Crackling Fireplace in your iPhone, iPod, Zune…

I’m a fan of the crackling fireplace. When I was younger, the local New York television station (Ch 11) would play a 24-hour Yule Log with holiday music. When they phased that out, I got a crackling fire VCR tape. It was inevitable that the magic could become portable. Check out iYule.tv.

Very reasonably priced for a hi-res video and the excellent music of Geoff Smith.

It’s a Glorious Day

Guess what, your client isn’t major pain any more!

You’re getting that raise big guy!

Did you loose a few pounds?

I got that sold-out concert ticket for you dude!

Rosie O’Donnell is retiring from all public life and speaking.

Oh yeah…

A P R I L F O O L !

Time to delete your holiday music audio files

Yeah, the December holidays are over! Time to delete all those songs you ripped to your hard drive and reclaim some drive space. I was suprised to find nearly a GB of Christmas music on my computer. (That was about 12 albums ripped at 192 kbps.)

Easy steps:

• Organize your tracks by artist or whatever your preference is.
• Delete songs you don’t like — Seriously, get rid of those tracks. If you rate your tracks from 1-5 stars, delete all the 1-2 star tracks.
• If you have different versions of “Little Drummer Boy,” keep only the one you like the most and delete the rest.

Once your organized and culled the herd, simply burn the remaining files to a DVD/CD and file it away until next year.

Then you can import it all again next December.

Be brutal and get rid of that unnecessary clutter!

Upside down Christmas tree

It may be too late to order for this Christmas, but I’d imagine that next week the fine folks at Hammacher Schlemmer will be cutting the $599 price tag on this upside down Christmas tree.

Don’t screw up at the company Christmas/Holiday party

eWeek so kindly published a list of stupid things you should not do at your company’s Christmas holiday party: “10 Office Holiday Party Landmines to Avoid.” eWeek even put together a cute slide show to help illustrate their top ten list.

I can distill their essay into the following quick guidelines:

• Don’t be stupid
• Don’t say anything stupid
• Don’t dress stupid
• Don’t do anything stupid
• Don’t bring uninvited stupid people

Look, common sense should prevail. It’s not a time to get drunk and cut loose in front of your bosses and colleagues. Be smart, be sober, be polite. Let some other clown make a fool of herself/himself.

Have fun!

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at Chaos365.com and AdMadMan.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Saving time, saving money while Christmas shopping

My wife and I no longer desire to visit brick and mortar retail stores, especially during the holiday buying season. In fact, my wife prides herself on completing nearly 100% of her Christmas shopping entirely online, without visits to the local mall.

In the past, it crossed my mind that this might seem a bit impersonal. After all, gift giving should not be about obligation. Each gift should be thoughtfully paired to it’s recipient. While I struggle, my wife excels at that.

With the breadth of eclectic products that can be purchased online, I’ve come to agree that online shopping truly can replace the tactile experience of in-store shopping. No more jambed parking lots, packed aisles and fuss. I can truly withdraw from society except for the occasional trips to the Post Office.

With that in mind I offer these last minute Christmas shopping tips:

• It’s not too late to still take advantage of free shipping to have your packages delivered before Christmas.
• When filling out online order forms, be sure to do a quick Google search on “promo codes” for the retailer. You’d be surprised how often you’ll find something (i.e. 5% off, $5 off, free shipping, etc.) to use at the online checkout.
• Signup and use Upromise.com. Login and click through to the online merchant to gain additional credits (i.e. 1-3%, etc.) towards your account.
• Check if the retailer is part of a family of brands that might offer a discount. For example, ThePopcornFactory.com is part of 1800flowers.com.
• Upromise users who also have a Citi Upromise MasterCard get 1% credit to their account on purchases made with participating merchants.
• Consider paying a few bucks extra to have the retailer ship the present to the recipient, especially if you are concerned you might not get it in time. That also saves you from having to wrap it. Your time is valuable, no sense adding more pressure on you the day before Christmas.

Point is, be a savvy shopper. Keep breathing. Try to relax. Enjoy the holidays.
Merry Christmas!

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at Chaos365.com and AdMadMan.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Geeky holiday gift ideas

Make magazine published its open source gift guide, sure to raise your coolness factor in the eyes of that special geek in your life. The guide include various build-your-own robots, MP3 players, mods for used devices and more.

Confession: The inner geek-marketer in me wants to check out the openEyes open-source open-hardware toolkit for low-cost real-time eye tracking, useful for the analysis of eye movement data. Yikes, that’s geeky, or sad, not sure which.

Enjoy!

-Roland

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