As you all know, I love cars — particularly fast cars.

Silicon Valley is a great place for carspotting.  Since I been here, I’ve encountered numerous Teslas, Aston Martins, Bentleys, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis on the roads.  I’ve even seen some super exotics, such as the rare Porsche Carrera GT.  Today topped them all.

I pulled out of my apartment complex this afternoon behind… a Bugatti Veyron.

Yes, one of the world’s fastest (0-60 in 2.4 seconds), rarest (fewer than 300 produced), and most expensive (about $1.4 million) production cars.  In the metal.  Maroon-painted metal.

Needless to say, it left the light very quickly.  What a rush.

Strange how Starbucks went from pretentious to proletarian in a decade.  Now they’re trying to turn it around.

The hipsters and yuppies have moved on, and now nobody thinks anything of seeing somebody walking around with a Starbucks cup.  Independent coffee houses are the new rage.

To paraphrase the Starbucks CEO, Starbucks lost its focus.  They replaced the manual espresso machines with automated contraptions.  They started selling music.  They added breakfast sandwiches to their menu.  Now most of that is gone, but where does salvation lie?

Enter the Clover machine.  It’s an $11,000 contraption that is designed to brew better coffee, one cup at a time.  By precisely controlling water temperature and brewing time, the Clover aims to maximize flavor and minimize undesireable bitterness.  Starbucks liked Clover so much that they bought the company.

I happen to like Starbucks.  Yes, yes… better coffee can be had elsewhere, but I don’t go to Starbucks for the coffee.  I go there to get work done.  The combination of ample sitting space, lots of power outlets, and ready access to affordable caffeine is a recipe for productivity — a combination, I might add, that is astonishingly lacking in the Palo Alto area.  All of the other likely options close early, have obscene prices, or both.

So it was that I found myself working in a Starbucks this afternoon.

I was sitting at the counter, reading academic papers about image deblurring, when one of the employees started teaching another employee how to use the store’s brand-new Clover machine right in front of me.  They went through the steps, adding grounds, entering the right settings, and dispensing the brew into a cup.  When finished, they offered me the freshly brewed coffee.  I had never tried one of the Clover products, so I accepted.

I’m not really a coffee snob, but I thought it was a very good cup of coffee.  Lots of bold complexity in the flavor, great smell, and almost no bitterness. Yes, very good.  But was it the machine or was it the beans?  Or did I just get lucky?  I decided to find out by ordering another cup.

In hindsight, I should have tested the quality of the Clover brew by doing a blind comparison with the same beans brewed both traditionally and Clover-style.  Barring that, I should at least have ordered the same coffee as the previous time, which would have allowed a test of consistency.  Instead, I ordered a completely different flavor.

The new coffee brought nothing but disappointment.  Yes, it went through the magic machine, but what came out was bitter and bland.  I suspect that operator error might have contributed to the let-down, but that just indicates that the robustness of the process is questionable.  I don’t think that I’ll trying that expensive experiment again.

Clover, will you save Starbucks?  Let’s put it this way: I’ll continue to patronize Starbucks for the ambiance, not the coffee.

Some words of encouragement for entrepreneurs: the founders of HP didn’t have a very clear picture of what they were going to do when they started their company back in 1937.

According to an excerpt from the original business plan, they seemed to have a better idea about what they didn’t want to do than what they did want to do.  Great depression and ambiguity be damned; they wanted to start a company.   Sounds familiar.

Thus began the company credited with establishing Silicon Valley.

(via)

Three weeks ago: I put a dish in the drying rack.  It slipped out and hit a wine glass sitting next to the rack.  The glass shattered.  I told my roommate that I would get another glass to replace the one of his that I broke.

Two days ago: I finally got around to buying the replacement glass.  I couldn’t remember exactly what type of glass I broke, so I got two different types.

Yesterday: I gave the replacement glasses to my roommate.  They got placed on the counter.

Today: My roommate was putting away groceries.  He turned around suddenly and knocked the two new glasses onto the floor.  They both shattered.  The tags were still on the bases of the broken glasses.

Yes, the glasses that were purchased to replace the broken glasses were themselves broken.  Oh, the irony.

It’s difficult to grasp, but already two years have gone by since I first visited California.  More shocking is that this fall marks eight years since I began my undergraduate education.  Now I am approaching the end of my second college tour, so it seems like a good time to look into the crystal ball.

What would I like to do in the next year?  Some things come to mind:

• Get a job.  Yes, I want to be employed after I leave school.  Fancy that!  This might sound shallow, but one of the most important criteria will be location.  I’d like to stay in the Bay area, but I’d also be willing to move to the area around Boston.  I miss winter(!), which brings us to…
• Resume playing hockey.  In hindsight, I shouldn’t have stopped.  The area around Palo Alto isn’t exactly a hotbed of hockey activity, so moving someplace with a deeper hockey tradition might help with realizing this goal.
• Keep photographing.  I’d like to get involved with some organization, perhaps a small newspaper, that will allow me to continue doing sports photography.  I don’t see this as a full-time career, but I enjoy it enough to moonlight.
• Have another adventure, preferably outdoors in a land far away.  Some of my “adventures” in the past eight years include: snowboarding at Steamboat, visiting Paris,  backpacking around Europe (including running with the bulls), snowboarding at Whistler, visiting England, backpacking on Isle Royale, backpacking in the Grand Canyon, and leaving a good job to go to Stanford and live in California.  What will the next adventure be?  I’m thinking of something along the lines of an extended backpacking trip this coming summer in either Alaska or New Zealand.

I’ve had mixed success with these lists in the past, but I enjoy writing them to show me how my ambitions change over time.