Chocolate Festival

I toured a fun festival in Honolulu, there is a new group of cacao growers in Hawaii that wanted to get the word out about the only chocolate grown in the U. S.


There were a lot of great samples as well as examples of the cacao plants, pods, and nibs that become chocolate. There were some other ingredients on display too- looks like macadamia, cinnamon, and vanilla. Vanilla is unbelievably hard to cultivate, I'm surprised it is as affordable as it is after hearing what it takes to raise and pollinate.


The pods come in a lot of colors, like coffee all the harvesting has to be done by hand.
I found out that the cacao trees are not fans of wind, they are rain-forest plants so they have no defense against it and their leaves get beat up and bruised. A lot of the North shore growers got surprise wind storms before coming to the event so the little seedlings on display had some brown leaves.

I bought two potted trees so 3 years from now I'll have to sign up for a table to share my awesome chocolate.


These guys are a day away from appearing on cupcake wars on the Food Network. some of the little cases people used were as neat as the treats.

Creepy mold art

Italian artist Daniele Del Nero has some cool architecture/art projects, I'll need to remember this one using mold on miniature houses for halloween.


photo credit: Daniele Del Nero

Nyub Nyub!

CraftFoxes.com has a fun project from the World of Geekcraft.

Video Game scholarhips, eh?

Some schools have special scholarships to try to level the playing field, VFS has a full ride (up to $49k) for the right woman who loves games wants to design them for a living. Game development has always been pretty male-dominated so this seems like a great idea. An application pdf is here, more info on their current scholarships is here.

This school teaches sound design, make up, writing and other useful things for entertainment careers, their url is www.vfs.com. I had to learn game design, creative writing, sound design, digital video editing, and project management on the street!

more financial aid tips

http://www.20sfinances.com/2012/01/05/different-types-of-financial-aid/

Grants and scholarships. The sweetest variety of financial aid, these freebies often come to you via academic achievement, hard work in filling out applications and good old-fashioned searching. Students build the rest of their aid packages from the base of whatever grants or scholarships they receive.

Loans. Students sink into a tapestry of debt to cover outstanding expenses.
The most attractive options are subsidized loans they don't have to pay back until after graduation, but what they'll be offered depends on their income and resources.
Filling out a FAFSA form is the first step to finding out which loans they qualify for.

Employers can help too, I had at least half of my college costs reimbursed by Apple, it took forever to finish but I got my BS eventually. In the meantime I spent what would have gone to tuition on office toys.

When Collecting Worlds Collide

Hallmark made an ornament out of the Disney version of Captain Nemo's Nautilus submarine this year, I have enough ornaments to decorate about 4 trees but I couldn't pass it up once the post-Christmas sale kicked in. It even lights up!


When this movie came out in the 50's Disney wasn't the marketing juggernaut they are now, they really didn't make too many licensed toys or collectibles of this great Harper Goff sub design until recently. The Disney Sea resort in Japan has pretty big chunk of the park dedicated to Jules Verne so they have some great collectibles in the gift shops.

These are some of the other 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea items that Disney put out over the years.






The movie posters are hard to photograph well but are really great items ot add to your collection, the foreign language poster are my favorites.

ShakyPlanet app serves up virtual Snow Globes

I've been working with ShakyPlanet for 2 years now shipping their virtual snow globes, known as ShakyGlobes. If you like collecting but are out of room to display even a souvenir thimble you can still collect eCollectibles.

Scholarship search

WSJ has an article on finding scholarships and advice about finding more than one. Here is a list of weird scholarships that I may have linked to last year.

more tiny sculptures

Dominic Wilcox
Watch Sculptures: Moments in Time
2011

The series of seven sculptures, each featuring tiny, hand-crafted figures attached to the watch hands, will be exhibited at Dezeen Space in Shoreditch, London from
September 17th to October 16th.
54 Rivington Street,
London EC2A 3QN.

Tiny worlds in tiny bottles

This is a cool Etsy shop, I want them all.