Sangria

I've spent too much time talking about how awesome Macs are recently, so this post is intended to return the discourse to another subject near and dear to my heart, alcohol. Specifically, sangria.

Sangria is a drink that comes from Spain originally. It's like fruit punch, but with booze. I make it pretty often, and people seem to think it generally tastes okay, so I'm gonna go over the recipe I use. It'll be fun.

First, these are the things that go in sangria and some preliminary rambling about them: wine, fruit, sugar, orange liqueur. That's it, actually.

There's more wine than anything else in sangria, and usually it's red. Sangria made with white wine is called sangria blanco, and you need to put different things in it. Don't fiddle with that shit. Red wine is the way to go. You don't need to get amazing red wine; you're going to dump a bunch of sugar and fruit juice in with it, so if it doesn't taste perfect you'll probably never notice. You probably want to shoot for something fruity rather than dry. I've used Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Merlot, Merlot, and I think some other things to good effect. Something like Shiraz or Chianti is probably not the sangria wine you're looking for. Actually, Chianti might work pretty well. I should try that. Yellow Tail is great for sangria.

On to fruit. As with everything in life, fresh is always better. However, I have found (through countless hours, selflessly spent, of experimentation) that using bottled orange juice and lemon juice in lieu of freshly squeezed tends to not make a huge difference in the quality of the sangria. On the other hand, you absolutely should use fresh fruit to make fruit slices to put in the sangria.

Some chefs, such as Emeril Lagasse, recommend the use of a top-shelf liqueur such as Grand Marnier to flavor your sangria. Mr. Lagasse may be an outstanding chef, but he is a piss-poor drunkard, and I assure you that the subtle and delightful features of Grand Marnier or Cointreau (which presumably justify their top shelf price) will be completely drowned in a sea of wine and fruit juice if they are used in sangria. All you care about is giving the concoction a little orange-flavored kick, and for that a seven-dollar bottle of triple sec is your best option.

You also need to make sure you get a big pot or pitcher; you'll end up with about 2.5 L of sangria if you follow the instructions. And that's it for introductory rambling. Here's the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1.5 L red wine
• 1 c sugar
• 1/2 c water
• 1 c orange liqueur
• 1 apple (Granny Smith is good)
• 1 orange
• 1 lemon
• lemon juice
• orange juice

Procedure:

1. Put the water in a pot, and put it over medium-low heat on a stove. Let it heat up a bit, then stir in the sugar. Heating the water simply ensures that all the sugar dissolves easily. Once the sugar is all dissolved, dump this in your big pitcher.
2. Cut the apple into chunks, the lemon and orange into thin slices. Dump them into your big pitcher.
3. Pour some lemon and orange juice into your big pitcher. If you're doing the freshly squeezed kind, you probably want the juice from one lemon and one orange. If you're using prepackaged, you probably want a bit more than that. Guesstimate.
4. Dump the wine and liqueur into your big pitcher as well.
5. Stir.
6. Let it sit for a while, preferably overnight. I'm no chemist, but my college roommate was, and he assures me that during the time the sangria sits, magic happens to make it taste better.
7. Drink.

That's all there is to making sangria. Give it a shot; don't even worry about sticking to the recipe. Sangria, like your mother, is very flexible. In the words of Cole Porter, quoted here from Box, Hunter, and Hunter,

Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment
And it will lead you to the light.
The apple on the top of the tree
Is never too high to achieve,
So take an example from Eve,
Experiment.

I think it is the funniest thing in the world that Box, Hunter, and Hunter use that quote to preface their textbook on statistics and experimental design.

Whoo for Design

As planned, I bought a MacBook a couple of weeks ago, and I've been using it pretty obsessively since it showed up in the mail. It's really nice, and I want to talk about why, but not for very long.

My background is Windows, and before that MS-DOS. The first computer I ever used was a Tandy 1000 SL. It had no hard drive, just two 5 1/4" floppy drives. You booted everything off of a floppy disk. It could run all kinds of awesome games, like Think Quick. These worms chased you around some castle, but you could use a plunger to distract them. It was great. Also, I wrote book reports for school with this word-processing program; I can't remember the name of it. The instruction manual for the program included this whole murder mystery story to explain how to use the cut-copy-paste functionality of the program. Instruction manuals nowadays are uninspired and banal.

The second computer we had was a CompuAdd, and it ran Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1 was all right in my book; it was a thin veil you could lay on top of MS-DOS to make it prettier, and like MS-DOS, it was pretty stable. That computer ran Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, which is when I learned how to look things up in an almanac.

Since then, the family's had several computers, all running Windows. It's gotten progressively worse, as most people who use it have noticed. XP, now that it's been out for however many years, is pretty stable, and that's cool. It took them two major service packs to get it that way, though. This is what happens when I boot my Windows computer running XP (the machine has a 1.8 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM):

• The BIOS loads and does its song and dance.
• The RAID drivers for my hard drives do their thing.
• Windows throws up a loading screen, which looks like it's about 640 x 480 pixels with 256 colors (=crappy).
• The login screen shows up; I click my name; I type in my password; I hit Enter.
• Windows shows me a desktop with no icons on it.
• Windows draws the icons on my desktop, but with generic icons instead of the correct ones.
• Windows replaces, one by one, the generic icons with the correct one for each item on my desktop.
• Windows finishes all its crap and lets me actually interact with the desktop.

This takes about five minutes from the time I hit the power button to the time I can actually open a program.

This is what happens when I boot my new MacBook (2.0 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM):

• I press the power button.
• The computer makes a pleasant sound and shows me a neutral grey screen with a loading thingy.
• A status bar shows up (which actually does not measure anything).
• The login screen shows up; I click my name; I type in my password; I hit Enter. I mean Return.
• The fully rendered desktop, all icons in place, shows up on the screen; the Dock saunters in from the right.

That takes about 30 seconds.

This is how you install a program in Windows: download the file, run the install program, which asks you about where you want to put the program, do you want a desktop icon, do you want a start menu icon, do you want to associate files with it, you need to restart your computer, BLAH!

This is how you install a program on Mac OS: download the disk image thing, double click it, and drag the program to your Applications directory. Boom.

It's silly to try to say that one operating system is "better" in some qualitative, absolute sense. But Mac OS is better for me. And also in general.

At this point, I am, in fact, completely off the Microsoft. I have a ton of Word and Excel files lying around, but there's this group called OpenOffice.org, and also NeoOffice for the Mac, which makes a suite of programs which have almost all the functionality of the Microsoft Office Suite, but are free. And that's a good price.

There's nothing else I can say about the Mac OS that hasn't already been said too many times. To me, the biggest difference between it and Windows is this: in Windows, you constantly have the feeling that you are using things that were hacked together early in the development process, and then got a fresh coat of paint quickly applied before being released. On the Mac, you constantly have the feeling that someone sat down and thought hard about the programs you're using and spent a lot of time polishing them before they ever got to you. Maybe you don't agree with their decisions all the time, but they were at least actively making design choices, and that counts for a lot. Now I'm done.