lucky ducky

It must be my lucky day! I won not just one prize, but two! Both from the Moo egg hunt, which most of you are probably familiar with by now, but if you’re not, here’s the crash course: Moo.com, printers of those ingenious mini cards, hosted an egg hunt around the world. Forty eggs were hidden in various sites on the Web, and several more were distributed (in the form of stickers) to major cities in the U.S., Canada, Europe, China, and more! Moo posted clues and hints at their blog and on Flickr each day, and the first people to decipher the clues and report the eggs’ locations were guaranteed a prize. For the benefit of those of us who are not that quick, several other winners were chosen at random to receive various prizes from different sponsors, including Flickr, Etsy, Moo, Picnik, Timbuk2, etc.

Well, I wasn’t first to find an egg, but apparently I was one of the other random winners in two different drawings. I’m thinking I should go out and buy myself a lottery ticket tonight!

The spoils: a Flickr Pro account and a Picnik Pro account. The Flickr account extends my current pro service for a year, so it won’t expire until 2010. And I’d never heard of Picnik until now, but it looks like a handy Web site for quick, on-the-go image editing, right in your browser (no Photoshop required). It also integrates with Flickr and other similar photo-hosting services for convenient access to edit your photos wherever you are. And with the Picnik Firefox Add-on, I can take screen shots of full pages and save them to my Flickr account in two clicks. No more “print screen” for me! The technology is impressive, and I’m having fun playing with my new “toy.”

To the right is a Picnik’d version of the waiting hour 2–cross-processed with rounded-corners. Nifty!

Moo is also having a special mini-challenge: write a poem about Moo or the egg hunt and be entered to win a prize! Here is my contribution (limerick style for St. Patty’s Day, of course):

There once was a comp’ny called Moo
Who’s egg-hunt was known by a few
They hid eggs ’round the world
With bright colors unfurled
But alas, I found none–oh, boohoo!

In the spirit of the egg hunt, there is also a secret message to the Moo team hidden in the poem. It’s not hard to find if you look closely. 😉