Hi. It’s me. I have a confession to make.

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with most of my hobbies.

The latest interest to see rejuvenated enthusiasm is photography. That’s why, in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions and the 100/100/100 challenge, I am going to give myself a photography assignment. For the next 15 weeks, I will post a photo every day, taken that day. Just one.

Each week will have a theme (e.g., sports action) or a constraint (e.g., shutter open at least one second), maybe both. In order to keep my main blog uncluttered, I’m going to do all of the daily posting over at my Flickr page, but I might talk about it with less-than-daily frequency here. The good ol’ photoblog just isn’t going to cut it.

Time to get started. The first week’s constraint is that I must use my 50mm lens and cannot crop the images in post. Content can be whatever I find interesting — an easy way to get started.

The first photo.

Sadly, there were no Oompa-Loompas.

Last spring, I wrote about my encounter with a 99%-cocoa Lindt chocolate bar, piece that enjoyed strong popularity on Reddit and Digg. Today, I decided to once again expand my chocolate knowledge by visiting… a chocolate factory!

There are several chocolatiers in the Bay area, including Ghirardelli of the eponymous Ghirardelli Square, but I could find only one that offered factory tours: Scharffen Berger.

Scharffen Berger was founded just over a decade ago and has its primary factory in Berkeley, California. I was surprised by the size of the building: quite small, maybe 50 m by 25 m. Its brick construction served well to conceal the treasure within.

The tour began with a discussion of cacao, chocolate, and the genesis of Scharffen Berger. Three-sentence summary: Cacao beans, initially surrounded by a sweet fruit flesh, are repeatedly heated and crushed to eventually become chocolate. Scharffen Berger started when a guy took a vacation in France, was smitten with some chocolate, and decided to pursue a career change away from medicine. Scharffen Berger was one of the first to bring high-cocoa-content dark chocolate to the American consumer, and they did so by handling everything from importing the beans to molding the bars. Delectable chocolate samplings punctuated the talk.

With the classroom out of the way, we went to the production floor.  Machines were crushing the cacao beans, tempering chocolate, and filling molds. This machine smelled delicious:

All along the walls were pallets of raw ingredients and finished products:

Like I mentioned, there were no Oompa-Loompas, but the people in this room seemed abnormally short:

The factory tour was a bit underwhelming. The factory was so small that I was left thinking, “That’s it?” On the other hand, the staff was friendly, and I learned some things about chocolate. It was a decent experience.

Innovation is great. It has brought about the very things that make modern life modern. That’s why the things I saw this evening scared me so much.

There was a class here at Stanford this past quarter where students developed Facebook apps. The goal was to acquire as many users as possible. For the course final, each student group gave a 2.5 minute presentation about its app.

I went to the presentations this evening, where I was joined by hundreds of other students, faculty, and members of the public. What did I learn?

• Everybody there seemed to have drunk the Kool-Aid — Facebook apps will save the world!!1!
• The successful apps were simple and of minimal utility — Send hotness! Send hugs!
• The unsuccessful apps tried to do something useful — Save the rainforest?

The most popular app in the bunch, Send Hotness, has garnered over 5 million installations, and it is generating real revenue for its student creators: over $[number removed at request of owners]/day. It didn’t exist three months ago. Impressive. But is “sending hotness” adding value? If it is, I don’t see it.

Only the petty and the puerile apps seem to have significant traffic, yet everybody at the presentation seemed convinced that Facebook apps are the next big thing (or, worse yet, that they are important to the strategy of normal companies).

Real money is lining up behind the development of Facebook apps. The Valley is placing a bet, data be damned. We are so screwed.

That, or I’m just jealous. Anybody want to collaborate on an app?

Baking is relaxing. That’s why, seeking a way to unwind after finals, I decided to bake bread today.

I’ve been baking things from scratch for years now, but I’ve never baked a loaf of yeast-leavened bread. I’ve made plenty of quick breads, but those were all leavened with baking soda. The closest I’ve come is yeast-leavened cinnamon rolls.  I’m not sure why.

There was an article in the New York Times about no-knead bread last year, which has prompted a mini-renaissance in home bread baking. The draw is, as the name suggests, the removal of the kneading requirement. The downside is the greatly increased rising time. I’m impatient and don’t mind kneading, so I went the traditional route when the bug to bake bit.

I ended up making bread by hand based on an Allrecipes recipe that was writen for a bread machine.  The main changes were honey instead of sugar and multigrain cereal instead of oatmeal. After a few hours, I enjoyed success:

The loaf was beautiful.

I let it cool for a while before slicing into it.  As the knife broke through the crust, I was swept up in sweet aromas.  And the taste?  Splendid.  A firm, crispy crust; a soft inside.  Tight, dense crumb.  Notes of butter and honey.

Mmm.

After three months, the experiment has ended.

Batta was in town for business this past weekend, so we hung out on Saturday in San Francisco playing tourists.  After visiting Alcatraz, we met up with Voda and some other Rose alumns for dinner at Destino.  Destino is a tapas restaurant, and the menu was what finally forced the experiment to end.

You see, for the past three months I have been… a vegetarian.  I’ve rarely been eating meat for the past few years, so when an incredibly long line for beef hamburgers at a “welcome grad students” picnic conspired with hunger to drive me to eat a Boca burger, I decided to take the plunge.

My motivation wasn’t health or ethical concerns as much as it was the challenge.  I wanted to see what it was like, to see how others treated me.  I decided that I would continue the experiment until forced by social pressure to deviate.  One other thing — I wouldn’t tell anybody what I was doing, but I would answer truthfully if asked directly.

I figured that somebody would notice what I was doing, but nobody — not one person — ever brought it up.  If they noticed that I shied away from burger joints and avoided pepperoni pizza, they didn’t mention it.  I perceived no difference in treatment.

The tapas finally did me in.  Virtually all of them featured some sort of dead critter, and the group was sharing everything that was ordered, so seeking only the veggie options would have been unworkable.  And so, for the first time since mid-September, I enjoyed the taste of beef, chicken, and fish.

What’s next?  For efficiency reasons, I’m going to continue to emphasize plants in my diet, but I’ll make exceptions for certain holidays and traditions.   Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to slip off my leather shoes and go to bed.