U.S. workers lag in taking vacation

A break from work is a chance to rest and rejuvenate, restoring your vim, vigor and mental engagement with your job.

But with crazed work lives often leaving little opportunity to escape, online travel company Expedia Inc. conducts an annual survey to determine just how much time U.S. workers are not planning to take off.

The average full-time U.S. worker is likely to skip three vacation days this year, according to the survey, which also found that nearly 33 percent of employees admitted to not using all their vacation days.

The average worker has 12 vacation days per year, the lowest among the six nations included in the 2005 survey. France had the most, with 39 vacation days per year, followed by Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and Canada.

So, when Americans do get away from the rat race, what’s the most popular way to take a holiday? More than a third, 38 percent, said they’d take a full week off and then use the remaining days through the year.

Technology

PalmOne gadget could rival iPod

PalmOne Inc.’s new handheld with a built-in hard drive makes it possible to jam more rich content than ever into your pocket.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based company, a pioneer of electronic organizers, hailed the “LifeDrive” as a new breed of personal digital assistant, the first to feature a hard drive.

The device, which will retail for $499, has 4 gigabytes of storage, a large color screen – 320-pixel-by-480-pixel – and is roughly the same width and length as most PDAs.

By offering to manage a person’s entire MP3 music collection, as well as movies, games, photos and large quantities of documents, the LifeDrive is the latest challenger to iPod digital music player from Apple Computer Inc.

LifeDrive also can connect to the Web wirelessly via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technology and offers support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.

Motley Fool

Name that company

I came to life in 1851 as a four-page publication. Adolph Ochs bought me in 1896, beefed up my writing staff, and added a book review section and magazine. A photograph graced my front page for the first time in 1910. Ochs’ son-in-law Arthur Sulzberger took over in 1935. I published my first Sunday crossword puzzle in 1942 and went public in 1967. I publish The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and 17 other newspapers. I own eight television stations and two radio stations, and I run more than 40 Web sites. I’ve won 111 Pulitzer Prizes. Who am I?