Adobe has been running round the country doing lots of workshops. Their campus tour is aimed at students and university staff, but I was lucky enough to be invited by a member of staff.

I went to three 45 minute workshops about different Adobe products. The instructor raced through the various useful new features and I tried to keep up with my note taking. I was able to relax in the Dreamweaver session because I knew a lot of it, but I couldn't afford to blink in the Photoshop and Illustrator session.

The instructor made it all look very easy, but now I come to look through my notes I realise it's going to take me a while to learn how to use the things he showed us.

The first thing I've managed to learn and actually do, is to use the Adobe photomerge tool. I've always liked the pictures David Hockney made by joining together lots of Polaroid pictures and I was wondering why I was starting to see lots of examples of people creating similar affects. It turns out they've discovered this Photoshop tool as well.

You can find this tool in all CS versions of Photoshop. It's in File > Automate > Photomerge. It takes a collection of files, automatically positions them so they all join up, blends the joins and also sorts out the perspective. I'm sure you could fool it with a difficult picture, but I'm very impressed. Here is an example I've done of the Corn Exchange that uses 6 photos I took. I would have cropped it, but I've left the edges to give you a better idea of how the joining worked.

• See a bigger version of my Corn Exchange picture on Flickr.

PaperVision is an open source project to make 3D in Flash much easier than it has been.

I've only had a very quick play, but I was able to create this lovely photo cube very quickly.

It's based on an example on The Flash Blog. I can see a lot of potential for including this in my future flash work. 3D can make things look more impressive, but a sense of space can also make things easier to use.

This is my favourite recent discovery. A fantastic site for the new Simpsons Movie. The site is so good that I may go and see the film again.

The site is full of brilliant ideas and lots of cool games to play.

The part that has captured my imagination most is the create your own Simpsons character bit. Once you've made one, there are lots of ways to share it with your friends. What a brilliant piece of personalised viral marketting.

Here is my attempt, although I couldn't quite get the hair right.

When I went to the first GeekUp event in Leeds I became very jealous of everyone's lovely business cards. I decided it was time to sort that out and make my own. I wanted mine to be a little bit different and hopefully be something that people would remember.

I've loved origami since my trip to Japan in 2002 and thought this would be an excellent thing to use. I'd also tested the idea in a previous project and it had been very successful.

Now the design is done, they're quite easy to mass produce. The hardest part of the design was drawing the diagrams and making the instructions clear. It's good to flex my artistic muscles though. The true test of how good the instructions are will be if people can follow them.

You can download the origami crane business card template and have a go for yourself.

This may be the first in a series of different origami business cards.