July 2007: 209 and Citadelle

I bought two new gins to try out recently: No. 209 and Citadelle.

I lied, Citadelle is not new. Citadelle is one I have tried many times before, but Bevmo had been out of it for well over a year. I think it's been a couple of years since I've had Citadelle in my liquor cabinet. I'll get to that in a minute.

No. 209 is a local gin, and I always look forward to trying local foods, wines, spirits I haven't tried before. Unfortunately, 209 is not very good. It has an overwhelming flavor of flowers. So much so that it tastes artificial, like a bar of soap. I think I've made two martinis with this and then it ended up next to the 3/4 full bottle of $9.99 Indigo that I tried back in March (now $22, which shows you exactly how much credence you should give other gin tasters besides FOTA).

Looking at the No. 209 website, they have a nice bogus history section. "Yeah, this has zero connection to the distillery of the 1800s that's mentioned, but we just started making gin in the last couple years. We hope you'll just think it sounds old and cool anyway." It cracks me up when some rich dude buys a winery, starts making gin and tells you about all of the history before he started something unrelated.

It reminds me that there's a reason gins like Bombay and Beefeater have been around forever. They're pretty darn good for the price.

Speaking of darn good for the price: Citadelle is back at Bevmo for just $20, yes $20! My opinion remains the same, it is too weak for most martini drinkers. However, if you stir lightly and add plenty of vermouth, it can come out pretty good. This is some of the best bang for the buck in the gin section right now. Save the other cheapies for your summer G&T and buy a couple bottles of this for your martinis.

Price/performance is very important in life. Which one of these doesn't fit?

• Boodles $14
• Citadelle $20
• Indigo $22
• Tanqueray Ten $24
• No. 209 $30

Aha! Trick question! Neither Indigo nor No. 209 fit. Indigo should be at the $10 that I bought it at and No. 209 shouldn't be priced higher than Boodles. Boodles kicks its butt. Sorry to the local rich guy who bought a winery and decided to make gin.

Someone at Mecca must read this blog.

Last time I went there, the bartender actually stirred my martini, didn't shake it. Kudos to him... it was very, very good.

If you're a bartender and need to stir in a hurry, basically just get a spoon and jam down on the ice in a glass. This is very effective and is what I usually see bartenders and restaurants do when they stir the martini.

Oh, also went to House of Prime Rib for my birthday. House of Prime Rib is one of those restaurants where they shake your martini and then leave it in a small shaker. It's amazing that morons on Yelp think this is a good deal, like they're getting more martini for their money. Folks, wake up: you're getting water when they do that. Whenever I get one of those, I basically take a sip, then a gulp of my martini and refill my glass as fast as possible. Then I just leave the shaker. Don't worry, you're leaving water behind, and very little gin.

If you were really getting a good deal, don't you think they'd give you a bigger glass instead of leaving the shaker behind?

Exactly.

Winter 07 Gin Update & Martini Rant

Two new ones that I have in my possession and others I've tried:

• Martin Miller's London Dry. Passable. Acceptable, I guess. Considering that Beefeater is about half the price of this gin and has more botanical flavors, Martin Miller needs to be cheaper. I made my evening martini with Martin Miller for a week, then just switched back to Tanqueray Ten tonight. It was like the lights went back on after a blackout in the dead of winter.
• Indigo. A Spanish gin that tastes like soap. I bought this for $10 at BevMo on a whim. It's a brilliant demonstration of "you get what you pay for".

Also...

• Beefeater. Never tried it before maybe November, but now I've had a bunch. You know, it's not great, but not bad. It's kind of like the Smirnoff of the gins -- the kind of gin that if you put it up against other gins, it would often win, but would never beat the best gins out there. If you want a straight up juniper taste without a lot of fruit, this is for you.

I can't recall others that I've tried since my Summer Review, so I'll just recap:

Martinis

1. Tanqueray Ten. Nothing compares.
2. Boodles. Classic, no frills.
3. Anchor Junipero. Bold.
4. Hendrick's. It's grown on me when I'm in the mood. Maybe it's the time I spent in Scotland in the fall.

Gin and Tonic

1. Bombay Sapphire.
2. Hendrick's (expensive for a G&T).

And now, my Martini Rant.

All of you out there who keep letting bartenders get away with shaking martinis in a metal shaker have to stop. I'm tired of going to bars and having bartenders assume that the best way to make a martini is by shaking it. Tell them no, you're a fool. Truth be told, about half the time I let them do their thing just to prove that I'm still right. Although, I was proven wrong once. Here are San Francisco restaurants that know how to make a martini and those who do not.

Does not know how:

• Jack Falstaff. Ordered a Hendrick's. Shaken. Watery, awful.
• Mecca. Ordered Tanq. 10. Shaken. He forgot my order and first made a G&T. Hello? Who orders Tanq. 10 in a G&T?
• Lulu. Shakes.
• Slow Club. Busy bar, shakes martinis.

Borderline:

• Harris'. Ordered Tanq 10. He shook it, however he shook it very gently and not for very long. It was good, not perfect, but good.

Perfect:

• Izzy's Steaks and Chops in the Marina. Stirred. Perfect amount of vermouth.

So the next time you're out, please get on your bartender to stir those martinis. Let them know we know what we're talking about.

On using QT

It actually seems like a great UI toolkit, so I was looking at their pricing today and was shocked at how much it costs to license it! $3000 per developer on one platform. It's $6600 per dev for three platforms.

Here's the only reason I'd license QT:

• Can't think of one.

It seems like kind of a ripoff. If you're developing on Linux, use GTK+ and wxWidgets. They're LGPLed. Cost: free. If you're developing on Mac, use Cocoa or Carbon. Cost: Free. If you're developing on Windows, use Visual Studio. Cost: $700 per developer and that includes the compiler, a great IDE and a lot of existing knowledge. Bottom line is, it's cheaper to buy an entire PC, the OS (Mac or Windows), and the dev environment than to just license QT if you're on one platform.

I'm not sure what the right solution is if you need to sell a commercial product cross platform. You could use wxWidgets, which seems pretty good, or Java if you wanted to feel extreme pain. If you're a big enough company, it should be to develop your own UI layer. It takes some work, no doubt... but $6600! Long term, it makes more sense to roll your own than to invest that much in middleware.

Point is, QT.. cool, but really, really expensive for what it is.

No more Python... or Ruby... or Boo...

So... if you've been reading this blog long enough (why you would have, I have no idea), you've figured out by now that I'm a chronic early adopter.

Languages play right into this early adopter inclination. I'm always looking for a better way to get computers to do what I'd like them to do. Unfortunately, adopting these languages just hasn't panned out as often as I'd like. More often than not, the "dynamic language" approach ends up creating more of a support issue in the longer term. It can bevery hard to figure out what each variable is supposed to do for even modestly sized classes once you've written enough code. Only someone intimate with the code all the time can keep up with that sort of thing. Stepping away from it often leads to questions later (I've had, at least).

I agree with everyone out there that it takes a rigorous amount of testing to write large apps in a dynamic language. I'll admit right now that I don't do this adequately. A lot of times it's a bit out of my control because the things I need to test are external to the language in a separate process (like running a batch application in the background). This can end up being not as easy as just whipping up PyUnit or NUnit and a bunch of fixtures.

APIs can be tough when you pick up someone else's code. Without static types it can be difficult to figure out exactly what APIs are supposed to do. Considering that none of these languages have IDEs that can really help you very much with autocompletion[1], it makes it even worse to deal with. And since people like to write code that is dynamic with these dynamic languages, where objects are modifying their attributes at runtime -- meaning that you might need to go to another piece of code, not the definition of the class to find out what the heck that field/attribute is supposed to do.

As I've mentioned several times, I use C# at work. About 6 months ago, I switched over all of my web development efforts at home to C# and have had a fine time with it. ASP.NET is by no means perfect, but it does the job just fine and it scales.

The thing I've mostly determined is that screwing around with Python, trying to introduce it into a .NET environment, has been a waste of time. We now have a lot of Python code that only I can support because no one else will learn the language. And, since Python's not standard on Windows, it's a pain in the ass to get everything set up right. I have to bring down all the additional libraries I need to everyone's local drive, set up Pythonpaths, etc. Sure, I do this dynamically, but it has ended up being a mess in the process.

So no more dynamic languages. At least for tools, just C# and C++. There are a lot of apps I use that have adopted Python as their language of choice, which is fine and I'll still use it to script, but I'm not going to undertake development in Python anymore. After 11+ years, I'm hanging it up.


[1] - Regarding autocompletion. C# and Visual Studio 2005 present the gold standard for autocompletion. I have yet to see anything that even comes remotely close for any other statically typed language (and no, Eclipse does not fare well in this comparison).

When doing price comparisons, MAC users have to assume the MAC is the preferred configuration to make them look cheaper

Ok, that was a long subject line but you get the point...

Have you ever noticed how every Mac price comparison asks you to configure a PC to exactly the specifications of a MAC? Why isn't it the other way around?

The answer is because there's no way the MAC can compete if it was the other way around. You can get $300 PC desktops and $600 PC laptops. You can get everything from $2750 Acer laptops that have Blu-Ray burners built in to the ludicrous "mid-range models" @ $1400 or the $474 bargain basement deal.

So don't bother debating prices with these guys. MAC owners want you to price commodity hardware as if it wasn't a commodity, that's the trick that makes Apple look cheaper. Apple can always come up with a configuration that turns out more expensive when you configure it on Dell. Yet, if we were to ever look at MACs in the context of PC pricing in general, it's no contest. Price/performance wise you can only go with a generic PC.

And hey, if you really love MACOS that much, just run it on your beige PC.

Dear home buyers: you suck

The Wall Street Journal this morning finally says what I said over two years ago: Alan Greenspan and the rest of the Fed were irresponsible jackasses with our housing market.

I just have to wonder what people were thinking? WHY were you falling into this easy money policy of the Fed and buying your houses for interest only loans with no money down and an adjustable rate mortgage? Are you that stupid? Oh wait... you also overbid on the house in the first place.

All that you really helped do was raise housing prices in a way that was totally unsustainable. Nice job. Enjoy that craptacular 1000 sq. ft 2BR house you live in that cost $150K more than asking price, for however long it takes for the housing market to come back to earth.