The Better Giving

A year ago it took me around 6 months before I felt it was the perfect gift to give it to my cousins. But the trouble was that by the time they received it they got confused whether it was for last year’s occasion or coming year’s! It’s an art to find a gift that’s unique, hard to find, memorable and the one matching with person’s personality and need. Here are some of those tips and places that I came across over time to help you out this holiday season. 1. The premier destination to get the unique gift idea is surprise.com. A must visit if you are still in the complete darkness. 2. Check out my collection of gift links. You will find things ranging from Kamasutra weekender kit to Astronomy’s cool gift ideas. 3. To find out what’s latest and coolest, check out Scientific American’s Top SciTech Gifts of 2002. This one is a real good contemporary compilation. 4. If you still didn’t found you were looking for, view my collection of shopping links. Specially check for Diversity Stores section. 5. Instead of giving gifts to someone who already has too much, you might want to ask them if it’s ok to give some donations to non-profit organizations instead of giving them yet another gift that would be anyway useless to them. Click here for some charity organizations in my links collection. 6. Finally here are my personal favorites and non-favorites for this year: Quicktionary, Book light (both are perfect if a person is an avid reader), external hard drive (perfect for heavy laptop users because they always run out of space), handheld GPS (for outdoor person), Lego Mindstorm robot kit (absolute perfect gift for kids), DVD/MP3 players, HP49 calc (perfect for mathematicians), model air plane kit (prefer unassembled ones). And now the things that sucks as gifts: fragrances, cloths, pocket PCs and palms, organizers, CD players, pocket MP3 players, RC cars, PS2. These gifts totally suck. Finally it’s not necessary to go overboard. Infect being a follower of ‘Grinch philosophy’ I’m supposed to hate all give and take of gifts. May be it’s just enough to send a web card with few clicks to let someone know that you still remember.

Principal Research Engineer

A program trying to understand what it’s computing.