Riding Around In Style???

Seriously, now I have really heard of everything. Years ago, when I read about Frida Kahlo Tequila, I thought I had finally happened upon the craziest product I would ever hear about. Until today, when I read about the Chanel Segway. If this isn't a joke, I don't know what to say. I guess if your boss tells you to come up with a gift idea that nobody else will have yet and budget isn't an issue, you have item #1 for your list.

So Easy Even Your Boss Could Do it

I kid regarding the title, of course, but I could not think of a good title for this posting. Recently, a friend of mine needed to make a photo of her son much smaller to submit it for something and neither one of us had great software on our computers to do it in a quick, effective way. At that moment, I remembered a site I read about that allows you to edit images in your browser called Picnik that was supposed to be free and easy, so I used it. It worked great and was very simple to utilize. On the site you can:

• Fix your photos in just one click
• Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
• Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
• Use tons of special effects
  

You can pay and register to have access to other features, but you really don't need to, as the basic version works just fine.

Quick Tip Tuesday

I just read the other day about this new Add-On for Firefox (my preferred browser and the browser of many geeky people you know) called Read-It-Later that allows you to Umm - duh, save pages of interest to read later :) by keeping them in a little list that is easy to access at the top of your browser. It's useful for when you don't want to permanently bookmark the site, but want to save specific article to read that you can't at the moment.

Because I'm not going to do a whole other post and this is a tech related posting, I'm going to include a link to this cool t-shirt that Wil Wheaton (who writes a great blog and books in addition to being an actor) wrote about today. Loving it makes me a bit of a nerd and I'm okay with that. Sorry for the extra geeky spillage on the tip of the day post.

Items for your Vinobrary

Obviously Vinobrary is not a real word, but it's my blog and I'll make up words if I want to. If you want to add to your wine knowledge or need to buy a client or your boss some interesting wine books, here are a few ideas:

1) Love by the Glass by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher. This couple writes the popular Tastings column for the Wall St. Journal. This book is a bit more interesting than your typical book about wine because you are learning about their marriage and life together and how wine has been involved along the way.

2) Gary Vaynerchuk's 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World. Gary is the Director of Operations of the Wine Library, a wine retail shop in New Jersey, who gained fame as the host of Wine Library TV, a daily Internet webcast on the subject of wine. Gary and one of my favorite writers, Joel Stein (who is hilarious), did a piece for Time where they tasted wines from all 50 states. The article is interesting, but the video of them blind testing some of the wines is informative and really funny.

3) The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace. This book is about a scandal that ensued after an auctioned cache of wine bottles purported to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson are called fakes.

Unusual Finds of the Week

I keep reading about these tiny cupcakes from Baked By Melissa in NYC. They are tiny (around the size of a quarter) and come in wacky flavors like Smores, Cookie Dough and PB&J. You have to order a minimum of 100 and that will run you about $90. They seem ideal if you want to send a larger size food gift or want to have a unique sweet treat at a party. For now, these are New York only. Read more info about them here.

Another interesting item I saw this week is this adorable sweater from Oeuf that has mittens attached. If you live where it's cold or have to give a baby gift to someone who does, it's a chic and practical idea.

Glassy Glassy Baby

I have mentioned a ton of times already that BUDGET doesn't make the gift. One item I like to give that is unique, beautiful and reasonable ($40) is from Glassybaby. Glassybaby makes handmade glass vessels (often used to hold votives, flowers or as a cup) that come in a million gorgeous colors. They are also fantastic to use for decor for parties. If you don't believe me, Martha Stewart loves them, so check out the owner on her show.

Ideas Even Tiger Woods Would Like

Someone on one of the boards I'm on recently asked me about some golf related gift ideas. If don't have the budget to get someone clubs there are still a bunch of cool things you can do. Below are a few ideas

Tiffany actually does quite a few cool items:

Golf Ball Key Ring

Golf Club and Ball Key Ring

Golf Ball Pen

Golf Club Money Clip

I think I have mentioned these before, but I have sent these golf cookies many times and people always LOVE them.

If you know a man who loves golf and wears cuff links, these are a great option.

And lastly, for the man or woman who wants to take some time out of their day to practice their game indoors, you can get them this.

Synctastic

Anyone who knows me is aware that I well uhhhh, LOVE my iPhone (probably a bit much). I keep telling people if I could find a guy that I like half as much, I'll marry him, but I digress. One issue I first had when I got my iPhone was that I use Google Calendar and I thought there was no way to sync it with the iPhone calendar. I could access the Google Calendar via the Google App on the iPhone, but it wasn't that great or feature rich and I was bummed out. Being the semi-geeky girl that I am, I searched around online and finally found Nuevasync which is a free program of sorts you can sign up for that doesn't even require an install (just some setup of info on their site). Nuevasync syncs the Google Calendar to the iPhone, so you can make changes on the phone or the web calendar and it will keep it up-to-date. I just read yesterday that Google finally decided to make this work for the iPhone as well. They have had Google Sync that worked for the Blackberry for like a year, but they finally came around for us iPhone users. With Google Sync you can:

Synchronize your contacts. Get your Google contacts quickly and easily to your phone. With Sync, you can have access to your address book at anytime and place that you need it.

Get calendar alerts. Using your phone's native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar, and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration.

Always in sync. Your contacts stay synchronized whether you access them from your phone or from your computer. Add or edit contact information right on your device or on your Google account on the web.

I can't decide if I should just leave well enough alone and keep using the Nuevasync because I don't want to fix what isn't broken or if I should switch to the Google sanctioned option. I'm still pondering it.

Oink If You Like Chocolate

Hopefully the title didn't scare you off. This is the thing, for some reason bacon and chocolate together is getting more popular by the day. At some point last year I read about this chocolate bar that had bacon in it and it's really in demand. You can order it online, but I have actually seen the bars at Whole Foods. Joel Stein, a humorist/satirist/journalist who has also dabbled in the sitcom world, that I love (seriously if you have never read his columns in Time or the Los Angeles Times, you're really missing out) did a video piece to accompany an article he did all about bacon and chocolate where he watches two guys from a local restaurant cook a bacon and chocolate dessert! Yesterday I read about another place in New York that sells something they call Pig Candy - not the best of names, but basically it is just chocolate covered pieces of bacon and it ain't cheap! Most people I mention this to are grossed out, but for the right person who loves the sweet and savory together it could be a hit.

The Gift I'd Most Like To Receive

One gift that I would love to receive is Amazon.com's e-book reader, Kindle. It's a really fantastic gift to give to someone who loves to read and travels often - especially if cost isn't an option. At over 350 bucks it isn't exactly a bargain, but for what it's capable of, it really isn't that bad. The second generation Kindle, aptly called Kindle 2 will be released later this month. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, spoke about it today in New York. The New York Times blogged live about it, so if you want to check that out, click here.

When Karen Met Firefox

I'm not a fan of Internet Explorer and if you're using a MAC, Safari is decent, but my favorite browser and the one most IT guys and dorky people I have met use is Firefox. I truly think it's great (being able to have multiple sites open in one window via tabs rules - and Firefox had it first). Don't just take my word for it, look how many other people think it's great. There is the random site where it needs IE in order to function well and for that I have this IE tab you can install within Firefox.

In other other browser related news, if you have multiple computers and wish your bookmarks could easily sync on all of them, try Foxmarks. Walt Mossberg (an amazing tech journalist that works for the Wall Street Journal) just reviewed the site.

tiny tip of the day

I don't seem to be blogging every single day, but I'm going to try to. One thing I will start doing is making sure if I can to do one simple and helpful tip of the day. I often feel compelled to do long involved posts with tons of detail and those can be really helpful, but I hope these will be as well.

Tiny Tip of the Day - TINY URL:

Did you ever want to send a boss or friend a link to something, but the URL was insanely long and/or kept getting messed up and not working? If have that problem, go to this site and you can enter the URL into a box and get a smaller URL to utilize. The site is fast and easy and it doesn't require any registration