This week I took factory tour of Schakolad Chocolate Factory in Columbus, OH.

It is one of the few attractions that Columbus offers apart from monstrous apple baskets, graduation cap etc.

The tour was sweet and so was our host/guide - Judy. She showed us a video on the history of chocolate and served us warm chocolate drink with honey and salt. That's probably the way it was drunk in ancient days.

Then we got to taste white, milk and dark chocolates fresh from the churner. Their pure cocoa butter white chocolate is out of the world. Then we got to make specialty chocolates ourselves.

We learned the 'two finger technique' of dipping in chocolate and 'catching the tail' trick from Judy and tried it. She also showed us how to use templates. She created a lolly and a baseball from templates.

We made chocolate pretzels, chocolate dipped strawberry, chocolate dipped cookie and chocolate bar dipped in chocolate. However, we didn't use any templates.

Then we got to wrap all the chocolates we made. Judy showed us how to curl the ribbons. Very cool!

Mom made the video of us making the chocolates while dad looked on.

It was a fun filled hour and all the chocolates that we made during the time were our take away from the tour.

PS - Oompa-Loompas were missing.

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I've been wanting to draw this for a long time. I abandoned the first attempt. But started afresh last weekend and here I am.

It took some time to locate the poster. It's called "Only for You" by Kim Anderson. It's also called "Red Hat" and appears in "Little Friends" too.

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I've a book of 100 short stories by O. Henry. I read it almost daily during lunch time. I like O. Henry's work - the sarcasm, the humor, the twists and the language. Today while I was reading I realized I was holding 100 individual works of art by Henry. Each written with great deliberation. It's a huge accomplishment to write 100 stories. Of course he would have written many times more to get those 100 published.

Then it came to me. If Henry can create hundreds of masterpieces I should be able to just produce hundreds of my work; quality no bar.

I've decided that I'm going to write and draw more.

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I like writings of Malcolm Gladwell. Just read his new essay Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath

Gist:
Underdogs beat professionals in as many as 70% cases. These underdogs often don't play by the conventional methods. Their effort and determination triumphs the expertise of their opponent.

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Sketch of the naughty cat caught in the shoe.



Closer shot


Update:
Mom says the sketch is exceptionally good. She said, "Look at the tail. How brilliant it is! OMG!" She even encouraged me to be a full time artist.

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I like to be able to use vi commands in the shell. This is default setting in korn shell but bash comes with default emacs setting. So I modified the bash on mac osx to allow use of vi commands.

I added the following to /etc/profile file
set -o vi

To use emacs binding on ksh, edit .profile with
set -o emacs

On the topic of profile files:
To refresh a profile file without logging off and in, use

on bash
source /etc/profile
on ksh
. ~/.profile

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Amazon remembers is an innovative and incredibly fast product image recognition service by Amazon currently available only on iPhone. I'm totally blown away by it.

How it works
Go to Amazon app on iPhone, Remembers Section, Click a picture with your iPhone, Send it to Amazon. Amazon will respond with a either an exact item or a matching one. All this right from within the app. You can view the results on your iPhone app or on your Amazon homepage.

I tried this service with following 5 items and within a minute or two I had Amazon respond with the exact item link in 3 out of 5 cases. One was a close match and the other a disaster.

1) On left above is the smoothie cup from my cafeteria for which Amazon found the adjoining matchin cup.


2) Picture of a poster. Amazon found it instantly but it had taken me over an hour.




3) I sent a valid bar code. Instead of the item Amazon found me this book on bar codes.




4) When I sent the cover of book whose bar code I had used in #3 above. Amazon promptly found it.




5) Finding a toy was easy too. This search took Amazon a little longer. Although it 's not an exact match but it's pretty close.



Overall, Amazon Remembers is a lot of fun and really useful in finding items which are difficult to describe. And hey it's someone else doing the work for you.

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