WhosOff takes some of the stress and mess that can occur when managing staff holidays. It's a free service that is pretty easy to set up, unless you have a few hundred employees to manage.
When staff names are entered into the online system together with their vacation entitlements, its WhosOff turn to work. Managers and staff are sent notifications by email when employees request leave dates, Managers then jump into the system and can either approve or decline the requests.
WhosOff can also track sickness, national holidays, and does use SSL to ensure the security of the website.
Are you right into the Holiday Spirit? Decorating everything in sight and singing good old fashioned Christmas songs? Or even if you have had it with all the crazy shoppers this time of the year, Google can brighten your season. If you do celebrate, Google wants to help you get into the festive mood with a list of holiday gadgets aimed at the holiday season. How would you like to decorate your Google Desktop with your very own Christmas tree, one that you can actually decorate yourself? Maybe you need a reminder to how many days are left in the year? Try out a Countdown to New Year's calendar. Or maybe you would like a pretty little clock with Santa in the middle that plays a Christmas Carol every hour? You can get them all care of Google's Desktop Gadgets.
I went out looking for a nice, not too dumb holiday theme for my Firefox, call me old-fashioned, call me sentimental, but hey, I like a nice looking theme to go with the holiday cheer. Most normal people look for gifts, I look for themes for Firefox. Don't dis it, you know you do too. The Tinseltown Firefox theme is a great one, featuring light bulbs for back and forward, Rudolph as the refresh button (I don't know why the thought or smell of a reindeer makes you think of refreshing a page, but...) Santa's hat for stop, a gingerbread house for home (makes sense), a present box's top to add a new tab, history is a stocking, and downloads is a gingerbread man. The scrollbars are a nice shade of candy cane, and the background consists of a snowy blue and white scene. All in all, the theme is nice but not too outlandish. Check it out, then let me know what your favorite is here. I am still on the lookout for a few good themes of the holiday persuasion. What do you suggest?
So, you have a hard time convincing the kids that Santa is real? Windows Live Messenger has set up a way for your kids (with your help of course) to chat with "Santa" on Windows Live Messenger (you'll need to download the latest, but there is a link on the page). All you have to do is add Santa's messenger ID (northpole at live dot com) to your WLM contact list and then you can send messages to him and get a reply back. I suppose that this whole thing started because Santa had to become more tech savvy with the times, to be sure he could hack it when it comes to all the new-fangled gadgets the kiddies want these days. I did hear a rumor that Santa and Bill Gates go way back, which is how Santa easily got a spot in Microsoft's offering of holiday cheer, but it is largely unsubstantiated at this point. Heck, simply tell your kids that Santa knows Bill Gates (feel free to link to this post),I'll bet that will make them believe in him for sure. It just makes sense. There you go, a holiday KidHack for you.
Today's holiday downloads is Free New Year ScreenSaver from Download for Free. It's not the world's most sophisticated saver, but it has falling snow, and anyone who's been following this feature knows I'm a sucker for that. And it plays the Twelve Days of Christmas, which just seems appropriate.
Flickr is making our holidays a little cheerier with some bonuses for Pro and Free members alike. The biggest bonus is for Pro users, of course: Beginning this month all Pro account will have totally unlimited storage and bandwidth. While probably only a fraction of Pro users were bumping up against the old 2GB-per-month upload limit, who can argue with unlimited? Free users have cause to celebrate, too: The per-month upload limit for free accounts has been bumped up to 100MB, a 500% increase over the previous 20MB limit. A Pro account still costs $24.95 per year, and a free account clearly still costs nada. For those "Giving the Gift of Flickr," Flickr also has a new system that lets you buy a Pro account activation code that will work for both existing Flickr users and those just signing up, and they also have a cute little card you can print out to stuff in that special someone's stocking.
But wait, there's more! The Flickr crew have blessed us with a cute holiday easter egg: If you add a note to one of your photos with the text "ho ho ho hat" or "ho ho ho beard," Flickr will add a cute santa hat or beard to the photo wherever you put the note. You can see it in action on the dashing Merlin Mann. Lovely!
Today's Time Waster has a lot going for it: Simple controls, cute bunny character, soothing music, addicting gameplay, and a pretty, wintry theme. Oh, and it's by Orisinal. The goal in Winterbells to get your little white bunny to jump as high as possible. After your initial jump, you control the bunny exclusively by moving the mouse. Each time he lands on a bell, he jumps higher and your score increases. If he lands on a bird, your score is doubled. The higher he gets, the more points each jump is worth. While this sounds pretty simplistic, it gets surprisingly challenging (and anxiety-inducing) as the stakes increase and the bells get smaller, and one missed bell can send your bunny plummeting (gently) to the ground. So hop on over (sorry, couldn't resist), and after you've got the hang of it, post your high scores in the comments. I'm up to 244.410 1,523,110.
NewsGator, the cross-platform gurus of all things RSS and blogging, is feeling a bit festive this holiday season, as they have announced an end-of-year sale on all their products. This forum post has the short 'n sweet details: through the end of December, using coupon code NGHoliday at checkout will score you $10 off any of their products. As most of them are sitting around the $30 price point, this could also loosely be considered a 30% off sale - not a bad deal if you ask me.
Posted Dec 6th 2006 9:00AM by Jay Savage Filed under: Fun
Today's download is a countdown, um, tree called, amazingly enough, Christmas Countdown. Not much to say here, but at least you'll know how many days you have left to do that shopping. Or how many days you have before the holiday, if you get one. You'd be surprised how many people have been saved from strangling their bosses by just telling themselves "10 more days; i can keep my temper for 10 more days..." This little widget is here to help.
Previous 12 Days of holiday downloads for OS X: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Ooh, a holiday-themed Time Waster that doesn't suck! Gift Wrapped is a great Flash hair-puller from Nitrome. The premise is thin and actually doesn't sound that promising--you have to find your gifts among the pile of wrapped presents by shape alone, based on the picture shown in the box at the top. At the beginning the game is really easy and I was prepared for a letdown. However, it gets harder fast, as first it starts changing the orientation of the wrapped presents and then adding more similar-shaped gifts to the pile and using more of the same giftwrap patterns, all of which make it harder to find the gift you're looking for. You start out the game with 30 seconds on the clock, which steadily ticks down, and bonus time gets added for each gift you pick correctly, and when your time really starts running out is when the hair-pulling begins. Like I said, I wasn't expecting much, but Gift Wrapped turns out to be a pretty fun, addictive little game. Post your high scores in the comments--I'm only up to 470.
All the innovations on the web and the advances in technology, and we still can't come up with non-crappy screensavers easily. Most sites you visit are filled with less-than-par graphics and dumb trial/spam/ad/crapware. This is where you come in. For those who don't know where to go, or what screensavers are decent, with no crapware installation or computer hijacking software tagging along, tell us all what your favorite holiday screensaver is and where you can go to get it. Give us some features, the install/uninstall process, and what your over-all feeling of the saver is. Why? Mostly because inquiring minds want to know, and duh, our readers are the experts on such matters. You can put up to 3 links in the comments if you feel so inclined. Let it snow (on your monitor)! What is your favorite screensaver or site to get screensavers for the holidays?
What would you like for the holiday season? Maybe something you can download? How about a special gift of a free downloaded movie from AOL Video? This Saturday at 6:00 am Eastern Time, AOL will be offering users 30 titles to download. Sorry, rumor is that its one per person. But not limited to one per computer. Some of the movies will be holiday related, and some will be other top releases like Spider-man 2. Get your mouse ready to click, and let's hope AOL's servers can handle the amount of traffic that's going to come in on Saturday morning.
Posted Nov 21st 2006 10:30AM by Chris Gilmer Filed under: Fun
Allen over at CenterNetworks has a 2.0ey idea for this holiday season. It's aimed at all Web 2.0 people, and is inspired by Secret Santa gift exchanges. Getting involved in it is pretty simple: Email Allen your name, website/blog, gender, likes and dislikes, and your address. He will pair people based on their locations, likes, and dislikes. The sender gets sent the information on the person they will be buying for, and blam! Your Web 2.0 gift exchange is on. It's a really neat idea, and I really hope it works as planned. So if you're feeling into the Holiday, Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivas season, think about giving this a shot!
Nevermind the other guy, what about what you want for the holidays? So you can't keep track of all those gifts you want? Sick of explaining the difference between an Intel Core Duo and and AMD 64 X2 to your loved ones? GiftHat gives you a place to store all your desires for the holidays and helps you justify being the greedy selfish little kid we all are inside, all the while maintaining the charade that it is a good thing for your loved ones, since they will know what you want without having to ask you, therefore maintaining that holiday tact no one seems to have. It will even allow you to load page images from Amazon to pick the right pix for your item, and grab the price too. The cool thing about GiftHat is that it will let you either automatically detect settings from a site or manually type in the details, so it works for just about any site, not just Amazon. With the nifty little JavaScript bookmarklet (drag this link to your bookmarks) and the ability to post a little GiftHat badge to your blog or website, it becomes a powerful service rivaling the functionality of del.icio.us except for gifts not sites, and actually makes shopping for yourself and getting what you want easy as, well pie. Pumpkin pie. The last great thing is that you can have any relatives, friends, and other people who will buy you stuff go to a simple URL on the web to see your list, in the form of gifthat.com/yourlistname. Email them the link, let them know that this is your wishlist, and you're done.
Wow, I feel so self-centered after this post, I am going to go feed a homeless guy or something. Peachy.
On Ozzie, and Allchin, and Ballmer...Microsoft will be looking to rake it the dough this holiday season. Already there are 250 plus products that are Vista ready, and will be ready to ship for the holiday season from many third party vendors. Santa will have a lot of Vista-ready stuff to hand out this year. Many new hardware and software products will both be available for this season's holiday rush, among them, many usual suspects. Keyboards, mice, other peripherals, and also many software titles, such as Flight Simulator, Company of Heroes, Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. Is there anything you've seen and heard about that you want this holiday season from the ever-growing Vista universe? Come on tell me, I may not be Santa, but we go way back, I'll see what I can do for you.
WhosOff takes some of the stress and mess that can occur when managing staff holidays. It's a free service that is pretty easy to set up, unless you have a few hundred employees to manage. 
