While not your usual step-by-step instructions, it provides more information than I think 98-99% of the U.S. population has that’s required to know what’s “good” and what’s… not good.

The February 2006 issue of Gourmet magazine has a nice ranked list of chocolate (available in the U.S.) that they tested in a brownie recipe. Valrhona was ranked #1, an relatively unknown at #2 (no one I know has heard of them), and Scharffen-Berger at #3.

(Click on Read This Post (right-side menu) for full entry. (CSS in the theme is screwing up the formatting if I leave the entire post to display here.))
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Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Mediocrity by “areas of improvement”
How many times in your life (school, career, relationships) have you been told about your “areas of improvement”? How much time and energy have you spent working on those areas? If you’re a manager, how much emphasis do you put on those areas during a performance review?

Maybe instead of working on our weaknesses, we should be enhancing and exploiting our strengths? What if the price for working on weakness (and who even decides what is and isn’t a “weakness”?) is less chance to be f’n amazing?

There are several books out about this, although I haven’t read them — but the idea gets my attention:

Teach With Your Strengths, which says on its Amazon page,
“Defying the orthodoxy that teachers, to be more well rounded, should work to strengthen their weaknesses, this book, drawing on research by the Gallup Organization, maintains that great teachers are those who teach with their greatest talents and abilities.”

Excerpt:

WWdN: In Exile: Seeking a potential Marrow Donor
One of my fellow Los Angeles Poker Bloggers, StudioGlyphic (who won the WPBT Winter Classic last December) is looking for some help for one of his friends, whose girlfriend is very sick with cancer, and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. The odds of finding a donor match are about 1:20,000, but this girl’s odds are even longer because she is Fillipino:

So please, contact your friends, and ask them to contact their friends. Anyone you know who is Filipino and between the ages of 18 and 61 is a potential donor. The system is nationwide, so it doesn’t matter where they live. Signing up on the registry is easy and painless. All it requires is a simple blood test. Some hospitals charge a small fee for this blood test, however if your friends contact me directly, I can put them in touch with one of the hundreds of local organizations that will do the blood test for free. They can use this email address: jacobkrueger@gmail.com

…and…

There are lots of misconceptions about donating bone marrow. (I know I was terrified of doing it before I learned how minor the procedure actually is.) The procedure is simple and safe. You will be anesthetized the whole time, so you will not feel anything. When the procedure is over, you may have some soreness in the area for a few days and you may feel a little tired. That’s it. The bone marrow you donate is replenished within 3-4 weeks. And again, you will only undergo this procedure if your blood sample shows that you are a match and you decide to donate, in which case the slight soreness you’ll be feeling will be saving someone’s life.

Excerpt:

Jupelo – Who Be Me?
The Most Basic Basics

Goal 1: Spend an entire year at Walt Disney World and record every second of it for you to see.

Goal 2: Begin building the world’s largest Disney collection (there’s more to this – see below).

Goal 3: Not go insane.