When I was a kid, my dad would occasionally travel for work. When he did he would sometimes bring me home sand in a bottle, or once he brought me home what looked like an empty bottle, but it was actually full of warm, sun-soaked air from wherever he was returning from. He would explain that he was trying to bottle some of the things he saw and experienced so I could share them with him.

The concept of bottling experiences and excitement has always fascinated me, and I think that is why I am so drawn to the personality of Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, for those of you who don’t know, is the man behind Wine Library TV, as well as the new book Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World, and can only be described as the most passionate “everyman” in the wine business.

I have been very fortunate to meet Gary on a few occasions, and he is a true inspiration on how to succeed in business. I only wish I could figure out a way to bottle his drive and enthusiasm for life.

Gary is a National Treasure, and not in that Nicolas Cage “I am going to steal the constitution” kind of way!

So now that I have finished my very long-winded introduction, I would love you to direct your attention to an interview we did with Gary a few months ago at SXSWi, and you will see how this guy is bringing the THUNDER!

The FreshBooks add-on family is growing bigger all the time! We’d like to celebrate the latest addition to the fold.

Easy Time Tracking gives FreshBooks users a way to access all of FreshBooks functionality from their Windows desktop, whether they are online or offline. Never again get stuck when you’re on the the road without Internet access.

Easy Time Tracking features an elegant timer application that sits in your system tray, and provides full two-way synchronization with FreshBooks. Import customers, projects, and tasks from FreshBooks. Export time logs to FreshBooks. Track Expenses.

Better yet, Easy Time Tracking makes it easy to backup your FreshBooks data onto your own computer, and you can work from a USB Flash drive.

Easy Time Tracking has been on a market since 2005 and has won multiple awards. It was developed by Logic Software Inc, whose products are used in 27 countries by of thousands of customers at some of the world’s most well-known organizations like General Electric, Heinz, and the United Way.

Early this morning we pushed out a new release affectionately dubbed “Animal House”. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:

Tax management for your expenses

Now you have the ability to add taxes to your expense categories. The benefit of this is that once you set the taxes you want to associate with a given category, all you need to do is enter an expense total and we will backwards calculate the amount of tax on the expense for you. This will come in handy at tax time - especially for UK and Canadian based companies.

Staff time-tracking via the API

When we first released our Mac OS X time tracking widget, only admin accounts were supported. Now your staff can join the party with their very own API token. Here are the steps they’ll need to retrieve their token and get rolling:

1. Login.
2. Go to the “Profile” link in the top right hand corner.
3. At the bottom of the page, collect your URL and token.
4. Input these values into the widget.

Note: You (as the administrator) must have enabled the API in your account and agreed to the API terms of service before your staff can retrieve their token. But if you are already using the widget or another FreshBooks add-on, you’re good to go already.

There are other additions to the API relating to projects, credits and some other goodies. Check the developer blog for those details a little later today.

Improved “Assign Client” page

We’ve made the “Assign Client” page easier to use, which is great news for accounts juggling permissions between clients and staff.

More e-mail customizations

In this release we also added the ability to further customize your emails. You can now include invoice/estimate numbers and amounts in the body of emails sent to your clients.

So, that wraps things up.

Hey folks, just a quick note that FreshBooks will be briefly unavailable this Thursday morning while we perform an upgrade.

When will FreshBooks be unavailable?

The upgrade takes place Thursday, May 15th at 11:30 AM GMT (that’s 4:30 AM PT, 7:30 AM ET, et cetera). It’s expected to take half an hour. During this time there will be periods when you will be unable to access your FreshBooks account.

Once the upgrade is complete, watch our blog and your e-mail inbox to find out what’s new!