It's been a long time since my last post (went offline for quite a while). Here's a promotional video of a very good online golf game that's completely free to play. It's called Albatross18 and I encourage everyone to check it out.
This year I sent some Christmas cards abroad and decided to write the wishes in the reader's language. For now I had to limit myself to simple 'Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year', maybe next time I will be able write something more. It's always good to use opportunities like this to learn something new. Here are the translations I used:
Dutch - Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig Nieuwjaar
Polish - Wesołych Świąt i Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku
Portuguese - Feliz Natal e Próspero Ano Novo
And here you can find many more (some of them with audio clips if you want to learn how to pronounce them), as well as translation of other phrases, like 'Happy Birthday' and ' This gentleman/lady will pay for everything' (wonder how often that comes in handy).
Finding good Christmas songs on the net isn't going easy. While browsing the net in that purpose, I found out there was a remix contest that just finished few days ago. All the separated audio tracks for the song 'The First Noel / Mary Mary' by Sarah McLachlan where free to download and remix. Those who created the best remixes are able to have their product released, win a video iPod, or get some vinyl records. This is a really nice idea. You can check the uploaded remixes here, though there's so many of them, it's difficult to choose one. They're still checking all of the submissions to pick the winners. I'm sure it's not an easy job. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes right now, but still, the idea was really nice. I checked a few of the submissions, if you don't feel like browsing through them all, here's a quick link to one that's not so bad:
Okay, that's not exactly possible yet, though I'm sure guys at Google are working on it. What You can do is take a look at those amazing high resolution images of such places as Owens Valley, Norway Fjords, Zion National Park, and even a part of Boston (try to spot some ghosts crossing the street in daytime). The site xRez takes advantage of the Google Maps API and allows us to zoom in really close on many photos there. Really worth checking out.
I'm looking around the web for some free Christmas music, but it's not easy, as I'm very picky. This one is nice, though I don't know if it's under the Creative Commons license, so you'll have to follow the link to music.download.com. For my taste that site is way too overbloated, and definitely not Linux browser friendly, but the tune is very good, so give it a try:
A set of great photos to get you in the Christmas mood. Click any of them to see the full version on flickr and leave a comment for that photo's author. You can also download there higher resolution version for a nice Christmas wallpaper.
Christmas is coming, and it's time to start sending those cards to all of your loved ones. You can go the easy way and buy some cards with generic wishes already there. It's definitely better to write some more personal wishes by yourself. I always had trouble with that, so I prefer to look through the web for some short meaningful poems. Here are the ones I think are really good. Second one is very romantic, ideal to send to the other half of yours, for Christmas or any other day.
