A Voice in the Dark

Come to my house. I’ll do anything you want. ANYTHING.

Seriously. Anything. Anything at all. Email me. Call me. Show up. Whatever.

(Why this is in the “liquor” category is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Filed under: Liquor
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So here’s how they make vodka and gin.

The process starts with what they call “grain-neutral spirits” which is just another word for potable alcohol. If they want to make vodka with it, they filter the shit out of it to remove the flavour; the best vodka has no flavor at all. I’m a big fan of Pravda, myself, but honestly… you can’t tell the difference between the various top-shelf vodkas. They all taste like nothing.

When they make gin, they add flavor using “botanicals” which is just another word for plants. The primary ingredient of gin is juniper berries, and then every distillery has their own private blend of other secret shit they use to make the exact flavor of their gin.

There’s one other variable in the process, which is whether the botanicals are physically infused with the gin (soaking in it) or aromatically infused (sitting nearby being smelly over the gin). Again, there’s a secret technique to either way - how they combine the botanicals, and in what order, and in what combinations, and at what temperature. The only gin I know that uses aromatic infusion is Bombay Sapphire, and it’s a far superior technique. Just about everyone else uses physical infusion.

Which brings me to the point of today’s post: Tanqueray, in their infinite wisdom, has figured out that you could use any botanicals you want to make gin. So in their new Tanqueray Rangpur, they pulled out the juniper berries (sacrilege!) and threw in some Rangpur limes instead.

It’s fucking awesome. Best gin EVAR. Tastes nothing like regular gin. If you think you don’t like gin, give Tanqueray Rangpur a shot. Or two. Or mix something with it. Makes a hell of a martini.

Or, if you want to try my personal favourite recipe, top off a Gatorade G2 blueberry-pomegranate with it.

Yes, folks, I am back… and drunk. Look out, world.

Filed under: Liquor
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I see this question a lot about songs by some artist or other who has a large catalog of songs available on the Zune marketplace. It frequently comes down to a question of legality.

Imagine that there is a band named The Band. One of the members of The Band - Bob Guy - writes a song. This song may be credited to The Band, or to Bob Guy. If it’s credited to The Band, the record label usually has the right to decide how they distribute it. However, if it’s credited to Bob Guy, the record label needs his permission to distribute it - because only The Band has given them that right. Even though Bob Guy was in the band and took part in that decision, listing him as the author gives him additional rights over that song.

Now let’s imagine Bob Guy goes out and starts a solo career. When he releases an album as Bob Guy, an invisible distinction is created between Bob Guy the band that released a solo album, and Bob Guy the individual person. To the listener reading the credits, there is no difference - indeed, they are the same person. But from a legal perspective, Bob Guy the band and Bob Guy the artist are different legal entities. Any number of subtleties in the contract language can create a legal requirement to get permission from Bob Guy the artist to distribute songs he wrote for Bob Guy the band.

To make matters worse, Bob Guy is probably not his real name. His real name might be Eric Schmidt, and one or more songs may be credited to Eric Schmidt. Even thought Eric Schmidt is Bob Guy the artist and Bob Guy the artist is Bob Guy the band, if the song was written by Eric Schmidt, they need Eric Schmidt’s permission to distribute it.

Confused yet? It gets worse. What if Eric Schmidt is dead?

It is likely that Eric Schmidt has passed on the rights to Bob Guy’s music, both the band and the artist. But Eric may have simply forgotten that once upon a time, he released music written by Eric Schmidt, and in the absence of a legal name change all unestablished rights to that music disappear until it eventually falls into the public domain. Nobody has any legal right to make decisions about it. For 75 years after his death, these songs are in limbo, and cannot be legally distributed except as already contractually established.

So when digital download became available, and those rights had never been negotiated, a significant part of the world’s music library was simply not legally distributable at all until it hit the public domain. Even if Eric isn’t dead, the music industry is finding that after they shit all over Eric’s career as Bob Guy, drove him hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt with “advances on royalties”, and ultimately bought all rights to his music at bargain-basement prices… well, he’s not well-disposed to giving them a fair deal on the digital distribution rights. He wants his piece of what they took from him. Unlike the day he signed away the fruits of his creativity to wipe out a half million dollars in debt, the record label doesn’t have any leverage now. They want something from him, they can’t get it anywhere else, and he’s going to drive a hard bargain before they get anything - because he holds all the cards.

So in general, the reason a song isn’t available for download is usually that there are complicated legal matters around rights, holes in many legacy contracts that can’t be fixed, and bitter artists the industry has abused.

Filed under: Business, Intellectual Property, Media, Music
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I’m heading back to Redmond and a contract position at Microsoft, although I can’t say anything specific about the position just yet. I’ve got several outstanding interviews with teams throughout Microsoft; one of them has already come through with an offer, so the only question is whether any other teams will make offers.

The tough part is that I’d love to have any of these positions, so it’s not so much which offer to take as which offers to decline… and I’m not going to like declining any of them. If I were to pick just one team out of the bunch as the prime choice, it would be the one that’s already made an offer, but I don’t have enough information about some of the other positions to make an informed choice. I need until at least Friday afternoon to finish up some interview processes and have enough information, and there’s an outside chance that some vital data will become clear on Monday morning.

In other news, I have now spent a total of 172 hours in Microsoft interviews, and judging by my current schedule, Monday afternoon will see it break 180. Whichever offer I end up accepting, it will be my seventh consecutive Microsoft contract.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft
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An entrepreneur in Israel has created a special kind of telephone which may be used by Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath without violating Torah. This particular quote in a NYT article struck me as odd:

“According to Mr. Marans, the Israeli army bought 1,000 of these phones in 2007, so that Orthodox soldiers can take part in military operations on the Sabbath and holidays.”

Let me see if I understand this correctly. Orthodox soldiers are being provided with a special device which allows them to work on the Sabbath without violating Torah by using a phone?

Stumbling blocks before the blind.

Filed under: Religion
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When IE7 crashed on me this morning, it was a terribly uncommon occurrence, and when I dutifully sent the error information to Microsoft, I was pleased to see that it came back with a link I could follow for more information. So I clicked the link.

This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Currently, there is no solution for the problem that you reported.

This didn’t help me avoid the problem, but I did find it simply hysterical and laugh for several minutes, which rather improved my mood.

Filed under: Microsoft, Software
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Received in an email from an opt-in list:

If you prefer not to receive email from [...], or if you’ve changed your email address, please Click here. 

If I’ve changed my email address, doesn’t that mean I didn’t get the email?

Filed under: Business
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There are a few things I hear over and over again, and they fall into a certain pattern:

“People who have this experience will end up doing this thing.”

There’s a huge variance in what these experiences and things are. If you dress in women’s clothes, you’ll become gay. If you watch porn, you’ll be a rapist. If you lift weights, you’ll become violent. If you play video games, you’ll kill people.

But what if that’s what you want?

Imagine that you’re a child who has been repeatedly brutalised on the playground, and someone reassures you that this happens because you’re just not a violent person. What if you conclude that because you are tired of this, and do not want it to ever happen again, the answer to your problem is to become a violent person? How should you do that?

Well, according to popular belief, you do that by lifting weights. So you might go start lifting weights, and after a few weeks decide that you’re sufficiently experienced in weightlifting to be a violent person. So you go out and act like a violent person.

But the weightlifting isn’t what did that - it was your desire to become violent, which you pursued by lifting weights, which did not actually make you violent. What made you violent was the decision to become violent. You became a violent person, not when you started lifting weights, but when you made the decision. Lifting weights was your gateway because you decided you needed a gateway - not because it naturally and normally leads where you were going.

You can’t ask “why is Johnny violent?” and then glibly respond “well, he wasn’t violent, but then he started lifting weights and became violent”. You have to ask the meta-question, why did Johnny lift weights?

The same thing goes for all of the above. And where this begins to get dangerous is that we say things like this to our children, that if you do this you’ll be that, and this carries two messages we don’t want to convey. The first is that if you actually want to be that, you should do this - and the other is that if you do this for any reason at all, you’re doomed to be that whether you want it or not.

This confuses the question of what really causes people to be the way they are. You have to ask why the two things are connected; the meta-question is actually more important than the naive causal link you might draw from a few ultimately unrelated data points.

Filed under: Parenting, Philosophy
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Infospace has decided to withdraw their offer of employment, explaining that they really didn’t want to hire someone who was trying to move up into project management; they need someone who would be content to spend the next five to ten years making no appreciable forward progress in their career.

That actually explains a lot.

Filed under: Business, Software
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Scholars have discovered the oldest recorded joke.

Dating to 1900 BC, the joke is from the Sumerians, in what is now southern Iraq:

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

This joke is apparently a typical response to some obvious statement, e.g. “I couldn’t get a discount on this wine.”

Which just goes to show that sarcasm and fart jokes have always been the fundamental ancestors of all humor. Yes, they are funny, and they’ve been funny for four thousand years. The runner-up is a sex joke from Egypt, 1600 BC:

“How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

Which means farts are funnier than fucking. That isn’t just a hysterical thing to say, it’s also alliterative.

Filed under: Philosophy
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