Adobe has added to the image-processing software pile for the iPhone. They’re branding it with the flagship Photoshop, and more importantly with photoshop.com. The website is a place to store & share your uploaded photos, similar to Flickr. I think it’s a little too late Adobe but it’s a valiant effort. Flickr has also come out with iPhone software that I haven’t tried out yet.

The controls for editing are pretty simple: cropping, exposure, saturation, tint, black & white, sketch (filter), soft focus, and a variety of sepia/duotone effects. Most of these have live preview while sliding your finger across the screen, which is nice. There’s multiple undo and of course the option to send it to photoshop.com.

Here’s some before & after samples after playing around with it:

Forty years ago, way before I composed this post that Wordpress decided to not remember and so now I’m writing it again, I was jumping off a jungle gym into the hot west Texas sand. This may or may not have been the day that, while jumping, I lodged my front tooth into the gum of my mandible to be discovered three years later as my adult tooth moved into position. Regardless, it was on this day (or possibly a couple of days later, as 40 years ago was on a Sunday) that time stood still and we were instructed to crane our heads towards the warm yellow sun and stare at it.

Like Dag I would repeat this exercise throughout my early childhood until my eyes would bleed with tears. I thought it was something I was supposed to do regularly but only on those summer days when the temperature and cloud conditions were right. I would step off my red tricycle, stop the game I was playing and stare until my eyes were wet.

It was only many years later that I understood what I was supposed to be looking at on that hot El Paso day at Kiddie Korner: it wasn’t the sun, it was the moon. And possibily the moon was visible on that day or maybe it was only something we couldn’t see but were still supposed to believe.

I won’t get into a huge diatribe about whether or not we landed on the moon that day, but I think we’re all going to be in for a big surprise in 2030 when the Chinese send their moon probe out and there’s no indication of an American flag or a Banana Splits-style moon rover waiting for them to drive around.

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Joe Braun’s photography can be enjoyed here. Please support freelance photographers.

Do you know what happened 40 years ago today? You should.

WASHINGTON (AP)—The D.C. mayor’s office says the city is planning to eliminate more than 1,600 jobs to balance next year’s budget.

Officials say 776 jobs will be cut through layoffs. Another 398 jobs will be cut through attrition, and 458 vacant jobs will eliminated, about 7.5 percent of the city’s 32,800-person workforce.

It’s the first time in more than a decade that the city’s budget will shrink. That’s because of a shortfall in revenue due to the nation’s slumping economy.

The D.C. Council can make changes to the budget before it is sent to Congress for final approval.

Spotted on JMG.

QUICK UPDATE: Mode Project, the same design team that created Obama’s iconic “O” campaign logo, is credited with designing the recovery.gov logo along with a great new Dept o’ Transpo’ project logo. Thanks @katkatkatbobat!

I know I’ve written about this minor fact before, but know it’s hitting me with reality right now. It’s minor, no need to worry, no need to be upset.

Six years ago, when I accepted a new contract assignment with an old company, when I went to a newly reunited Duran Duran concert wearing the most makeup I had worn since 1985, when I put my much-historied VW out to pasture, when I was dating the Millionaire, I thought it in my best interest to redirect my Netflix delivery address to a different address.

I had just embarked on a new contract with Gee, where you probably already know was where I always was meant to be. I was determined to become a full-time employee again, and one of the things I purposefully did was to immerse myself back in to the company’s culture. It wasn’t difficult since I still pretty much knew everybody that worked there still. But I did take it to an extreme by fully decorating my office with plants, posters and mementos both current and reminiscent of my past tenure.

One of my infiltration secrets was to have my Neflix discs sent to my workplace, both to extablish rapport with the new admin staff and to give me reasons for circulating throughout the studio (checking for my discs in the mailroom).

Now, I’m finding myself running (not really) across Horseshoe Park at 2:45am just to get a disc put in tomorrow’s mailbox in order to get another one kicked back to me before the weekend. I’ll bet Netflix is making a killing in today’s “economic crisis” because it’s easier to rent instead of paying $15 for a seeing a movie in a theater.

After going to bed around 12:30 last night, I woke up at 3:00am and couldn’t get back to sleep. It is now 7:40 and I’ve given up on falling back asleep so I’ve gotten up and made coffee. But I still feel tired.

Last night I was giddy with the prospect of going to La Lomita with Melba, my first dining-out experience in the last two months. I had a $25 gift card which paid for most of my portion so I was able to rationalize the expense of going out. It was a great meal, with great conversation, and I practically licked my plate clean. Hopefully it won’t be another two months until I can return.

Usually after our nights at LL I would wake up at some point in the night, smacking my lips together and needing to hydrate from the split pitcher of margaritas earlier in the evening. Maybe that’s what woke me up last night, maybe not. For when I did wake up, it was with the abruptness of what’s-her-name in Pulp Fiction when she gets the adrenalin styringed straight into her heart. I wasn’t having a dream, at least not one that I can recall, that shocked me awake. Then I just couldn’t get back to sleep.

Now I’m counting down (and hoping I can stay awake until) brunch today. A good friend from NYC, Nancy, is down this weekend and offered to take me to brunch. See how the love is flowin’ y’all? We’re meeting up at Rosemary’s Thyme which I have never been to. Oh! Let’s check out their brunch menu. I think egg’s benedict (always a favorite) or maybe the cured salmon. Or maybe the spinach ravioli from the lunch menu?

I went with the eggs benedict. They were good, but not as good as the eggs neptune at Busboys & Poets that I had a couple of weeks ago. Also joining for brunch was Glen, and also down from New York. He’s a freelance web designer and combined with Nancy’s ad agency experience they really sparked me up on the New York job market and are going to return home and see if they can dig up any contacts or job opportunities up there in the Big Apple.

They had a couple of hours before their train left so we scooted over to the National Building Museum. We visited the Detour exhibit: new and unique rest stops and pit stops along Norway’s National tourist Routes; and Green Community: pollution-contaminated urban spaces and their steps towards turnaround to a viable, livable and public-transit-friendly communities. The Detour exhibit had great models and photography and we discussed how great it would be if our government’s “stimulus package” would incorporate some clever, unique designs instead of awarding the contract to the lowest bidding contractor. Probability factor: not likely. The Green Community exhibit had some really cool electronics in it, including traffic lane entrances that while you walked forward, the vehicle you were standing over (I ended up in the bike lane) would move with you and give you information on that mode of travel. At the end of the exhibit was this wonderfully animated touch-screen of an evolving community and the choices that can be made to improve it and why those options are beneficial. Fun stuff.

WASHINGTON (AP)—The number of people receiving unemployment benefits has reached an all-time record, the government said Thursday, and more layoffs are spreading throughout the economy.

The Labor Department reported that the number of Americans continuing to claim unemployment insurance for the week ending Jan. 17 was a seasonally adjusted 4.78 million, the highest on records dating back to 1967. That’s an increase of 159,000 from the previous week and worse than economists’ expectations of 4.65 million. As a proportion of the work force, the tally of unemployment benefit recipients is the highest since August 1983, a department analyst said.

The total released by the department doesn’t include about 1.7 million people receiving benefits under an extended unemployment compensation program authorized by Congress last summer. That means the total number of recipients is actually closer to 6.5 million people.

Businesses continued to hemorrhage jobs Thursday. Ford Motor Co. reported a fourth-quarter loss of $5.9 billion and said its credit arm would cut 20 percent of its work force, or 1,200 jobs. Eastman Kodak Co. said it’s cutting 3,500 to 4,500 jobs, or 14 to 18 percent of its work force, as it posted a $137 million quarterly loss on plunging sales of photography products. Black & Decker Corp. said its fourth-quarter profit tumbled 77 percent and the power tools manufacturer announced about 1,200 job cuts.

More signs of the deepening recession came in separate government reports on home sales and durable goods. The Commerce Department said Thursday that new home sales fell 14.

7 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 331,000, the lowest pace on records dating back to 1963. For 2008, builders sold 482,000 homes, the weakest results since 1982. The median price of a new home sold last month was $206,500, a drop of 9.3 percent from a year ago. 

Meanwhile, new orders for durable goods dropped by 2.6 percent last month, even worse than the 2 percent decline economists expected. Orders fell 5.7 percent for the year, the second biggest drop on government records, exceeded only by a 10.7 percent plunge in 2001, according to the Commerce Department.

The tally of Americans filing new jobless benefit claims rose slightly to a seasonally adjusted 588,000 last week, from a downwardly revised figure of 585,000 the previous week. That also was worse than analysts’ forecast of 575,000 new claims. The number of initial claims is close to the 26-year high of 589,000 reached in late December, though the work force has grown by about half since then. The record number of ongoing benefit claims is an indication that laid-off workers are having a difficult time finding new jobs, economists said.

A year ago, continuing claims stood at about 2.7 million, less than half their current level when the extended unemployment program is included. The rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December, a 16-year high. Employers cut an average of 510,000 jobs in the last three months of 2008, and may cut a similar amount in January, Reinhart said.

The crush of new and continuing claims has overwhelmed many states’ ability to process them all. Electronic filing systems crashed in three states earlier this month, and last week Michigan said it would hire 276 workers and open a fourth call center to handle increased phone traffic.

President Barack Obama’s $819 billion economic stimulus package, approved by the House Wednesday and now on its way to the Senate, would provide $500 million to the states to upgrade their unemployment insurance systems. The measure also continues the extended unemployment compensation program, which adds up to 33 weeks of benefits, until the end of the year.

Companies have announced a huge number of layoffs this week as they prepare for an extended period of economic weakness. Economists expect the current recession, which began in December 2007, to be the longest since World War II.

While Virginia has temporarily redeemed itself from it’s number one H8ST8 status with its election of Democratic governor Tim Kaine and even more shockingly by going blue for the first time since Johnson in the 2008 election.

But if you’re trying to secure unemployment compensation from them, they’re still patronizing assholes.

Since this is the first week that I’m actually receiving benefits, I received a letter in today’s mail, fully set in 16-point Times Bold all capitals. Some excerpts:

THE VIRGINIA EMPLOYMENT COMMISSION STAFF RANDOMLY VERIFY WORK SEARCH CONTACTS EVERY DAY.

EACH WEEK THE VEC MATCHES REPORTS WITH CLAIMS BEING PAID TO DETECT UNREPORTED EARNINGS.

FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THESE REQUIREMENTS IS CONSIDERED FRAUD.

Insert sarcasm: It’s nice that the H8ST8 doesn’t treat me like a criminal, and that it believes I’m honestly filing these claims.