The 6 Best Last-Minute Gifts

Gifts are part of almost every winter holiday tradition. Everyone likes to give and receive gifts that are carefully chosen. Too often, we give and receive gifts which are inappropriate, useless or just poorly thought out. But, isn't it the thought that counts?

Why do we think we can push our way into the crowded stores when we haven't a clue what we are looking for? Perhaps we feel that the perfect gift is some kind of magic thing that just happens.

How can we, in the rush of the season, choose gifts that are helpful, meaningful and that don't break our budget?

1. Give the gift of you. The best gift is often the gift of your time. One year my mother-in-law took my sons on a Christmas vacation. It was more expensive than a lot of gifts, but it will also be remembered forever -- and no one has to put it away or clean it. You might choose tickets to a concert, a sporting event, movies or a play and then go together. You can also make a coupon book. Use your imagination. Coupons for babysitting are perfect in homes with young children. Coupons for hugs are welcome everywhere! Or, why not write a letter or poem to a special person to let them know just how special they are to you? You don't have to be Shakespeare to put words together that describe your feelings. Sometimes it's a simple note from the heart that is most precious.

2. Give the gift of food. Food is another thoughtful gift that will be appreciated and won't contribute to the after-holiday clutter. Restaurant gift certificates are popular. Parents of young children often can't afford to pay for dinner, tickets to an event and babysitting. Covering the meal might get them out of the house. And, of course, you can cook for someone. One advantage of cooking ahead and freezing is that you always have a meal in the freezer that you could share with someone else. Or, include all the ingredients for a favorite dish, the recipe and any special utensils in a pan or baking dish. Baked goodies are always a popular gift.

3. Give a gift of remembrance. Gifts that help us to remember this holiday -- and the people we are sharing it with -- don't have to be big and extravagent to be appreciated. Special ornaments make good gifts, and you don't have to choose the most expensive. If you can sign and date the back of the ornament with a sharp-tipped permanent marker it will bring up happy memories every year. Or, you can make a donation in someone's honor. A gift that keeps on giving. It could be to their favorite charity, a donation to a zoo, where they could be a "foster parent" to an animal they can visit and enjoy. You can even plant a tree for your loved one.

4. Give the gift of organization. Choose a gift that will help your children (or your friends' kids) to keep their rooms neat, rather than adding to the clutter. When we noticed that our children were spending more time tripping over their toys than playing with them, we made a suggestion -- CONTAINERS! Each child now has an underbed storage box for a few of their favorite things.

5. Give the gift of memories. Whether Christmas is spent watching children open gifts or watching the ocean on a tropical vacation, the gift of a camera -- even a nice disposable one -- can really come in handy. Make sure there is enough film and fresh batteries.

6. Give the gift of communication. Want to hear from your family members who live far away? A pre-paid phone card makes a great gift. Available everywhere, these don't require a special shopping trip and slip easily into a card or letter.

Many of these gifts can be done at the very last minute -- even on Christmas Eve. Most of them are a combination of your imagination and items you may already have around the house. Take a good look at the people you are giving to and think about what they really want and enjoy. You will find the best gifts often don't come from the mall!

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Movie Coming this 2009

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a movie adaptation from Marvel Comics that centers on the talon-clawed mutant superhero from the X-Men starring Sexiest Man Alive of 2008 - Hugh Jackman (Australia, X-Men).

Also starring in X-Men Origins: Wolverine are Liev Schreiber as Victor Creed/Sabretooth, Danny Huston as Col. William Stryker, Taylor Kitsch as Gambit, Will. i. am as Wraith, Lynn Collins as Kayla Silverfox, Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Dominic Monaghan as Barnell, Asian Heartthrob Daniel Henney as Agent Zero, Tahyna Tozzias Emma Frost and Troye Sivan as Young Logan.

Directed by Gavin Hood, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is set to premiere on Summer of 2009.

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I.T. Movers and Makers of 2008

In the spirit of looking ahead to 2009 and with high hopes for a better information technology year, it is good to look back and review the innovations that made a mark this 2008, news and development that hugged the I.T. limelight.

What are the products, solutions, services that made a big impact on the I.T.industry and will play a big role to the innovations of the coming years?

1. Netbooks

The year 2008 is the year of the portable netbooks. Started by Asus, the other players like HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, MSI, RedFox, Neo, and others joined the foray and releases their respective netbook offerings. The availability of Intel Atom made it even a bigger success.

2. Touchscreen Phones and Mobile OS

Started with the iPhone, almost all mobile handset manufacturers came out with their own version of Touchscreen phones. Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG and others releases their touchscreen phones combined with high resolution cameras, stero quality sound and a lot of functionalities. The battle for the mobile operating system heats up with the unveiling of Android powered phone G1. Nokia bought Symbian and Microsoft launches Windows Mobile 6.1 (and soon Mobile 6.5).

3. Social Networking Explosion

The popularity of Facebook, MySpace, Multiply, Digg, Friendster, Twitter and others has become mainstream that enterprises now applies the very core of social networking technology to help market their businesses.

4. Microsoft Yahoo - Takeover Deal

To be able to compete with Google, Microsoft made a bid to buy Yahoo, offering as high as .6 billion only to be rejected by Jerry Yang. Google also tried to block the deal saying the proposed deal could pose threats to "innovation and openness" on the Internet. Yang stepped down as Yahoo’s CEO and Microsoft is now hinting they may still acquire Yahoo but for billion only.

5. Processing the Processors

The introduction of Intel Core i7 changed the landscape of computing. Core i7 brings speed, improve performance and power efficiency. But to me, Intel Atom is the most successful processor for 2008.

6. Birth of new offerings and terminologies

Year 2008 ushered in new services like Virtualization, Deduplication, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and others. Vendors are announcing products and services addressing the new technologies. Users on the other hand are at a lost on which solutions to adopt.

7. Mega-Megapixels

The digital cameras that came out this 2008 are simply awesome. Higher megapixels, more features, easier to use are just some of its prominent characteristics. I am particularly awed by Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II that comes with 21MP and full HD video recording. Mobile phones aequipped with cameras has also raised the bars of their camera resolution to 8 megapixels.

8. All-in-One, One-for-All Printers

A number of all-in-one printers debuted this year, mostly coming from Canon, Epson and HP. Not only are they more powerful, faster, more economical and more enery efficient, the all-in-one printers has become very affordable this 2008.

9. Open Arms with Open-Source

When social network sites offered their codes to developers, Open Handset Alliance boasting 47 members and Microsoft supporting open source activities simply means open source products and projects are no longer alternatives but also has become mainstream. The launching Google Chrome, Android and other open source offerings simply proves that open source is now welcome and adopted by the business community with open arms.

10. High Definition LCD TVs

Not only are their resolution getting higher and clearer, LCD makers like Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Philips, Sony, Pioneer, Sanyo, and others are coming out with bigger and more energy efficient LCD offerings. (Jerry Liao)

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The 10 Best Books of 2008

The New York Times have selected the 10 best books, 5 fiction and 5 non-fiction, from the list of 100 notable books of 2008.

FICTION

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER

Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.

In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is another, waiting to be born.”

A MERCY
By Toni Morrison.
Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95.

The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears.

NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill.
Pantheon Books, $23.95.

O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief “in its salvific worth” — is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations.

2666
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.

Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.

There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord. (Excerpt)

NONFICTION

THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
By Jane Mayer.
Doubleday, $27.50.

Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush’s anti terrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced” interrogation methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation’s history.

THE FOREVER WAR
By Dexter Filkins.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.

The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war on terror.”

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95.

This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences — and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion.

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.

In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the “harvest of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created “a newly centralized nation-state,” Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.”

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French.
Alfred A. Knopf, $30.

The most surprising word in this biography is “authorized.” Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer, has a novelist’s command of story and character, and he patiently connects his subject’s brilliant oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life.

Source: NYTimes.com

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Astro Boy (2009) - Movie Preview

Astro Boy is a movie adaptation of the popular Japanese anime in the 80’s featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage (National Treasure),Donald Sutherland, Nathan Lane, Bill Nighy and Freddie Highmore(The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Golden Compass). Watch the goosebumps-inducing teaser after the jump.

Synopsis: Set in Metro City, a grieving scientist constructs a young robot with incredible powers in the image of the son he has lost. Unable to fulfill the grieving scientist’s expectations, “Astro Boy” leaves, embarking on a journey of acceptance and betrayal that eventually leads him back to to the home he left in order to save Metro City and the father who had rejected him.

Released by Sony Pictures, Astro Boy is set to premiere on October 23, 2009.

Video Link: Astro Boy (2009) HQ Teaser Trailer

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Dragonball Trailer Released

The official trailer of the live action movie adaptation of the anime “Dragonball” has been released.

Gist: Goku and a handful of friends battle for the Earth against the deadly forces of the Saiyans, who are sweeping across the universe, leaving a path of destruction. Goku and his friends’ best chance for survival rests with the Namekian DragonBalls, which provide them the power to summon a mighty dragon.

Dragonball the Movie stars Eriko Tamura (Mai), Jamie Chung (Chi-Chi) and Justin Chatwin (Goku).

Video Link: Dragonball - Movie Trailer

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