The sweat of 120 degree Phoenix summers, the drudgery of roommates and the dedication and sacrifice to get in assignments and grades is officially over. Tomorrow, I am a DeVry University Graduate, Bachelor of Science in Network and Communications Management.

Again, the first step in a Million More, I look forward to the next step in the journey.

Yes,

After all the commotion and outrage that Adobe would snub all Intel Mac users from enjoying Photoshop natively can now rejoice because the new (beta) version of Photoshop is here. What we want to do if be your guide to the new version, give you tips and tricks on all the new stuff there.

We will have a book giveaway, and food will be provided. I want to extend my apology for the last meetup, I was at the Microsoft Vista Launch Tour. There are many reasons for this, first and formost is that Microsoft is sponsoring our user group and I believe that the 2nd largest Mac developer (after Apple of course) and using thier software deserves support. Feel free to e-mail me or comment on my decision and I will be glad to go over it in detail.

Some of you know about thier work and some don't.

Thier work in the community is both an educational and rewarding experience. Just like Steve Jobs won over John Scully by saying (paraphrasing) would you rather sell sugar water to kids or change the world, this is again an oppoortunity to change the world.

A tribute to our Co-President Ben.

Can a person fall in love with a phone? Oh yes, oh yes they can. You may ask what the first love was, it was my Macbook. The angels sang, the heavens parted, the sun shown bright in short it was an awesome day.

Yes, you have to sell your soul, I mean sign a 2-year contract with Cingular to do it (well not really). It doesn't work off of kewl new 3G or 4G technology but old antiquated 2G to 2.5G technology because of EDGE. It is expensive (500 and 600 dollars repectively) even after the contract and has relatively small storage space (4GB and 8GB respectively).

After all the bad and good around it, I only have one question. Where do I get it?

Naoto Fukasawa is an extremely popular designer in Japan, he worked for the powerhouse industrial design firm IDEO but now on his own studio. The concept is that you create products that are used in ways that are "transparent" to the user and require little to no knowledge or training on the item. An iPod is an example of this, without a manual or knowledge of using a scroll wheel, most of us felt right at home on the iPod and use it like professionals without needing a training manual.

The same concept is starting to apply to computing and specifically ubiquitious computing, computing that is everywhere from the floors to household objects. We will have a discussion on its impacts, implications and whether the future of the network bieng everywhere is a good or bad thing.

The meet will be January 17, 2007 (First meeting of the year) at Noon in Room 102 at DeVry University but we may have an encore session and as such I will update accordingly.