Tanqueray Rangpur

I first started drinking gin about six years ago while at Purdue. My friend Brent introduced me to it and we quickly went through an assortment of brands before finally settling on our top three. These were Bombay Sapphire, Tanqueray and Citadel, all of them excellent gins. Over the years I eventually came to drinking just Bombay Sapphire while occasionally dabbling in other brands such as Tower of London.

But earlier this month it came to my knowledge that Tanqueray was releasing a new variant of their world-famous gin and only in Washington, DC with select areas in Maryland and Delaware. It was a sign from God if I'd ever seen one. So last week on my way home from work, I stopped by the liquor store across the street from my metro stop in the District and picked up a bottle. It was only $22 for a 750ml, comparable to my regular Bombay Sapphire, and as for the taste, well read on.

Gin truly is an acquired taste. Many of my friends have compared it to mouth wash, pine needles or jet fuel, all of them apt descriptions if you're not a fan of the stuff. And even for us connoisseurs, drinking it with tonic is seen as the best way to casually enjoy it. But Tanqueray Rangpur is different. Following the advice of a local blogger, I poured it straight over ice. The taste was much lighter than what I expected. I'd never had a Rangpur lime before but I imagine their complimentary flavors to gin was discovered early on. The whiff of botanicals was there but not nearly as strong as expected. Tastewise it was very smooth yet retained the characteristics of its worldly heritage.

Already my life has been subtly altered by the discovery of this new gin. While hanging out at a bar in Clarendon the other night I caught myself asking for a Tanqueray Rangpur straight up, momentarily forgetting that it was available only in DC until February of next year when it goes into general release. I, for one, will be counting down the days.

SUSE 10 and a glass of gin and tonic

For the purpose of installing Battlefield 2 onto my computer, I had to create more room on my Windows partition. I had considered simply attempting to resize my existing partitions but was advised against this by a friend familiar with fsck (pronounced f-suck due to its unwieldy interface and ability to induce psychosis). So it appeared that I would need to reinstall Linux if I were to expand my Windows partition. Having just found out that SUSE 10 was released via openSUSE, I now had a good excuse to spend my evening installing the latest version of my favorite distro.

But I was to be disappointed because SUSE 10 practically installs itself. After downloading the boot ISO image and burning it to disc, I then copied down all the relevant information about my chosen installation server. In this case I chose suse.mirrors.tds.net (path to install is /pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source). The partitioning took a few minutes to set up properly as I ended up having to delete all the Linux partitions, expand the Windows partition, and then recreate the ones required for SUSE 10. Package selection hadn't changed since 9.1 (my first experience with SUSE) and hardware detection got everything. It even got my 11-in-1 card reader which 9.1 had refused to recognize.

Upon reboot, my system came up quickly, much quicker than it had with the previous version of SUSE. Within 30 minutes I had Firefox, Thunderbird and my ATI drivers all installed without any issue. Hence the reference to gin and tonic in the title. It really did take me less time to install SUSE 10, package download notwithstanding, than to drink a 10 oz. glass of my favorite mixed drink. And now that I can get my camera's pictures without having to boot into Windows, the only reason to keep that OS on my hard drive is to play sweet games.