad :)

Artp said

Yappychappy- I’m the same way, but I figure tea can only be bad on my wallet

In times long past I averaged $30 a night on entertainment. My tea budget will never approach that.

Artp said

30 a night? DANG

And thats spread out weekly and includes nights I didn’t do much.

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Sounds pretty much just like excel, where I house my personal spreadsheet. No fees or anything!! it works great, and it’s more customized to my needs to.

Kittenna said

The spreadsheet program of Google Docs seems to have most of the same functionality as Excel as well, and it’s free to boot. I personally use Excel and it’s perfect.

theres also Open Office.

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Sil select said

I’m just trying to figure out why I would want a mind map for organizing my tea collection, ESP if I have to pay for it….I second Indigobloom, excel works for me just fine lol but I could be missing something.

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yssah said

I’m using the free version of it myself. Works for my purposes well enough since I dont need the calendar and file attachment features, etc.

The diff w Excel is that you can connect many things to one item without having to retype it. If you watch the video on the website and try it out, you will see what I mean ;)

You don’t need to retype it in excel either. It auto populates. AND you can summarize with pivot tables and make charts! pretty ones with plenty of colours :D

Colored pivot tables and charts are not pretty.
Source: I’m a pro statistician.

Kittenna said

Hahaha, I totally agree that coloured pivot tables/charts, etc. aren’t pretty in the context of the real world, but I have fun with colours on charts for kicks/personal use. :) Bells and whistles are frowned upon in my research environment, sigh.

I rely on steepster for my rating storage. Although I will admit I just did a -10 scaling for 95% of the teas I have and that was quite annoying.

Dr Jim said

I use color coding all the time for both home and work. Work uses a lot of green/yellow/red for risk etc. so I try to limit the colors in the work stuff but go crazy at home.

Applying colors to words to imply some overall meaning isn’t the same as coloring pivot tables (: I certainly didn’t mean zOMG no coloring things red to denote negative!
I was really messing around anyway. Check my latest response in the steepster suggestions thread

lol at my old job, that was the highlight of my day. It wasn’t very interesting, as you can tell! I managed to make a few pretty ones, don’t tell my boss haha

yssah said

glad that works for y’all :)

Kittenna said

yappychappy – I hear you with the ratings stuff… I have a bad habit of trending towards rating things overly high (like, everything 80+!) that I correct every now and then, but it means some of my ratings are skewed upwards, and I really should go through and fix them…. but…. so much work!

I scaled most flavored teas down 10 except those that I really liked, which went down 5. I had some at 100 that clearly didn’t deserve it. Like oatmeal raisin cookie. Its amazing and a staple, but 100? no not so much.

Kittenna said

I completely agree. I think my ‘100’ ratings are ok for me, but I know I have teas rated in the 80s and 90s that really shouldn’t be there, they should really be around 67-75 because I like them (smiley face) and would recommend them, but they’re not the epitome of awesome.

The more tea you drink, the more you realize a 75 is a good score.

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Donna A said

Yappychappy and Kittena, I agree with you about scoring. I think since a 75 is not so good on a college transcript, I tend to view it as a bad score. So I probably score things too high, but 75 should in fact be viewed as a good score, especially for a flavored tea. I really don’t even like to assign a score, but then if I don’t, it might appear that I don’t like the tea.

Dinosara said

I don’t think I ever realized why I had such a hard time scoring teas in the mid range on here until you articulated it like this. I guess I view most teas as “B” grade which is 80s, and below 70 is failing! I can’t help it though, I have spent too much time teaching college/professional students

Kittenna said

You know, Donna – I think you’re absolutely right! Whereas in the school system, 50 is considered “fail” and 100 “perfect” (i.e., grades below 50 are all equally failures), the tea ratings scale is really more of a representation of the top half of that scale, so what I’d consider a tea fail would be 0 (50 on the school scale), so a 75 “tea rating” is like an 87.5% school mark, which honestly wouldn’t be acceptable to me ;) but is really quite a good mark! Thanks! The smiley faces do indicate this well, and they’re good reminders for me as to where I should be rating things, IF I don’t get all caught up in the numbers.

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Josie Jade said

Ha, I am always so indecisive about ratings. I usually drink the tea a couple of times before rating it, and then I think about if the rating is ‘right’ for awhile before finalizing it on Steepster. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who stresses over it.

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