Christmastime is here and Shutterfly has got me in the spirit!

Shutterfly has introduced a great way make your Christmas greetings to your friends and family this year both personal and elegant. Their new line of Christmas cards this year reminds me of a card Shane and I sent out a few years back. As most of you know, my mom is a professional photographer and one year we had the great idea of making our dog Jasper the subject of our holiday greeting.

My mom set up a "doggie photo session" with Jasper as we donned little reindeer ears on his head and jingle bells around his neck. Surprisingly, Jasper was quite the model and took some great shots! After we sent the card out that year to our family, one of our nieces received it and actually thought that the dog on the card was a "model dog" that looked like Jasper! On second look, she realized it actually was Jasper which gave us all a good laugh. Maybe next year, we can use Shutterfly to make a 12-months of Jasper calendar ;-).

All in all, we look forward to using Shutterfly for our holiday cards this season, as we have used them for photo cards and books in the past. We love this collage design in particular. Happy Holidays to everyone and I look forward to seeing everyone's cards this year!

Heidelberg Photo Book

Click here to view this photo book larger

Microsoft and Yahoo to unite?

This is the most interesting news I've heard in awhile regarding two heavies with merger talks in the works. On CNN.com, the headline reads "MSN-Yahoo: Watch out Google." While I adore Google and love what the company has done to the internet, I miss seeing true competition and all the good ideas and progress that come from it. Even if the merger does happen, MSN-Yahoo still has to do a lot of work to catch up, but this piece of news has everyone buzzing with excitement and Yahoo's stock through the roof.

Like da fonts?

If you are a font fanatic like me, you will love this site : Dafont.com. My dream come true - tons of free, no strings-attached fonts that you can easily download with a couple clicks - no account or personal info needed. There are so many user-submitted fonts here which are all organized under categories such as old school, gothic, medieval and retro. Type you favorite word or idea into the search engine and I bet you'll be surprised that there is a font for it :)

Easy auctions

I've been looking for an easy way to list eBay auctions for a long time and have tried many different freeware/shareware programs, but never found one that I really liked. While I might be the last one to figure this out, I finally found Auctiva. There's no downloading required with this one because it's all online in one easy, user-friendly Web site.

Auctiva lets you create listings for free and even posts them to eBay for you. The site offers tons of cool templates to make the listing look more professional and eye-catching and offers tons of customizable options that can be saved to a user profile so you can apply them easily to any of your auction listings. I still haven't found a catch to it being free, however maybe if you dive deeper into the features and want additional usability and even more options, there might be fees involved. For now, it is definitely the solution I have been looking for and has already helped me sell several items within the past week.

Band in a box

I knew the day would come when the console gaming world would combine Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution to make the ultimate singing/performing gaming experience. I just read an article on Gamespot that reveals a partnership between Electronic Arts and Harmonix for a PS3/XBox 360 game called Rock Band that will allow users to essentially live out their big rockstar wannabe dreams.

"It's essentially taking the core play premise of Guitar Hero but just expanding it hugely along every axis. We're building it out into a complete band experience, with guitar and bass and drums and singing, including very deep and expansive online game play. Huge recording artists are going to be in the game, including original multitrack master recordings in a lot of cases, which has been amazing." How wicked is this going to be?!

Shoes glorious shoes

I am sure many of you have heard of THE place to order shoes on the net, but if not, here is a tip for you - go to Zappos. Any shoe in any style, size or brand you will most definitely find here. Overnight shipping is almost always free - which is totally awesome. But the best thing about Zappos.com is their customer service (sounding like a commercial here I know). But I have to say I was very impressed with how they handled a recent complaint of ours. I ordered my fiance a pair of shoes and within a week, the seams opened and they were falling apart. I told him to call Zappos so they could send him a new pair. Not only did they overnight him a new pair, but they also gave him a slight refund because the price of these shoes had dropped by a few bucks. While Zappos prices aren't as much of a steal as they used to be, they are a wonderful online retailer to do business with.