The room my team and I are in at work is often referred to as the Orange Room … for obvious reasons … my desk for starters. Other than my team of 2-3 as it has grown to in the last year, an extra can fit – and we’ve had a stream of them in that time. I’ve collected up a few Room Rules as we’ve cycled through people and got a reputation for being quite upfront about communicating them on someone’s first day sitting in the room! One poor guy ended up changing his eating habits to salad for fear of breaking the ’smelly lunch’ rule … much to his partner’s delight.

So another new person arrived in the room this week – a Xero old-timer but has never shared a workspace with me. By now there were rumours of the rules being documented and the person vacating the desk next to me said he couldn’t get away fast enough. So I welcomed our new room buddy with an emailed copy of the rules, which I circulated around the whole office to show just how real they were, and so far so good. He’s been a very quiet and well-behaved neighbour and he’s had rather a lot of visitors and sympathy – people coming to see him to make sure he’s OK!

This morning I got to work and after him telling me yesterday that he could only abide by 2 of the 11 rules, I found that he’d printed them and stuck them up on the wall. Good man!

They are fairly unreasonable:

And a joke of course!!

The Mister lost a bet at work and had to provide a cheesecake. He reckoned he’d build a feature with 10 bugs or less but Susanne from the Quality Assurance team had her doubts – 10 bugs or less and she would provide a cheesecake, more than 10 bugs, The Mister would. There were 11 bugs.

So we made cheesecake on Sunday. The Mister unveiled it for a dev team afternoon tea yesterday.  Susanne was thrilled with it and The Mister received many compliments on how wonderful it was.

There were a couple of requests for the recipe so here you go.

10-12 plain digestive biscuits (of if you’re in the States, 15 graham crackers)
3 TBSP melted butter
900g cream cheese
1.5 cups white sugar
3/4 cup milk
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 TBSP vanilla essence
1/4 cup all purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 175C (or 350F). Grease a 24cm (9in) spring form tin

Crush the digestives finely in a food processor and mix with melted butter until they look like wet crumbs, but not clumping together. Press into the bottom of the tin with the back of a spoon.

In a large bowl (if your hand-held blender can cope with it!) or a food processor/mixer, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Blend in milk and then mix in the eggs one at a time, mixing just enough to incorporate. (It’s at this time I pour everything out of the food processor into a bowl and use the hand-mixer because the processor is getting rather full and leaving unbeaten cream cheese on the bottom.) Mix in sour cream, vanilla and flour (I sprinkle it from a little sieve) until smooth.

Pour filling onto the crust and bake in preheated oven for 1 hour.

After an hour turn the oven off and leave the cheese cake to cool in the oven without opening the door for 5 to 6 hours to prevent the top from cracking. Store in the fridge.

First time I’ve seen this concept of a ‘flipper bridge’ joining 2 countries where each drives on a different side of the road. Have heard the terminology at work in terms of ‘flipper accounts’ which I guess is the same really – an account that changes between being a debit or credit account for reporting purposes – like a credit card.

Anyway, this pic of the proposed bridge between Hong Kong and China looks very cool and there’s a bit of a write up about in on the Fast Company website.