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Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

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Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#91

Post by ginko »

spingsprong wrote: post #27
StavrosK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the conclusion, for those of us who can't listen?

Technical requests are usually handled by different people than catering and hospitality requests. The people in charge catering and hospitality would not be expected to read the technical requests to do with electronic and sound systems, and vice versa. The guy at the TRC podcast actually searched out their contracts, and the brown M&M clause isn't in the middle of technical requirements, but is in the hospitality s…

> So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story.

Either that or the no brown M&M's clause became so well known later on that it wasn't useful as a litmus test anymore.

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#93

Post by delinka »

Monkeyget wrote: post #67

It reminds me of the orange juice test. You organize an annual convention for hundreds of people. You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast. It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amoun…

It is possible to do. He just needs to hire enough people. And presumably he should pass along the cost.

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#94

Post by porpoisemonkey »

rmc wrote: post #50
peteretep wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a rumour of technical specification including some of the jokier RFCs to check that people were really reading them... http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

That was published on 1st of April. It's an april fool's joke. There are loads of April Fool's RFCs. It's not a litmus test for reading, it's a community having fun. BTW: A group tried the IP over Avian Carrier: http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ The ping times were unimpressive.

I think the litmus test being suggested is to include the joke RFC in the reference section of a different technical specification as a way to verify the specification is being reviewed in detail.

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#95

Post by ryanburk »

raverbashing wrote: post #82
Monkeyget wrote: post #67

It reminds me of the orange juice test. You organize an annual convention for hundreds of people. You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast. It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amoun…

http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-rep...

if you go with an amazon solution, it should absolutely be mechanical turk!

https://aws.amazon.com/mturk/

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#96

Post by BuildTheRobots »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #46
davedx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar, any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea without milk or sugar. If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of non-diet Pepsi. (I dislike the taste of coke, and of all diet soda; also, there is…

This isn't eccentric, it's poor communications though. It could basically be summarised as: "Please provide tea making facilities: tea bags, milk, sugar and hot water. If possible a couple of cans of Pepsi (not diet or other brands please) would be appreciated." Really, the person organising the speech doesn't really care how someone takes their tea or why they don't like Pepsi or what the conditions (which are total…

"Hot water and a cup for making tea..."

Tea needs to be made with _boiling_ not boiled water. The amount of places that present you with a cup of warm water and expect you to put a tea-bag into it, is upsetting*.

For reference, the correct way of making tea: http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A61345

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#97

Post by Argorak »

cnvogel wrote: post #39
jmadsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more likely that they used it as a flag to go double-check the safety measures. They made huge money from the concerts, nevermind the fans. They weren't looking for out-clauses

...but the whole thing break down as soon as distinct teams are taking care of catering and checking the venues floor's mechanical load specs, so using this indicator only makes sense as long as the venues (and the teams working in them) are sufficiently small. Nowadays the "big shows" employ teams of dozens of guys travelling and dozens of helpers employed locally, it would be severely negligent if checking of basic…

Even in those organizations, there will be controlling and Q&A. Orgs being sloppy in one regard are often sloppy in another and probably gave down bad orders in the one direction _and in the other, too_.

I organize smaller events, but you wouldn't believe the number of f-ups a bad manager can produce left and right. Often, the "ground crew" isn't even at fault - e.g. I had events where the ground crew was briefed to a standard timetable layout, although we had provided a timetable usable for them beforehand, having them fix a lot of things on the fly.

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#98

Post by moron4hire »

Roonerelli wrote: post #23

I’ve heard similar stories regarding developers and IT Services Where the devs weren’t allowed access to the Production environment so would have to leave written instructions on how to deploy the software they’ve written. And convinced that IT Services weren’t reading their instructions they would write something really offensive in there and see if they complained Possibly just a myth, but amusing all the same

well, I've done such a thing, so not a myth.

Re: Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause

#100

Post by bjourne »

mehwoot wrote: post #54
bjourne wrote: post #28

Maybe a mathematician can explain whether this "trick" works or not? Intuitively, I can't see that knowing whether the M&M demand was filled makes it more probable that the other demands are filled. Say you have a pile with five black or white marbles. You want them all to be black. So you check that the first marble in the pile is black (ie no brown m&m:s). Is it now more probable that the other four marbles also ar…

You assume independence between the color of the marbles. This is highly unlikely. Promoters probably don't read the terms randomly and completely randomly fulfill them. Likely whether one of the marbles is black or white tells you a lot about whether the other ones are black or white, especially if it's a marble that you selected before hand in a way that will often change depending on how the marbles are colored.

But you are assuming there exists a positive correlation between absence of brown M&M:s and whether the other demands are also filled or not. I don't think you can show that since the M&M demand was singled out. Had they instead randomly inspected once piece of equipment and found an error that would have been totally different.
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