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Like This Product to Enter

Aaron N. Tubbs — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I was at the dentist yesterday. We had a nice chat in which he told me one of my teeth has a crack and is going to be a problem. Then, while my mouth is occupied with picks and mirrors and tubes and crap that normally happens during a dental exam, he starts talking to me some more. He asks me to recommend him to my coworkers, since he takes their insurance, and his prices are good.

Keep in mind this is the dentist that botched a filling and is going to subsequently cause me to have the tooth extracted if a root canal and crown can’t save it. If he really wants me to leverage social media or tell my social network about him, he might get more than he asks for.

We’ll ignore that. If I like my dentist, I’m going to talk to people about him, or at least offer him up if people are looking for a recommendation. This happens. Instead, what happened is that this discussion solidified my dislike, and I’m now in the market for a new dentist. What’s the first thing I did? I asked my social network for recommendations for a dentist.

Point being, if you’re going to ask me to recommend you to my friends or coworkers, you’ve already lost.

Businesses have been trying to harness the social recommendation network for as long as there have been businesses. What’s weird lately is how artificial the practice has become with technology. Somebody figured out that being liked on facebook or mentioned on twitter increased something or other, so now everybody asks to like them on facebook or retweet something specific on twitter. Maybe they offer a prize. “Just like us on facebook and fill out the entry form to win!”

The problem is, are my friends really endorsing this, or do they just want to win a free trip to Aspen? The gaming of the system makes the system unreliable. So I go back to the same old thing, and ask people what they recommend.

Plumbing

Aaron N. Tubbs — Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

This is a yarn about software engineering¹.

There’s a luxury apartment complex. One of the nice features of the luxury apartment complex is that the master bathroom in each luxury apartment is well-appointed. It features a shower, bath, toilet, two sinks, and a bidet². These apartments lease for many thousand dollars per month, so such features are expected by the renters.

Once every few months, some circumstances combine and violent water hammer breaks out in the bathrooms of one of these apartments. This causes noisy shaking in the walls, sure, but if allowed to continue for more than a couple of seconds, the pipes start breaking, water sprays all inside the walls, and all hell breaks loose. Substantial damage is done to the bathroom and adjoining walls. The tenants have to use their second bathroom (not nearly so luxurious, lacking the bidet, separate shower/tub, and one of the sinks) or stay somewhere else while weeks of repairs and renovation are done. It’s not really clear what combination of devices causes the behavior, but it’s clear that in each situation more than one thing was using water at a time.

A couple of tenants experience this, and when it comes time to re-lease, they decide they’ve had enough and move out. These tenants go out on the Internet and complain about the apartment. The company has to lower the rent and do its best to improve the situation so it can increase occupancy and raise rent again. They send around a memo to all existing and future tenants telling them about the water hammer. They’re advised not to use more than one water-consuming device in their bathrooms at a time.

This seems a perfect solution, but the residents complain. They have two sinks, they should be able to use two sinks, right? So the management office says “well, we’re sure that two sinks should be fine, it’s not like you’re using everything at once. Feel free to use two sinks.”

So residents start using the two sinks (in fact they never stopped in the first place, because nobody pays attention to memos and rules), and sure enough, using two sinks is fine.

But a few residents experience the water hammer, have to survive in their third-world bathrooms for a few weeks, and complain. They’re told that they’re idiots. They should have read the memo and not used more than one thing at once, though they could have used two sinks, because that’s okay.

The residents of course say “yeah, whatever” and decide not to re-lease and we’re back to the same problem.

So, it’s clear the apartment complex has to do something. It calls in its plumber, and the plumber asks what residents were doing when they experience the water hammer. They were “just using a few things” but can’t remember what. The plumber gives each device a try and says they all work and packs up for the day.

The management company sends its maintenance staff to try to reproduce the problem. It’s just six devices, it can’t be that hard to figure out the problem, right? Basic combinatorics, which every maintenance staff knows, tells the management company that they just need to test every combination of on and off for the six water-using devices. 64 tests later, they’ll know what combination of usage causes the problem, right?

Well, that sounds like a lot of work, so the maintenance staff takes some shortcuts and just tries all trios of things together. 20 tests later everything still works and they attribute the numerous incidents in the past to freak accidents that won’t ever happen again.

The plumber confirms this, since they’ve had to re-do a bunch of the plumbing anyway, it’s probably fixed.

Sure enough, another resident experiences the problem, gets pissed, and moves out. It’s time to get to the bottom of this. The shortcuts taken by the maintenance staff were uncovered via an inquisition, and the management staff demands they go through all the combinations, not just the combinations of three devices!

They go through all the combinations and nothing happens.

The plumber is consulted again, and they smartly tell the management company that that result is obvious: It’s a master bathroom, which means two people at most, most likely. Is it really likely they would be using more than three devices at a time? Why would they think that more than three devices at a time cause the problem?

So now the search space is pruned, again, but still nothing has been uncovered.

Somebody (attributed to the management company, but nobody can quite remember) has the bright idea to start thinking the problem through more carefully. There may be six water-consuming devices, but they all consume water in different ways!

After all, the sink, tub, and shower can all adjust their temperatures, which means a seemingly infinite series of output water temperatures and input hot and cold water consumption can be experienced.

Perhaps if they use enough maintenance staff and approximate various gradations of temperature along the way, they can reproduce the circumstances. The maintenance staff dives into the problem head-first.

Hours elapse, but still no water hammer. Back to the plumber, who again reminds them that they’ve over-simplifying things. The sink faucets have pressure adjustment as well as temperature. The shower head has a lever to adjust the spray which adjusts the pressure. They get into topics of differential pressure between the hot and cold water lines, and how adjusting the shower head’s spray may ultimately adjust not just the amount, but also the ratio of each type of water flowing through the shower head.

Bewildered, but satisfied, the conference call between the management company, maintenance staff, and plumber is about to end. The plumber, however, is not finished!

The plumbed starts explaining how bad the situation is. The pipes leading to the bathroom change temperature over time. The hot water heater doesn’t deliver water consistently at the same temperature. The cold water isn’t always the same temperature. The ambient temperature varies in both the apartment and the walls.

The pressure in the building varies between negative and positive pressure versus ambient. There are other water-consuming appliances in the apartment, including another bathroom and a half, dish washer, several sinks, washing machines, humidifiers for the central air, and so forth.

There are other apartments in the building and other buildings in the neighborhood, and there are pressure boosters on every 4 floors to keep the water pressure up, which also means that the pressure varies between floors. Seals and valves degrade in performance and behavior over time, such that the same handle input doesn’t produce the same result. Toilet ballasts and seals change over time, and some of the newer toilets have two different flush settings. Further they have very periodic and definite on/off behavior, whereas some faucets and things like bidets aren’t necessarily turned on full blast right away. Different shower and faucet heads have different classes of flow restriction devices depending on when they were manufactured.

Also, sometimes people take longer showers or decide to take a bath instead, and …

You get the idea. Now what?

I don’t know anything about plumbing, after all.
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This is fiction, certainly. Clearly this not my apartment or complex, though it certainly sounds nice!
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Chicken Breast Mezcal

Aaron N. Tubbs — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Check this out.

First off, I’m going to assume some basic familiarity with mezcal. Refresher course: maguey pinas are harvested and trimmed to just their hearts. The hearts are dumped in the ground for a few days and cooked over a wood fire. The roasted piñas are then ground up on a stone wheel, mixed with water, and then they ferment naturally.

The resulting slurry is distilled over hand-fed fires and potentially aged in oak. For more mass-produced mezcals things are a bit different, but those mezcals are not interesting, so I’ll ignore them.

This brings us to Pechuga. After the mezcal is distilled, it is combined with wild mountain apples, plums, plaintains, pineapples, almonds, and uncooked rice.

Don’t be fooled, this isn’t a crema de mezcal being made. This is far cooler than that. This infusion is distilled again, but this time a raw chicken breast is suspended in the still.

How cool is that? Chicken breast mezcal. This is happening. Stay tuned.

Browsing For Books

Aaron N. Tubbs — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Krugman was interviewed in the Boston Globe. Everybody’s making a big deal out of how he’s a hard sci-fi buff. To be fair, that’s pretty damn cool. What I latched onto, however, was something I’ve been frustrated by before:

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren’t looking for.

This is one of those obvious things that seems to come up every time somebody muses over the problem of e-readers and such. Amazon has its Kindle store, and there are a myriad of “suggest a book” websites that leverage varying degrees of effort.

But, I’m reminded of Books Inc. in Burlingame. For years, when I’ve gone to the bay area, I’ve tried to stop here when I’ve had time. It’s an independent chain, but it’s hard to realize that when you visit just one store. It feels like it’s been there forever. It’s not particularly fancy, wedged into a strip mall with sufficient, but not particularly attractive, furnishings. The selection is relatively small, with a few shelves dedicated to each genre.

What I love about this book store is that I can browse around and easily find something completely unexpected. I can pick it up, flip through it, and go on from there. Sometimes I browse within genres I know, sometimes I find myself picking up strange offerings from biography and history sections.

What’s impressive to me about the store is that it is a well-curated selection of books that are more frequently interesting than not. There are some staff picks with hand-written descriptions (I still love this custom), but one need not rely on those to find something new.

In the end, Books Inc. is not a bookstore you visit to find what you’re looking for. I’ve never, in fact, found a book that I was looking for there.

I’ve certainly discovered new books via the Internet and various online tools and storefronts. Some of them have been enjoyable. Somehow the experience never feels the same. I can’t tell if there’s a genuine difference or if it’s some foolish romantic notion.

Surely there are some differences. A suggestion website or commerce system has a massive catalog, rather than a constrained selection of titles. When confronted with a large inventory, there’s a tendency for obsessive min-maxing of sorts; star ratings and reviews quickly screen out things on the periphery that might be interesting. It’s easy to find things that are generally appealing to the general target market, but finding things that are personally resonant becomes a chore. It’s the problem of Oprah’s book club and similar efforts for me. The books are meaningful, deep, poignant, and whatnot, but they feel like they’re deep and meaningful for a population.

I take it as a given that brick and mortar book stores will continue to die in their current forms. The tide of electronic commerce and electronic books is going to relegate what we thought of as book stores to the same fate as music stores. There’s always things like used book stores, but those are largely full of junk that nobody wants. They’re good for decorating shelves with books, but the signal to noise ratio is horrible. One’s never (seldom?) going to find a used book store that says “no, I don’t want to buy that, it’s not interesting enough to be in my collection.”

I want little well-curated book stores to survive, but I don’t know if they will. If they don’t, I’m not really sure what fills that hole.

I can’t help but feel there’s something here similar to channel flipping on television. I haven’t had cable in half a decade now; I watch television on demand with what I purchase when I want to. I don’t discover anything randomly. The things I venture out and try are critically acclaimed or create a buzz among friends. Television never really had a phase where there was a well-curated selection of shows or whatever that I can be nostalgic about. There’s nothing there I miss. If a generation grows up without the well curated small bookstore for books, it probably will not miss the concept either. So perhaps I’ve answered my question, but that’s a little sad.

Metrics

Aaron N. Tubbs — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

This is a bit of yarn.

A company was evaluating upgrading to a new laptop. The old laptop was generations behind on architecture and storage. The upgrade should have been a formality.

The new laptop was thicker. It was heavier. That was sort of weird.

There were a lot of complaints about the screens. The aspect ratio changed from 16:10 to 16:9 (“it’s just the way the industry is going”)¹, so some complaints were expected.

Upon seeing the screen, it became clear that the problem was not just aspect ratio. The new screen had more pixels. Unfortunately, there were fewer vertical pixels. Vertical pixels are life for a software engineer. The new screen was also an inch shorter and featured a smaller pixel pitch. So there was less content, in less room, and it was harder to see. A thick bezel was added to eat up all of the space freed up from the previous design.

How did this happen?

At the tail end of the life cycle for the old laptop, the vendor had a focus group with its biggest clients. Makes sense. The vendor wanted to make money. Getting real world feedback would help it retain clients and attract new ones.

Chief complaints in the focus group were that the battery life was poor and that the device felt flimsy and cheap. Both of these complaints were valid. On the old laptop, the screen in particular felt about as sturdy as a shrink-wrapped legal pad.

The vendor listened to this feedback. It set specific goals for the next laptop. Dramatic increases were required in battery runtime and chassis rigidity.

More efficient components were procured, but battery weight was required to achieve the runtime goal.

Reducing chassis flex was accomplished by adding more internal and external structure (read: plastic). The smaller screen helped with this, since it freed up some room and decreased the weak flexible cross section. The laptop could now be carried by the opened screen² with confidence.

The effort was a success. The new laptop hit its targets.

Except there was one little problem. Nobody was asking for a bigger laptop with a smaller screen.

I remember when laptop screens were 4:3, and how painful it was to go to 16:10, but this is not a time for reminiscence. Even today, Apple is making laptops with the best industrial design in the industry. All but their 11-inch Macbook Air have 16:10 screens.
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There’s a special place in hell for these folks, but they exist. Laptops get abused. Good industrial design helps minimize the number of repairs required from this abuse.
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Cocktail Project Update

Aaron N. Tubbs — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve now completed half of my classic cocktail project. This is, I think, no small feat. When I started the project I had a dozen bottles of liquor. I now have ten times that quantity.

Exotic, strange, and sometimes downright disgusting liquors and bitters are scattered and hidden wherever they fit. New glassware, mixing pitchers, spoons, strainers, jiggers, dashers, bags, hammers, picks and other nonsense litter my everything drawers.

It’s been an interesting journey thus far.

We’ll see how the second half of the book goes. I’ve already procured (unless I’ve missed something) all of the difficult-to-find ingredients to complete the book, so now it’s purely a matter of execution.

There have been several frustrations in terms of ingredients procurement. Erik Ellestad chronicles this sort of problem well. Living in Connecticut, it can be downright impossible to procure some of the ingredients. Our liquor laws and regulations around liquor import are a huge frustration for the classic cocktail enthusiast. Ignoring that, the barely extant, reformulated, and nonexistent ingredients make things challenging if not downright inauthentic. I’ve recently discovered that Lillet Blanc has nothing to do with the original formulation of Kina Lillet. Luckily Tempus Fugit and others have produces liquors that are similar to the original, but now I’ve got some rework to do.

Many of the classic cocktails thus far have been uninspiring. They are often seminal but have fallen from relevance for a reason. Many prize mildness or sweetness and try to avoid bitterness or intensity. A large quantity of them seem to be hard-set on the sour + sweetener + spirit approach with only mild variation.

So, we’ll see how the second half of the book goes. It should be interesting. Then I’ll need to start a new project.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Aaron N. Tubbs — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning scratched the same itch as Skyrim for me. The problem with Skyrim is it stopped being interesting after a while; there wasn’t any point to anything once the plot was finished. Sure, you could keep doing quests and exploring stuff, but it wasn’t getting you anywhere.

Amalur lacks the amazing visual style and graphics of Skyrim, but stayed interesting for a much longer period of time. Unfortunately, it also hit a wall for me. About halfway through the game (by some arbitrary estimation) I hit the level cap. I still had gobs of side quests, but I stopped leveling up. The other huge problem was loot: After the sorrows gear, I didn’t see a single improvement in equipment through the entire remainder of the game, save for a staff upgrade. So the loot stopped being interesting midway through the game, and the quests had no point (at least in terms of anything but doing the quests)… At this point it just became a matter of tearing through the rest of the main story (with a quick sidebar to completionist Dead Kel and get some more buffs).

This leads to the last problem. Amalur becomes seriously easy-mode once you’re high level and have good equipment. Where Skyrim does a good job of leveling the challenges a little bit (it’s not great, but it’s something), every single encounter in Amalur can be solved by meteor storm followed by lightning storm (or whatever these are called. Everything dies in this. Bosses are harder, right? Just punch fate and do the same sequence; virutally nothing could take two fated meteor storms. It wasn’t even interesting.

So, whatever. If you’re thirsty for perfection in an RPG, this isn’t it, either. The first Dragon Age game still seems the most interesting from a mechanics and gameplay standpoint, but was crippled by bugs. Skyrim wins for graphics and Amalur wins for content overload, but all of them still sucked. What’s the fourth option that I haven’t found that’s perfect?

Learned Me Some JavaScript

Aaron N. Tubbs — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I drink a lot of tea at work. Often at least a liter or two a day. This means that several times I day I need to be reminded to remove tea from a batch of hot water. There are fancy phone apps and computer apps for this, but the thing that’s always at hand is a web browser.

Thus, I fell in love with steep.it, a simple web based timer. You visit a url like:

steep.it/5 minutes

… and you get a 5-minute timer.

The problem is, this website uses flash, and that means stuff crashes and hangs, because that’s what happens when you use flash.

So, I decided to implement something that will serve the same purpose for me in JavaScript instead. I’d have to do some domain/redirect magic (including picking a nice short url) to make this work properly, but now I’ve got something that’s somewhat similar:

This does more or less the same thing, just with fewer features and more ugliness. It supports seconds/minutes/hours/days/weeks, but doesn’t do convenience things like “green” and “oolong.” Mostly because that sort of default guidance isn’t particularly useful to me, and I made this for myself.

It also doesn’t play a sound when it finishes because I couldn’t figure out a way to pop up a message box and play a sound without making one or the other happen at the wrong time. On the upside, my sound is usually off at work, so I don’t care.

In the process I learned a little JavaScript, but not much; what I built is still pretty ham fisted at best. I used pegjs to build a parser for the time language and Ugly JS to compress things. Both seem to work relatively well.

JavaScript and writing purely client-side code is sort of weird. I don’t know enough about it to be particularly good at it. But there you go.

Mobile Check Deposit

Aaron N. Tubbs — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Marco Arment’s post about mobile check deposits is on point. I was overjoyed to discover that Citibank started offering this feature in their mobile app – I’d no longer have to make my monthly trips to Citibank! Reality wasn’t nearly so kind, though. The steps I have to follow are similar, but worse. I’ll be somewhat brief as a lot of this is redundant with Marco’s original post:

Log into the citibank mobile application. Again, this requires a strong password that’s irritating to type on the iPhone, because it was made to be a strong password when a keyboard is accessible.
Navigate to accounts.
Pick account for the deposit.
Hit the ‘make a deposit button’
Enter my complete ATM card number. Wait, what? Why the hell? Didn’t I already log in to my accounts?
Enter a security challenge response. Here’s where it gets really stupid. These are picked randomly, and are not the same challenge/response questions used by the Citibank website. Why did I set up custom challenge/response questions only to have “what is your Mother’s maiden name?” or “what are the last four digits of your SSN?” asked of me? Through this process I discovered that my mother’s maiden name, at least according to this mechanism, did not agree with the value I’d set. This of course locked not just the application and mobile deposit out, but all of my banking access everywhere.
Scroll down on the page to signify I’ve read the instructions to photograph the front of the check to hit a button to start the process to photograph the front of the check.
Photograph the front of the check.
Verify my photograph and that I’m happy with it.
Scroll down on the page to signify I’ve read the instructions to photograph the back of the check and hit a button to start the process to photograph the back of the check.
Photograph the back of the check.
Verify the photograph and that I’m happy with it.
Be presented with thumbnail images of both sides of the check and hit a button to say I’m happy with both of them.
Hit a button to submit the mobile deposit.
Get an email telling me that my mobile deposit request has been accepted and I’ll hear back in a few days if it worked.
Wait a few days.
Get an email telling met he mobile deposit worked, I should now void my check and destroy it.

Now, some of these steps can be debated, but call it at least a solid dozen steps to submit a check for mobile deposit. This is just for one check. Citibank limits deposits to $1000/day if you try to deposit more than this, but doesn’t tell you otherwise that there’s a limit until you run into it (at least as part of this workflow).

Let’s make a totally unfair comparison with how much work it is to sign up for Uber the first time:

Start app
Photograph credit card
Call town car

Apples and oranges, yes. But I think there’s a lesson here. Old businesses stuck in their old ways leads to complete absurdity. For me, checks will continue to be deposited at an ATM, where I can just feed them into a machine and be done in 90 seconds.

Sandals Whitehouse

Aaron N. Tubbs — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve just returned from my first trip to an all-inclusive resort. The resort was Sandals Whitehouse in Jamaica. Like all Sandals resorts, it’s all-inclusive, couples-themed, and adults-only. Not having kids at the resort was definitely a huge plus. Being my first stay of this variety, I have little to compare it to. The closest comparable was my cruise experience, which was pretty awful (the cruising part, at least) by comparison.

And there’s peacocks.

Matters of Transportation

Getting to Sandals Whitehouse is interesting. We arrived into MBJ , went through the usual international hassles, and then went to the Sandals lounge. There were checked in, got our free beer, and were told that we were ready to depart.

Now, as part of the arrangement, we were supposed to have luxury private transfer (as we find out later, that pretty much just means something like a Camry with a driver), but somebody dropped the ball. We ended up on a shuttle instead, but nobody else showed up for the shuttle. So it was semi-private, and kind of strange.

The drive itself is … interesting. I drugged myself with motion sickness medicine ahead of time (it pays to do your research). I recommend this if you, in any fashion, get sick in vehicles. The driver was good, but the road south from MBJ is incredibly bad. It works out to about 1.5-2 hours of swerving, pothole avoidance, sudden stops, and games of chicken with oncoming traffic. The scenery is interesting, showing “real jamaica” (our driver’s words, not mine) and a lot of the interesting inland geography. I enjoyed it both coming and going; it was fascinating to see.

A few minutes into our transfer to the resort, somebody figured out that there was a giant fuckup, but it was well-handled, and we enjoyed our time with our shuttle driver anyway.

On the way back we did have private car service, and it was relatively swell, except that the car was sprayed with perfume and I smelled like it for the rest of the day.

Now, real winners figured out something that wasn’t an option when I was booking through Delta: Helicopter transfers from MBJ to the resort are available. Would totally do that next time (easy to say when I have no clue how much it costs; reality probably differs from my assertion).

The Food

The food was the worst part of the trip. Fresh cut fruit at the breakfast buffet was excellent. The Stamp n’ Go was tasty. The pepper jack cheese was actually spicy and satisfying (sadly this was the only spicy thing we ate). I would have a hard time saying anything else was even good. Half of our plates were tolerable. The remainder were horrible. Food in my cafeteria at work or in my dorm in college is vastly superior. I’ve had better frozen meals.

Minor variations of the exact same sauce were used in virtually every sauced dish. Seasoning was uninspired and optimized homogeneity and flavor minimization. Vegetables were mushy and flavorless. Desserts were universally bad; pastries were vast in variety and quantity, but the quality was inferior to a continental breakfast at a $29.99/night dump in the Midwest. Even sugar cookies and chocolate chip cookies were horrid.

The difference between the jerk chicken and the sweet and sour pork seemed to be that one was made with chicken and one was made with pork. A Wendy’s jerk chicken sandwich at the airport was superior in flavor and texture to any meat I had at the resort.

Some specifics: Beef carpaccio was thick cut dehydrated well-done roast beef. Ceviche was cooked with both acid heat, and was so rubbery and awful that I could stomach only a single bite. A hamburger was an inedible hockey puck. Snapper had the texture of applesauce. Flying fish was glue paste.

Saltfish was the only meat or fish tolerable, and it only came in the form of fried dumplings or in a soup of “spicy” (read: flavorless) ackee relish. Sadly the latter option was only available at the buffet on Sunday mornings.

A lot of work seems to be put into making the plating look “fancy” with sprays of sauce, brushes of chocolate, squirts of effluent, and swizzles of syrup. Unfortunately, fancy plating doesn’t make shit food taste any better. It didn’t help that the wait staff didn’t seem to have a clue what they were serving, even. As a small anecdote, I ordered cherry clafoutis. This is what came out:

It was presented as creme brulee. In reality it seems that it was some sort of decomposed flan, perhaps?

I could carry on, but this grows exhausting. It’s as simple as this: The food was truly bad. I can’t speak for other resorts on the island or for other islands, but I would avoid at least this particular resort if good food is important. The dining options are sufficient in providing sustenance and freedom from intestinal distress, but they offer little joy otherwise. Paired with inattentive and sluggish sit-down service, dining is downright miserable and arduous. The buffet and self-service options were the least disappointing should one wish to dine here.

Encounter With a Monster of the Not So Deep

I lied. Far and away the worst part of the trip was stepping on a spiny sea urchin. This happened in the designated swimming area that’s purportedly the nice sand (the normal beach quickly gets nasty, rocky, and muddy about 10 feet in). For our entire stay the water was pretty cloudy, and seeing more than a foot deep was difficult. Thus, I didn’t see the urchin, but he made his presence felt. Unlike stepping on a starfish (also quite common at the resort), which hurts a bit, this hurts like a motherfucker.

The spines entered my little toe and the side of my foot. It felt like being injected with large-bore needles coated in fire, if that makes any sense. We attempted to remove the spines to little success and a life guard joined the fun, but quickly gave up and suggested Melissa pee on my foot. Apparently this is legitimate, but we didn’t try it. The nurse said that if I was relatively healthy I would be fine. “The urchin, is carbon. You’re carbon. It will be absorbed by your body.” Things are still a little sore, but I believe I’ve escaped infection, which is what really matters.

I avoided the ocean thereafter.

Otherwise, encounters with creatures other than birds was relatively infrequent. Pesticides are applied liberally in rooms and around the resort. We ran into a few lizards and this giant moth (a bit larger than a deck of cards):

Some giant cockroach death beetles appeared after a night of exceptionally heavy rain, and it seems that guests enjoyed crushing them, as we only saw their smashed remnants around when we got up. But, suffice to say, I don’t seem to have received bot fly infections and I haven’t been attacked by foot-long venomous meat-eating centipedes that can move faster than a human.

The Service

I already touched on service during meals; it was about as good as the food. The exception was our private dinner on the beach; this meal had fantastic and attentive service with the only quirk a half hour gap between courses while she left to fetch our main courses.

Otherwise, service was pretty good. Bartenders were friendly, if quite busy, and alternating between patois back-chatter with other staff and talking to guests. I’m terrible at realizing when they context switched, but most folks seemed to get along with it just fine.

Room staff were largely exceptional, doing a thorough job of cleaning and restocking the room many times during the day. The rooms were well cleaned and prepared, and housekeeping spent significant time (at least a half hour) cleaning every day.

We had a concierge-level suite; this means a suite and certain other things (like a well-stocked and regularly re-stocked in-room bar). Our concierge awkwardly led us to our rooms initially and then promised to keep in touch daily thereafter. In reality we heard from him one other time and run into him by accident during a wedding. He did arrange to have the room set up nicely on Melissa’s birthday, but otherwise he was more or less nonexistent.

What we figured out after the fact was that the way to visit one of these resorts is to get the butler service. On the website, butler service offers various things we didn’t care about, like unpacking our luggage, pressing our clothes, and serving us dinner in our suite. Those are three things that were not worth an up-charge to me. In reality, butlers provide something far more important:

That’s right. Reserved space on the beach, with opaque shade, nice chairs, towels, and a cooler full of ice and drinks. Butlers also brought fresh drinks, frequently addressed the needs of guests, and did all the things that a concierge is supposed to do, but doesn’t. Ignoring that, though, a reserved spot on the beach with cold drinks is worth the price of admission.

The Drinks

One of the perks of the resort was ready access to alcohol. As mentioned previously, our suite was well-stocked with alcohol, featuring a bottle of white wine, red wine, and champagne. Also present at all times were at least four bottles of red stripe, four different liters of premium alcohol, several mixers, soda, and water.

I believe this is just a feature of concierge suites and up, but it was really nice and convenient. Bravo.

Otherwise there are a ton of a bars and options all over the place.

The house wines (except Champagne), a custom label by Beringer, are horrible, but plentiful. Up-charge wines by Beringer and other are available, but we didn’t generally indulge in this.

Daily drink specials are available, and most bar stations offered frozen, iced, fruit-based, and all other manner of drinks. It’s trivial to get stupid drunk and stay that way as long as you’re at the resort, but with the heat, it wasn’t really what I felt like doing.

The Room

I’ve talked about this a little bit, but the room we had was really nice. It was also huge. It was ground level, and we could easily hear doors slamming and people moving furniture, sliding glass doors, and themselves around upstairs. That sort of sucked, but otherwise the suite was pretty much exceptional in every way.

Our living area had a lovely porch and view of the ocean; the bedroom shared the view but lacked the porch (and that’s just fine). There was a sitting/makeup area in the bedroom, a large closet, hot tub, shower, king mahogany bed, reading area, desk, two couches, a bunch of televisions, the minibar (with a functional sink), dual sinks in the bathroom, well, you get the idea. It was nice.

So, yeah, the accommodations were pretty swell. Highly recommended.

Parting Thoughts

In general, I had a really nice time at the resort. The weather was nice, with a good breeze developing in the afternoon. This made evenings cooler and kept bugs away (as if the pesticides weren’t doing this already). Our room was lovely, the view was great, and the value for the money was pretty decent. I would recommend it unless you mind long transfers from airports, expect good food, or want to swim in the ocean.

Internet Switch Must Be On at All Times

Aaron N. Tubbs — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve been meaning to get this photograph for a while. I definitely got some funny looks from the flight attendants. Once I explained that “I work with computers, it’s cool” they seemed less concerned. They did say to one another that “I sure was a queer fellow though.”

In any event, this is great on all sorts of levels.

Victory Beer Dinner at Coalhouse Pizza

Aaron N. Tubbs — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Coalhouse Pizza in Stamford is a regular haunt for us; we have a large group that’s been going to the restaurant at least once a week for over a year now. We’ve been lucky enough to attend some of the restaurant’s special events in the past, so we were delighted when Gerard invited us to attend the Victory Brewing + OmNomCT event on Monday. The event featured live music and five courses of beer and food pairings (plus four beer mixes to try at any other time; we sampled these extensively before our meals) and was a lot of fun! Some details follow, but the pairings generally worked well and the food was pretty good. At first the “five courses of bacon” seemed like quite the gimmick, but I’ll give credit where it’s due: it worked.

So, next time you’re in Stamford, check out Coalhouse, and definitely try one of their beer or wine dinners out if you’re interested in lots of food, lots of alcohol, and lots of fun!

First Course

The first course was Steamy Summer Love Clams & Bacon, paired with Victory’s Braumeister Pils. The pairing worked well and the clams were perfectly tender – not at all gritty. There was not, sadly, anything to mop the broth up with – a crusty roll could have made this dish a killer nosher.

Second Course

For the second course, the Bacon Blues Salad with Victory Headwaters Pale Ale Dressing was paired with the Headwaters Pale Ale. Again, the pairing worked well. The salad itself was a nice side salad (with the amount of food at this event, this is not a complaint, believe me). The speed at which these salads were prepared and delivered was pretty incredible to witness.

Third Course

By the third course, the beers started to get more serious. Victory’s Golden Monkey Tripel was featured with a Sweet & Spicy Hawaiian Pizza (featuring Golden Monkey Pizza Dough, no less). This pizza was epic. The substitution of bacon for the ham on the Hawaiian works for me. Diced ham has always been the weakness of the otherwise classic combination (substitutions such as prosciutto have made me happy in the past).

But, what made this epic was the slices of Habanero flesh. So good. So very good! I don’t think a lot of the diners present realized that Gerard wasn’t pulling any punches when he said this pizza was spicy. Again, killer pairing with the Tripel, but the pizza stole the show – I fell in love with it and now want to eat this pizza always and forever when I go to Coalhouse.

Fourth Course

A surprisingly good Smoky the Beer Bacon Burger Slider with Beer Battered Onion Rings was joined by Victory’s Hop Devil for the fourth course. I topped my burger with a copious amount of Harissa. The burger itself was cooked a little well, but the flavors and aromas all worked well together. Interesting was the smoked gouda (I think?) disc atop the burger, but the onion rings and dipping sauce stole the show here.

And of course Hop Devil is delicious, which helps.

Fifth Course

The final course was a mix for me. The Salted Caramel Bacon Brownies were pretty damn good and made just the way I like them (dense like a neutron star and moist).

The Storm King Stout Butterbeer was ghastly and awful. This sadly continues my experience with “dessert beer” experiments at Coalhouse usually going poorly. With whipped cream and a cheery, the stout was wrecked with schnapps and was probably one of the more vile things I’ve consumed. Hats off to the creativity, but this was not my speed, friends.

Review: 59 Seconds

Aaron N. Tubbs — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

59 Seconds: Think a little. Change a lot. is a self-help book masquerading as a book on psychology. Or, perhaps, it’s a survey on psychology masquerading as a self-help book? I’m not sure. It fits in a similar niche as Stumbling on Happiness and Satisfaction!, two texts that attempt to bring social science research to the unwashed masses (read: I can understand it).

Wiseman does some things rather well in the book. It may not be the stated purpose of the text, but the author devotes a decent amount of side effort to debunking commonly held misconceptions about self-help. Various frameworks and exercises ostensibly designed to help make people successful are frequently deconstructed and demolished.

More on the point of the text itself, he does some work to try to find scientifically proven approaches that are at least correlated (if not causal) with success and improvement. The research is explained in layman’s terms and then the take-homes for the reader are summarized. It’s a bit rote at times, but for the most part the approach succeeds.

The part I found frustrating is the hook: The author’s attempt to distill each chapter down to 59 seconds of advice and to in fact summarize the entire book in as much time. This simplification of the preceding text seems gimmicky and does discredit to the rest of the text.

Review: The Hobbit

Aaron N. Tubbs — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

In college, I started working through some of the top 100 lists of best films ever. Among this list were a number of films I didn’t really appreciate at the time. Seven Samurai was an example of this, where I reached the end of the film and thought “so what?” I’d seen it all before, in cartoons and other films. There was nothing new. What I didn’t realize is this: Seven Samurai is fantastic because it is seminal. The things that are common now didn’t happen before this film. Back when I was younger I wrote this film off as boring, but now I’m excited by it.

This leads me to an embarrassing admission. I have not read The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings before. I’ve watched the animated and film versions, but that’s not really full credit.

So, reading the hobbit was interesting. I knew the rough story before, but in reading it, I realized all of the things that Tolkein introduced. Standoff wizards, dwarves, elves, fantasy stories as adventures, goblins, trolls, black birds, and various whimsy and other structure. It has a unique style of narration and a curious attention to detail. It may not be that Tolkein originated all of these ideas, but so much is in this book that it’s quite impressive to look back at it and realize all that came from it.

The book is not challenging. The story is not particularly creative in the context of all of the literature that has come after it. This is, however, essential reading and of deep importance to the genre. It’s silly that it took me this long to get around to reading it.

Review: Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

Aaron N. Tubbs — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Tom Clancy’s Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing is a dated tome. While the book is ostensibly updated, that’s not strictly accurate. Instead, a chapter is included with an also dated update on where things are going. That’s fine. I don’t have any issues with reading a vision of a fighter wing at a moment in time, but a lot has changed. For example:

F-22 production was dramatically reduced and put in service way behind schedule, and the F-22 still doesn’t have a strike package. AIM-9X support is half a decade away as is AIM-120D support in earnest. The F-22 is thus a special purpose asset, and not an F-15 replacement.
B-2 production was capped and the thing is stupid-expensive to maintain and operate. As the most expensive platform ever developed for the delivery of dumb (unsmart, not unwise) weapons, it’s a pretty nice joke. Now equipped with the JDAM, it’s a compelling asset for massive ordnance delivery on known hard targets while air defenses are still intact. So it’s a niche product, but it has a role.
The B-52 is the most successful bombing platform ever built. It will be in service two decades after the B-1 by current plans, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the B-2 was retired beforehand.
Then relevant (if declining) aircraft such as the F-117, F-14, F-4, EF-111, C-141 are retired.
The C-17 is real and we’re making super galaxies.
There’s a new tanker on the way (okay, that just happened, so not a huge deal).
The F-35 happened and is approaching reality and has its own slew of issues, delays, and overruns. At least it will support helmet cueing for the -9X, unlike the F-22.
Drones with missiles.
There’s this thing called an A-10. Granted, it was a thing in Clancy’s book but he all but ignores it.
… and so on

On one hand, these are just current events and things that have happened. Unfortunately, they also represent dramatic shifts in how the modern air force operates. This makes the point of the book (ostensibly not just a pornographic tour of the Air Force’s weapons systems) somewhat irrelevant, as the concepts of warfare have changed dramatically in the intervening years. By his own admission, Clancy’s picture of the composite fighter wing he profiled has fallen apart at the time of his update, so that’s something.

Anyhow, so the book falls down a bit on talking about the “modern air force.” For a tour of a lot of military hardware, it’s not a bad introductory text. There’s a lot of redundancy and a several things that are discussed before they’re introduced, but it could all be fixed with a good editor. I assumed Clancy would have access to one of these, but I guess not?

Clancy’s efforts to then try to document his experience with the fighter wing in question is downright horrible. He’s not good at this sort of writing. He then follows it with a hypothetical “what-if” scenario, which gets him into writing fiction. At least he’s well know for that, if not particularly great at it either.

Reading it on the Kindle was somewhat interesting, because all of the diagrams and photos lost a lot in the translation. Pagination and formatting of the text was also inconsistent and crappy. Nothing surprising, there, but it was sort of a pain.

Whatever, I’m not disappointed that I took the time to read the book, but I’d have a hard time recommending it to anybody looking for anything but a history of what a chunk of the air force was like a couple of decades ago.

Review: The Lathe of Heaven

Aaron N. Tubbs — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I finished The Lathe of Heaven on the flight out to California. It’s a well-written novel (very nearly a novella) that meditates on the idea of a protagonist whose dreams provide for uncontrolled alteration of reality. It resonates with the feeling I get when I see a street light go out right after I look at it. Or the feeling I get when I dream something only to discover it’s a thing. It also seems to toy with a bit of a parable isomorphic to the unintended consequences of a genie’s wishes.

It is succinct yet poignant, even if the ending is a little neat, tidy, and abrupt. The premise is simple and perhaps a bit allegorical and beaten to death, but the execution is good. It’s worth a read.

Wine and Extraction

Aaron N. Tubbs — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I’m trying to understand the notion of extraction. Specifically, I’m trying to understand the concept of over-extraction.

I’ve run into folks who feel many wines are over-extracted. Others praise something related, a notion of restraint in a wine’s extraction. The intimation is that perhaps over-extraction is not a flaw. Instead, there may be a style of winemaking that sees benefits in not over-extracting.

Unfortunately, I get confused on the topic. I’ve had some cheap Shiraz that had even me shouting that the wine is criminally over-extracted. I don’t know that what I was saying was accurate, but it felt like I was drinking wine that had been reduced in a pan until it was wine syrup. It may not be that the wine was really over-extracted, but rather that the concentration of something was just far too high. For that matter, from a literal sense the wine could be properly extracted but then altered to have a higher concentration. Perhaps there is not a 1:1 correlation between extraction and concentration.

Continuing these thoughts a little more, I may encounter a wine review that praises precisely the intense concentration of a wine. The 2009 Lafite-Rothschild is for Parker a 100 point “most concentrated Lafite … ever tasted” He rephrases to describe it as “staggeringly concentrated.” Wine Enthusiast calls it “Rich and concentrated.” Wine Spectator describes its “dense core of black fruit and smoldering iron.” Tanzer’s 96 to 99-point rating also praises the wine’s “deep, intense” nose.

So, the wine of the vintage from this year’s vintage of the century is almost universally praised for its concentration, intensity, if not extract? To be fair we’re looking at a particular set of vintage conditions for a very particular region and style of wine, so this may not be a fair game. But, I don’t think anybody’s going to say that the 2009 Lafite is “over-extracted.” So maybe concentration and extraction aren’t just the same thing? Or maybe some wines can be safely more extracted without reaching over-extraction?

Like I say, I get confused. But I think I’m getting ahead of myself.

Just what is extraction?

What is extraction in the first place? Well, we can hit the third edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine, which suggests that extraction:

usually refers to the extraction of desirable phenolics from grape solids before, during and after fermentation, although over-extraction is an increasingly common fault in an era when colour is associated with quality.

Never mind that this definition is awkwardly recursive. It’s sucking the stuff out of crushed grapes that we want, but not too much. I think.

Phenolics means pretty much anything. In the context of extracting phenolics we’re mostly focused on pigmentation, flavor, and tannins.

Getting back to the definition, it’s sort of neat, because right in the definition of extraction we get to the topic that I’m interested in. On the other hand, this definition kind of sucks because it seems to inject a rather subjective aside into something that’s relatively objective.

Okay, so we have a naive understanding of what extraction is, and an aside that there is such a thing as over-extraction. Further, over-extraction is a fault. Hey, it’s in the Oxford Companion to Wine, we don’t mess with it, right?

When all else fails, trust the Internet.

Turns out I can’t leave well enough alone. From a thread on chowhound comes this gem from the poster zin1953:

Extract can refer to weight, but it may be best to think of it as a blend of weight on the palate and intensity of flavor/character. You can have a light-bodied wine that is over-extracted; you can have a full-bodied wine that is under-extracted. And you can have both that are just right.

They then get to the point that interests me:

An over-extracted wine will often show itself to be “bigger” and “chewier” as “Mr. Cookie” describes above, and the tannins will be harder and more harsh, more drying on the palate.

Back to my earlier hunch. Well-respected and well-made wines that “need time” often come across as harsh, harder, and tannic when they are young. All sorts of adjectives are used to describe wines in intense need of further elevage. Some wines sound downright unpleasant.

Still confused.

In the same thread, Robert Lauriston returns to my early premise even more succinctly:

“Extracted” = concentrated, more or less.

Validation from some random person on the Internet. Success!

“Well extracted” is an odd phrase. “Heavily extracted” or, if you don’t like hedonistic fruit bombs, “overly extracted” are more common.

Poop. It’s a matter of taste?

Back to the books.

I return to my original source, via interpretation on Wikipedia (I can’t find this directly in my online copy of Jancis Robinson’s book):

Greater extraction can add to the complexity and life expectancy of the wine by developing more complex tannins that will soften over a longer period of time. With these benefits does come the risk of developing various wine faults, such as the development of acetic (or “volatile”) acidity. Too much extraction can also increase the harshness of some tannins to where the wine is not very approachable to most wine drinkers.

Still judgmental and subjective, but this provides me a more interesting perspective. Longevity and complexity are moderated by extraction level, but there’s two downsides. The first is that we can develop recognizable faults because of the over-extraction. The second is that over-extraction can make the wine too cerebral or inaccessible.

Can I really conclude anything?

I’m not sure what to make of all of this. I believe I can infer a few things:

Under-extraction is likely to lead to a thin, ready to drink, easily accessible wine. The downside of under-extraction is that it might not have much life expectancy, complexity, richness, or structure. Under-extraction may not be a flaw, per se, though there’s surely a continuum where “restraint” becomes watery piss.
Correct levels of extraction are highly subjective, but higher levels of extraction are generally correlated with higher levels of concentration. Higher levels of extraction result in wines that are more tannic, complex, and age-worthy, but that also may be less approachable in their youth.
As a wine approaches over-extraction, it becomes more inaccessible and unapproachable. At first this progression may be highly desired for the wine enthusiast, but there is an inflection point where extraction starts introducing acknowledged flaws. The optimization point, then, becomes achieving a high level of extract without making a flawed, or perhaps inaccessible, wine.

I’m still left with a lot of questions.

I think, however, I have more questions than answers at this point. I must assume that, like with any organic product, the process is not perfectly uniform in any way. Some extractions must lead to heavy levels of tannins but low levels of color or flavor. All the permutations surely manifest in some regard. A wine could then be over-extracted because it is harsh and tannic and yet it lacks in concentration, flavor, and color?

Are there wines that are truly showing restraint in extraction? Wines that could be enthusiastically extracted further without introducing any flaws, yet produce a superior experience by not pushing that far? Truly this can only be subjective, and I realize this, but I wonder if in the collective wisdom and consensus how this issue shakes out. Is the maximization of extraction universally or nearly universally appealing, or is this just the Parker influence?

I have yet to have any truly memorable wine experiences that did not involve a wine with a certain concentration and intensity of flavor and aroma, but maybe I’m just missing out. My friend’s assertion that there’s no such thing as too much excess seems to ring true in theory; I can’t imagine a good vintage Cabernet that I’ve had, say, that would not have benefited by turning everything present otherwise up to 11.

What is the relationship between extraction, concentration, and alcohol levels? What indeed is the perception of extraction when taken in context of the alcohol levels, and does the applicability of extract level moderate with alcohol? Screw alcohol, are there other factors that allow higher or lower levels of extract to produce a more sound wine?

Review: Regenesis

Aaron N. Tubbs — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Regenesis is the direct sequel to Cyteen. After reading Cyteen, it was clear Cherryh was intending for a sequel, and this is it. The novel continues the plodding pace of the original book, with the last few pages being a maddeningly action-packed conclusion. There’s also a massive amount of the book devoted to Ari playing princess and the castle with Alpha Wing, and a nominal amount of the book devoted to the gestation of a few familiar creatures for the future. I’m not sure what the point of the latter theme was, unless to try to force the reader to think about the impact of the future world and how it was being shaped as the physical forms were shaped? Seems a bit weak, whatever the case for the frame.

It’s more of the same, if you liked Cyteen. It’s full of one-dimensional male characters (Jordan becomes nearly caricature) and the story of Ari. To some degree, it’s enjoyable as a conclusion to the first half of the story. With that said, the book closes with an ending hardly more satisfying than the original abrupt conclusion. Read it if you have to, I guess, but I was a bit disappointed.

Review: In Search of Clusters

Aaron N. Tubbs — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been meaning to finish In Search of Clusters for years. I originally acquired this book in 2008 (thanks, Amazon, for blurring the lines of amazing and creepy). Somehow it took me until this morning to finish the last few pages.

This is the introductory text on clusters. Want to know why your distributed system falls apart when changing architectures? Want to know how to scale a system? Want to understand your model of computing?

Clustering may seem a somewhat dated concept, but this book is not just seminal. The writing is coherent and the concepts are foundational to the notion of distributed computing. This book needs to be read.

Carpano Antica Formula, Campari, Gran Classico Bitter, and The Negroni

Aaron N. Tubbs — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Carpano Antica Formula

I first read about Carpano Antica Formula in Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, the subject of my blog working through each of that book’s recipes. Carpano proves that Italian vermouths are capable of transcendence. It is incredibly complex. It has impeccable balance and versatility. Poured over some ice, it makes a fantastic drink all by itself! It is well worth the $25-40 it’ll cost for a hand-blown bottle holding a liter of liquid magic. Go buy some. I’ll wait.

Combine Carpano, rye, and some bitters and we have the greatest Manhattan on Earth. It can make cocktail lovers out of the unbelievers. It’s that magical. Carpano is the go-to for “this cocktail is missing something.”

The Negroni

I thought the only downside of my love affair with Carpano was price (don’t get me wrong, the cost differential is a pretty big downside).

There was, however, another problem.

Made with an everyday bottle of sweet vermouth, a Negroni isn’t a bad drink. Equal parts Campari, Italian Vermouth, and gin yields a bitter and bracing beverage, capable of whetting one’s appetite and exciting the palate.

So, I have a great cocktail made with vermouth in the Negroni. I have a great vermouth in Carpano. A match made in heaven? To a degree, it was. It was clear form the start I was tasting something capable of incredible depth, complexity, and intrigue. The Negroni could be something far greater than an apertif to knock back before the meal.

And yet, it was not quite right. The balance was off. There were hints of greatness clouded by a failure in execution. Equal ratios of gin, Campari, and Carpano tasted downright wrong. I tried different gins. Jenever, Old Tom, Plymouth, London Dry, American gins … none of them worked. I tried other sweet vermouths, checking my work. Even Punt e Mes couldn’t rescue the drink. I tried ratio mashing, much to my chagrin¹. No joy.

By process of elimination, the problem became clear: the weakness was Campari itself. Bother. I was lost. How could I replace an ingredient that practically defined the cocktail? That it was clearly the weak link made things no easier. I fumbled around ignorantly with a few things (Cynar, Averna, Aperol, Meletti, CioCiaro, Amaro Nonino) but couldn’t find a silver bullet.

The Saving Throw: Gran Classico Bitter

So, I did the thing that I should have done in the first place. I searched the Internet. That quickly lead me to Michael Lazar’s blog, Stirred, Not Shaken. In specific, it lead me to his post Negroni + Amaro = Negromaro:

There is going to be a tendency for people in the cocktail business who stress the importance of natural flavors and traditional (non-industrial) processes to simply embrace Gran Classico (which contains no added colorants) as a de-facto replacement for Campari (a product made on a much vaster scale).

Sign me up, I’m sold! Gran Classico is available in Connecticut (a huge bonus for me), though you may have to request it be ordered from the distributor. I ordered a bottle (actually, six 200 mL bottles, but that’s another story) from Cellar XV, and haven’t looked back.

The back of the Gran Classico Bitter bottle has a hell of an introduction:

Gran Classic Bitter is based on the original Italian Bitter of Turin recipe dating from 1864. This classic apertif is an infusion of numerous herbs and roots including wormwood, gentian, bitter orange peel, rhubarb, and other aromatic plants. Complex, refreshingly bitter-sweet with a finish that lingers like the last sentence of a cherished novel.

Compare Ccampari, with flavor text taken from their website:

Campari is the result of the infusion of herbs, aromatic plants and fruit in alcohol and water; these last two being the recipe’s only known ingredients.

Well, we also know there’s artificial coloring, too, since the bottle says so. Water, alcohol, artificial coloring, and some other stuff we don’t know. I digress.

Over time, appreciation and respect has grown for this historic and unique brand, which is now recognised and appreciated worldwide.

So it’s an acquired taste?

In continuous evolution, an image of fashion, international, and constantly cutting-edge, with a style that defines and precedes trends and fashions. Campari persistently follows sophisticated atmospheres that are stylish and emotional.

Trend setting but trend following. I think that’s what it says.

There’s a lot of other flavor text, largely talking about the brand’s dominance, prevalence, and massive quantity of production. In reality I believe the best argument for Campari is “because it’s Campari.”

Comparing these liquors does not require a lot of careful attention to subtleties. Both have alcohol (Gran Classico Bitter is 28%, versus Campari’s 24%), bitterness, sweetness, and some herbal flavor. Campari is a one-note ordeal, with syrupy medicinal bitterness. It smells like it tastes, and that taste is one-dimensional. I’m not quite sure what that aroma and flavor is, though the closest I have is “bitter cough syrup.” Gran Classico has a relatively mild aroma, but it’s a wholly different creature on the palate. There’s a smooth sweetness up front, followed by a growing bitterness, with a finish that is long and multifaceted. The liquor has excellent balance, complexity, and richness. Despite hitting a similar “profile” as the Campari, there’s virtually nothing in common between the two.

Used in a Negroni, the contrast is also pronounced. With the Campari, there’s a grassy sweet bitterness, “like eating orange pith.” With the Gran Classico Bitter, the balance and complexity really shines. The final product is not as bitter as the Campari version. It’s a bit sweeter and smoother. It’s a lot richer. The complexity is worlds beyond the original. The drink is contemplative and full of intrigue, and yet it doesn’t abandon its genetic similarity. This is still a Negroni, albeit the best one possible. It mixes especially well with a flamed orange peel. The only real downside I can find is that it’s no longer a drink that’s a lovely shade of red, and it joins the legion of ugly brown cocktails. I guess some artificial red coloring could be added to deal with this, but that doesn’t seem sporting, despite its authenticity!

Messing with ratios for cocktails after the fact is a recipe for a disaster. It is via this method, after all, that the Martini evolved to being a mechanism for chilling gin rather than a cocktail.
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