Saturday, December 31, 2005

FindIt Puzzle Game




We got the FindIt Puzzle Game from some family friends for Christmas. Despite appearances, it's not actually a birdfeeder. Hidden in the clear sealed cylinder and obscured by a bunch of little plastic pellets are 47 little doohickeys like a paper clip, eraser, plastic ant, match, clothes pin and jingle bell. Your job is simply to find all the doohickeys by shaking, twisting and turning the package.

It's easy to get obsessive with this thing --- despite having it sitting on our coffee table for a week now, there are still four things I can't find: damn you, rock, wing nut, nail and screw.

Anyways --- it's a lot of fun and pretty much all the people passing through our house have picked it up and gotten absorbed in it. Definitely a good "family" gift, and also worth it as something to pick up on your own for the family room.

Happy new year, all!

Friday, December 30, 2005

L'Occitane Verbena


 

The best part of going to Fairmont Hotels used to be the L'Occitane Verbena stuff they had in the bathroom (ok, that's a little overstated, but it was up there on the list). Then of course they blew it and switched to some other junk. Verbena shampoo, soap, hand lotion, etc. works well, but the key thing is that it smells fantastic. It's a great lemony deal without being all girly. OK, it's kind of girly, but at least it's not rosewater.

I am generally a Dove and Suave kind of guy --- the $1.50 pricetag on those guys is much easier to cope with than $20 for the L'Occitane stuff. But for a once-in-awhile purchase, I definitely recommend it.

Lemon-fresh, just like Pledge! Maybe that's the connection, some deep link to my childhood. Nah.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

NeatReceipts Professional Scanner




I bought the NeatReceipts scanner a couple of weeks ago at Staples; you can also get it from Amazon and a bunch of other places; it's around $200. My flatbed had taken a dive and I needed to scan some stuff, but my wife was planning to get a new flatbed for upstairs so I figured I didn't need a huge one.

The NeatReceipts is pretty sweet; it's tiny and comes with a little stand so it just sits at the back of my desk out of the way unless I need it. The only cable is a standard USB; it gets its power from that as well. At roughly 2" x 2" x 12", it's a nice package. Documents are pulled through the unit, so they have to be separate pages --- you can't scan a page out of a book, for example.

The receipt and business card scanning software is technically quite impressive. Stick in just about any receipt or business card and it will auto-recognize most fields, down to tax and total, cell vs. office phones, and so on. It's quite a trick. However, integration with other apps like Outlook or Quicken is kind of awkward. It works, it just takes a bunch of steps to keep things in sync.

One big issue: installing was a hassle on Windows XP SP2; it kept hanging and required an email to their customer support. On the upside, I got a response over the weekend and it worked (use task manager to kill the "setupre" process when it hangs).

In any case, there it sits on my desk now and I've used it quite a few times. For my light, business-related scanning needs it's a perfect fit, and once in awhile the specialized software comes in handy as well. Definitely a good purchase in my book.