New Years Eve - ON-LINE!!!

I hope that everyone had a great Christmas! We gave two of our kids and my Mom ASUS Netbooks. They have been enjoying the Internet from their laps for the last couple days. Kind of nice not to have to be sitting at a desk all the time.

For those of you that can't get enough of New Year's Celebrations on T.V. you can also have some fun watching the Times Square Ball drop and countdown online on several sites. Hulu & MSN both have live coverage as well as my favorite site, http://newyears.earthcam.com/ Visiting earthcam will get you views from multiple webcams as well as a very accurate countdown.

Happy New Year!

Shipping deadlines: order your gifts soon in time for Christmas

This year, as always, I buy most of my gifts online. I love not having to go out into the crowds and I am nearly always happy with what I order. Plus it is fun when the packages arrive to open them and find that what I ordered will be a hit. I am almost done but I still have a few things to get so I went online this morning to research whether or not it is getting to close to Christmas to have delivery on time.

I found out that if you still have gifts to buy and you plan on shopping via the Internet, you don't have much longer to meet the Christmas deadline.

Two-thirds of retailers are giving you until Dec. 18 to order gifts and assure that they get delivered by Christmas.

Dec. 17 is also free shipping day. At least a couple hundred retailers, including Toys R Us and Crate & Barrel will offer free shipping that day and guarantee delivery by Dec. 24.

So you still have a few more days!

Wize Dezigns adds RSS feeds

RSS is a web content syndication format. Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It is used for syndicating dynamic material such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video and is a defined standard based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). Programmers use RSS to provide website users with fresh content and headline news. Consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location. Content provided by programmers and viewed in a RSS reader or news aggregator is known as an RSS feed.

Wize Dezigns has added a custom RSS feed on our website to share our latest news with you. We have also added feed headlines from this blog. Both can be found at http://www.wizedezigns.com/

If you use a news aggregator such as Google reader or My Yahoo or a feed reader on your email application, you can subscribe to our news feed by clicking on the RSS icon on our homepage or by using the address http://www.wizedezigns.com/feed.rss and/or you can subscribe to our blog feeds using the address http://wizeblogs.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Here comes St. Nick!

In the Bendt house we celebrate St. Nicholas Eve as the start of the Christmas season. Every year I forget the date, I know it is the 5th but I can never remember if the eve is the 5th or the 4th. So every year I a have to do a google search to figure out which is the eve. This year was no different so yesterday I did my search and found that the eve is the 5th. So if you celebrate St. Nicholas day or you would like to start, have your kids leave their shoes by the door or fireplace on Saturday night. In the morning St. Nicholas will have brought them little presents to indicate whether or not they have been good this year. It is a great way for you to get your kids ready for the Christmas season and to remind them that Santa and the elves are always watching. You can find out more about St. Nicholas and his history here http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=38

While I was searching I also came across a great site http://www.santaclaus.com/ This website has a ton of information related to Santa and will even let you track him on Christmas eve.

Facebook hits 350 million

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook now has 350 million users!

They have also been working on better ways to improve privacy and networks. Look for these changes coming soon. You will begin getting notices and prompts to adjust your privacy settings based on these changes. The goal is to allow your personal activity to be seperate from your business activity or protected from users that you do not wish to share information with.

Cyber Monday was blazing!

By 2:20 p.m. ET, more than 270 retailing Web sites tracked by Internet monitoring firm Akamai were drawing more than 4.3 million visitors per minute in North America. Traffic was up nearly 39% compared to the same time last year.

I know that I got some good deals, did you?

Not to worry, there will be plenty more, just keep checking everyday for the items you are looking for. Prices change by the minute.