Mike and Justin are winging their way down to San Francisco (on wifi enabled Virgin America, no less!) for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center. Three days full of action, excitement, intrigue, and web operations, the highlight will surely be Friday afternoon’s talk from Mike and Justin themselves on “Inside Picnik:How we built Picnik and what we learned along the way.” That’s right, our very own COO and Penguin Handler shall dish the dirt on the wonders of Flash, our amazing growth, and everything you’ve ever wanted to know about CherryPy!

So keep an eye out for the guys from Picnik, and say hi when you see them!

Team Picnik is ever-so-proud of our very own Darrin Massena for winning the Technology Innovator of the Year award at Wednesday night’s WTIA Awards. He’s got a fancy vase on his desk now, and the rest of us have sparkly “Washington Technology Industry Association” swag bags full of tchotchkes. The award has set off a flurry of press coverage, including some thoughtful photographs of the cupcake tree those of us who couldn’t attend missed. And we’d like to thank John Cook (of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Tech Flash blog) for sprinkling his Good Luck Curse-Breaking Fairy Dust for calling it too. It was very serendipitous of him!

Darrin, Jonathan, Mike, Steve, Sarah, and their better halves are on their way to the Historic Paramount Theatre tonight for the 2009 WTIA Industry Achievement Awards!

Of course, Picnik is up for Consumer Product of the Year, and our very own Darrin Massena has been nominated for Technology Innovator of the Year! We hope that all you Washingtonians in the Technology Industry out there can make it tonight. We’d love to meet you all, plus, there will be cocktails, networking, gaming lounges, and you’ll get to find out if Darrin wears a tux!

See Darrin in all his innovative glory!

The sun was out, the app was up and running like a champ, the box office called out to us: it was the perfect day for a little R and R. I should have known better.

Last night you may have noticed a big ugly error page where Picnik should have been and a long list of trouble shooting suggestions that all led back to trouble. I wish I could say, “Well, you know the internet, such a fickle mistress,” or maybe I could have said that our tweet tipped off a gang of underground web 2.0 hackers, or even that the ninja cat sensed our retreat and attacked the servers in our absence. In fact, I’m almost tempted to craft an epic saga of renegade pixels joining forces with mutinous coding to rise up in rebellion and override Picnik, but it’s time to come clean:

I was looking at the wrong page in my calendar.

That’s really all it comes down to. I was looking at the wrong date, so I didn’t hit the renew button for our basic security certificate before grabbing my coat and heading out the door. To all those who suffered in the absence of Picnik, I am sorry. Picnik is back up and I’ll be double checking the dates in my agenda from now on.

Thanks for your patience, everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! For those of you who have been curious about all the turkeys and pilgrim hats, pies and cornucopias in our Shapes section, today is the day where the entirety of the US (except the poor grocers) takes the day off and to celebrate the bounty of the New World, stuff themselves with turkey dinners and pie. And then tomorrow, the day after Thanksgiving, we take another day off, and go shopping!

That’s right, the Friday after Thanksgiving is lately becoming commonly known as “Black Friday”, and not because of the mall traffic: the Christmas shopping season is when most retailers finally go in the black. In these trying economic times, of course, consumers are looking for smart, intelligent, perhaps even environmentally friendly, possibly even free alternatives for the usual holiday giving options.

If you feel like this describes you, Team Picnik Members will be downtown Seattle tomorrow handing out free Picnik Premium Samples! Look for us around 4th and Pine in among the crowd gathering to watch the lighting of the Christmas tree and Macy’s star!

Somehow, the entire backend/operations team here at Picnik (mike and myself) was convinced to compete in the Issaquah Triathlon. This is a ’sprint’ event consisting of a 1/4 mile swim, 15mi bike, and 3mi run.

Saturday is the day. I’m scheduled to hit the water just after 7am. Mike is a little later at 7:30am.

Oh yeah, while I’ve done a couple of 10K runs, neither of us has ever done a tri before. I think we’re ready, but wish us luck anyway!

Update:

Mike and I finished in around 1hr 33min. We were 11.4s apart!