Yay, it’s Winter Break! Happy Holidays! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas! Happy Boxing Day! Happy Kwanzaa! Happy New Year! Yay, I’m back to school tomorrow!

There you go, there’s all of the posts that I probably would have made over the past two and a half weeks if I had had time. And then some. But man, this winter break has been very very busy for me, and I think that I may need a winter break from this winter break.
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Tags: 2009, activites, article, cell phone, Christmas, college, college apps, Common Application, cribbage, essays, gifts, holidays, Leadership, new year, newspaper, Personal, phpBB Weekly, picture, San Mateo County Times, supplements, winter break

The holidays is about quite a bit more than simply decorating. And as much as I hate Black Friday, we do find ourselves going shopping for Christmas gifts this time of year, and some of us could benefit from something to help us keep track of our gift giving. Meet Santa’s Gizmo.

This cool little $15 app from MacMage is a really tidy little app to help you make your list and check it twice. Essentially, for each gift that you purchase or plan on purchasing, you add it to your list along with the name of the recipient and approximately how much you will be spending on the gift. As you then go along running your shopping errands, you can use Santa’s Gizmo to track as your go through the steps of buying, wrapping, and sending your gifts, and lets you mark each step as complete as you do it. Santa’s Gizmo keeps a running total at the bottom of how much you’ve spent on gifts so far, and the list on the left lets you filter your gift list by gifts that you need to buy, bought, need to wrap, wrapped, need to send, and sent.

There’s also a few additional features buried in the List menu of the app. One option lets compare your recipients in terms of the value of the presents they are receiving–great if you’re one of those meticulous people who wants to spend the same amount of money on everyone on your list, or if you are giving people multiple presents and want to see what that adds up to. Another lets you e-mail your list to someone else, great if you’re co-planning your list with someone else and want to reconcile your ideas. And another option brings up a place in Santa’s Gizmo to let you add a link to your gifts, in case you need to look up the website of that gift that you’re planning to give. About the only thing that you can’t do with Santa’s Gizmo is determine who on your list was naughty or nice.

And, of course, Santa’s Gizmo is stylish, with a customized interface using a bit of Christmasy green, plus an Elf Dudette that sits on the upper-right of the window. (If you find him annoying, you can turn him off in the app’s Preferences, though I don’t know why you would.)

At $15 (or a $25 family pack), Santa’s Gizmo is priced a bit steep, but the developer is donating $5 of each sale to SaveTheChildren.org, a very nice gesture. And if making text or RTF files to manage your Christmas list isn’t cool enough for you, you’ll want to give Santa’s Gizmo a try. After all, if it’s good enough for Santa, it should be good enough for you, too!

Be sure to check out other decoration tips for your Mac in my Deck the Desktops blogging series, occurring daily during December 1-25 here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Deck the Desktops, gifts, planning, Santa's Gizmo, tracking

With Monday’s announcement that we are now officially in a recession (wow, I had absolutely no idea after all of the crazy events of the past 2-3 months), you’d think that most people would be trying to pinch pennies this holiday season. Ah, but that rule doesn’t apply to the super-rich, as Stephen Colbert sarcastically points out in his latest edition of his Colbert Platinum segment.

Tags: Christmas, Colbert Platinum, funny, gifts, holiday, rich, sarcasm, Stephen Colbert, Video

So tell me, how do you give a gift to someone that requires that person to be with you at the store when you buy it for them? Like, say, the iPhone 3G, which stupidly requires the person using (and paying for the service plan for) the phone to be physically at the store where they get the device?

Well, here’s what some genius at Apple came up with: the iPhone Gift Card. Of course, rather than just get the device yourself and give the physical device to the recipient so that they can immediately open it and start using it while they’re still in their PJs under the tree, how about we give them a gift card that may or may not be for the full value of the gift and force them to leave the house, find a nearby Apple Store (if they have one nearby since this card apparently doesn’t count at AT&T stores), make them wait in the inevitable line for their phone to get activated, and make them have to pay for their own service plan for the next two years?

It gets even crazier when you can consider that you could just get them an Apple Store Gift Card to do the same thing. (Or that, quite frankly, the iPhone Gift Card can be used for anything else in the store, so it might as well be an Apple Store Gift Card anyway!) Oh, and the thing can be loaded with up to $2500–that’s your choice of either, um, twelve and a half iPhones (or ten iPhones if you include sales tax), or it could be enough to pay for that iPhone and all of the cost of the two-year contract. Oh wait, the gift card can’t count towards that contract–man, that might have actually made it worth it.

Wouldn’t it have just been easier to go back to the way it was with the original iPhone where someone could buy you the physical device, wrap it up, and then when you unwrapped it, you could go onto iTunes and activate it by yourself on your own time in your own PJs? (Never mind that iTunes was slower than molasses on Christmas Day last year.)

So, here’s to the latest Sarcastically “Great” Idea: the iPhone Gift Card. May your wallet have mercy on your soul.

Tags: activation, Apple, crazy, gift card, gifts, holidays, iPhone, Sarcastically "Great" Idea, store

I’m a big fan of David Pogue, New York Times Tech Columnist and CNBC Tech Contributor, because unlike many tech commentators, he has a good sense of humor in everything he does. And now, he and the New York Times have put together what they call the Pogue-o-Matic product finder, in which a digital representation of David Pogue guides you through the process of narrowing down gift products to the ones you want. Right now, they only have four categories: Cameras, Camcorders, TVs, and Smartphones, but it’s still a really nice bit of work.

Plus, I was bored, and so I sat watching the intro page for quite awhile–David Pogue spends up to like five minutes just doddling around waiting for you to click something! It’s quite funny.

High five to Pogue and the New York Times for this great service.

Tags: David Pogue, gifts, New York Times, product finder, tech