Temperature when my plane left San Francisco: 50° F.

Temperature when my plane touched down in Minneapolis: -10° F.

Ah, good to be home.

Does it ever snow here in Palo Alto, California?  It’s rare, but the answer is yes:

Okay, okay.  While technically true, this photo is a bit misleading.  It’s a real, unmanipulated photo taken this afternoon.  The catch is that it wasn’t in downtown Palo Alto.  Instead, it was taken on Skyline Boulevard, near the intersection with Page Mill Road:

That’s about 7–8 miles from the Stanford central campus.  The key is that the elevation difference is more than 2100 feet.  Nothing but rain fell below about 1800 feet.

Roughly 3–4 inches of heavy, wet snow were on the ground, providing a source of great delight for the Californians and this Minnesotan.   Kids were sledding, teens were having snowball fights, and the adults were all smiles.  Hard to say what the animals thought:

Has it ever snowed at Stanford?  I can’t seem to find any definitive data one way or the other, but I have to believe that it’s possible.  Maybe I’ll get lucky enough to see it this year.

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.

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