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Hall of Fame, Mark Hamburg, the second engineer to be hired for Photoshop and more recently the creator/founder of Photoshop Lightroom has decided to leave Adobe for Microsoft. There, he will lead the OS user experience team.

“Now, given that I find the current Windows experience really annoying and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can’t imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but, I needed to do something other than imaging for a while.” - quoted from photoshopnews

Mark Hamburgs Going Away Party

As of August 1, 2008, the WestJet benefits, including the WestJet flight redemption benefit, will no longer be a feature of your card. Instead, as part of your new Gold Air Miles Reward Option you'll receive an exclusive 20% discount on all Air Miles flights. Now you'll have a greater choice and flexibility, with increased seat availability and more frequent flights.

So what does this mean? Up until now, holders of this BMO Westjet MasterCard could fly anywhere with WestJet in the high season for a max of 1600 points (900 for short flights). With the termination of this partnership, BMO Mosaik is now just offering a 20% discount on all partner airlines.

This is good for destinations WestJet doesn't service, but very bad for any destination they do.

For example. Charlottetown to Vancouver has a list price of 4800 points. Until August 1st, you can still book a flight with WestJet for 1600 points but after this, that same flight will now be only 20% lower at 3840 points—but with any airline.

It was good while it lasted.

Update: Just realized that on the rare short flight, it becomes cheaper. Charlottetown to Montreal (regular 1100/high season & 900/low season) drops from 900/800 points on WestJet only to 880/720 points on either WestJet or AirCanada.

We at silverorange have been working with Mozilla and The Royal Order to launch a new design for the release of Firefox 3. The site is still not officially released but John Slater is offering access to anyone willing to be beta testers.

Anyone Interested in Beta Testing the New Mozilla.com?

Zap Your PRAM was a small conference in 2003 that was designed to bring together a small group of creative professionals, academics, and intriguing people from around the world interested in design, the web, and emerging technologies. It turned out to be a success and after 5 years, we are doing it all over again.

This October, we are taking over the entire Dalvay By The Sea Resort and aiming for about 50 attendees. Unlike a traditional speaker vs audience conference, everyone here is encouraged to participate in discussion like sessions.

Zap Your PRAM: Dalvay Oct 16th—19th

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) has selected my image "Yellow Frog" as this weeks Editors Choice.

Archived screenshot of the homepage. * for bragging

I thought I was fairly high up, I was standing on dry sand, and I figured I had lots of time to get out of the way if needed. I was wrong, but lucky enough to have taken off my shoes. Then off to a meeting I went, soaked right up to my waist.

Sequence of photos taken by Dan.

Zoos are nothing like the wild and usually you are forced to look through a tiny hole in a fence or through a thick layer of glass. This becomes even more awkward when your lining up a camera lens between a wired mesh fence. All jokes aside about escaping tigers, the San Francisco Zoo does a great job of providing a clear view of most of their animals.

Here is one photo I got from this location.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait exhibit by Chris Jordan

• 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
• 170,000 disposable Energizer batteries, equal to fifteen minutes of Energizer battery production.
• 9 million wooden ABC blocks, equal to the number of American children with no health insurance coverage in 2007.
• 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.
• 2 million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
• 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.
• 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.
• 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.
• 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.
• 65,000 cigarettes, equal to the number of American teenagers under age eighteen who become addicted to cigarettes every month.
• 213,000 Vicodin pills, equal to the number of emergency room visits yearly in the US related to misuse or abuse of prescription pain killers.
• 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004.
• 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.
• 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales of that model SUV in 2004.
• 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.
• 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes.
• 3.6 million tire valve caps, one for each new SUV sold in the US in 2004.
• 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.
• 75,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every day.

Would have, Could have, Should have.

For various reasons, I have never spent any real money in the stock market but I still follow a couple specific stocks on a daily basis. For a moment today, Apple Stock past the $200 mark and has no signs of stopping. Is $600/share in 2009 realistic?

• Dec 27 2007: $203
• Dec 29 2006: $85
• Dec 30 2005: $72
• Dec 31 2004: $32
• Dec 26 2003: $10

Update: Jan 23 2008 Apple fell this month and is selling at $129 today.

Veseys went live on September 14th 2006 and then UppermostAwards followed on July 30th 2007. Early this morning, our third custom built ecommerce web store created with the silverorange Swat toolkit went live.

Visit Van Bourgondiens DutchBulbs.com