Michigan health officials say influenza has killed 54 people in the state since April 1 and 44 since Sept. 1, when swine flu began gaining steam.

The Michigan Community Health Department said Monday that 26,868 flu cases were reported in the state from Nov. 8-14.

Since Sept. 1, officials say 1,530 people have been hospitalized in Michigan for the flu.

The department says in Michigan, authorities have allocated at least 1.9 million doses of the vaccine for the H1N1 virus, which causes swine flu. That means medical personnel have received permission to receive that number of doses.

Source: R&D

Now here’s a neat photoshop tutorial.

Learn to apply the Warp Tool effectively and a few other tricks to make smoke look like a skull. This technique has a variety of outcomes and works well with water, clouds and a whole bunch of other stuff. This is probably more for intermediate users, as the author guides you through the process well, but not every Warp Grid point handle move.

Source: PSD Tuts+

Photoshop CS4 introduced document tabs that makes me crazy! If you’ve ever dragged one Photoshop window over another, only to have it sucked in as a new tab, you know what I mean.

So for you, a checkbox in Photoshop’s Interface preferences: Turn off "Enable Floating Document Window Docking" and say goodbye to that annoying feature.

Source: CreativeIQ

Awhile back, Dustin Curtis wrote an article expressing his displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. He also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To his surprise, a user experience (UX) designer at AA.com emailed him an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read Dustin’s original article here and the response from Mr. X here.

An hour after Dustin posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

I’ve never tried to hide my opinion of MicroSoft. This post over at the Opera blog, aimed at those who have little knowledge of Microsoft’s history, talks about their anti-competative behavior.

Here’s a quote by Bill Gates:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Source: Bill Gates sums up Microsoft’s abusive history

We all know there’s many, many different ways to do the same thing in Photoshop. But, did you know there’s at least 11 ways to zoom in and out of your artwork?

I can only think of five or six off the top of my head and now I’m curious what the other methods are!

Source: CreativeIQ

HV-Designs.co.uk has a post about converting a Photoshop based layout into HTML. Actually, they have a few such tutorials. They also have other goodies that are up your alley. You should probably set aside a few extra hours to explore.

Source: HV-Designs.co.uk

From PSD to HTML, Building a Set of Website Designs Step-by-Step

A blog I don’t think I’ve seen before, DesignM.ag, has a post listing the Top 10 Tutorials for Converting PSDs to HTML/CSS. Here’s a sample:

• From PSD to HTML, Building a Set of Web Designs Step by Step
• Encoding a Photoshop Mockup into XHTML and CSS
• From PSD to HTML – How to turn your designs into usable web interfaces
• How to Convert a PSD to XHTML
• From PSD to CSS/HTML in Easy Steps

Beware, if you visit this site you might wind up spending all day there doing tutorials and learning stuff.

See the rest of the list here: DesignM.ag

Meanwhile, another blog called Vandelay has a listing of SEVENTY-FIVE Photoshop to HTML resources. Some are tutorials and some are companies that will convert your PSD into HTML. Yeah some of this list is duplicated in the first list but many are not. Here’s a quick sample of the Vandelay post:

1. Encoding a Photoshop Mockup into XHTML/CSS
2. Coding a Clean Web 2.0 Style Web Design from Photoshop
3. Converting a Design from PSD to HTML
4. Slice and Dice that PSD
5. The Design Lab: PSD Conversion
6. Converting a Photoshop Mockup (video)

See the other seventy here: Vandelay Design Blog