Finding Unique Birthday Gifts
By Mike Hamilton, Fri Dec 9th

Finding Unique Gifts

Finding a unique gift can be one of the mostchallenging, frustrating and rewarding things you will ever do.When your loved one’s eyes light up with that expression thattells you “I never even knew I wanted this but now I wouldn’ttrade it for all the money in the world.”

If you haven’t had that experience then it is hard to put intowords how wonderful it makes you feel. If you approach it as achore or something you need to do then you will never find theperfect and unique gift.

One mistake that a lot of people make is trying to find a uniquegift and then deciding if it is something the person will like.This sometimes ends up being akin to trying to fit a round pegin a square hole.

Think about what you are celebrating then find something thathonors that celebration. If you are celebrating the friendshipyou share with that person then shop with that in mind. Thinkabout the things you have shared with each other.

If you have been on fishing trips together then contemplatethose trips and what made them enjoyable. If it is simply thequite times sharing ideas and thoughts over coffee then letthose memories come flooding back.

The best gifts are the most personal. What makes the gift uniqueis the uniqueness of the person you are shopping for and not thegift itself.

If this method of choosing a gift seems

like it takes moreeffort then it seems it is worth then maybe the problem is thatyou need to examine why you are concerned that you find aperfect and unique present.

If the motive is that you really want them to open it and justshare the joy they are going to feel then it should be a prettyeasy exercise. If the motive is what you can get out of itbesides joy then it is a chore that is could very well be amongthe toughest you have ever tackled.

Ralph Parlette, the author of “The University of Hard Knocks”,is quoted as saying, “Real birthdays are not annual affairs.Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.”

The wise words of Parlette say what I am saying much moreeloquently than I can. If you choose to celebrate the birth ofyour relationship in addition to the annual affair you will findthat you have taken the first and most important step in findinga the perfect and unique gift.

Make the day, a day that you share in and are a part of and youwill find that the search will be much easier. Become aparticipant, not a spectator and your search is just about overand a fruitful search it will be.

At our website we offer a mini-website for honoring birthdayswhere you can post pictures, poems, or memories. After allmemories are what they are celebrating, shouldn’t that be yourcelebration as well.

About the author:Mike Hamilton is a co-owner of www.itsurbirthday.comand has been writing about birthdays for over 20 years.

By: kuttu
i want a feed to connect forum and blog
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog » Blog Archive » Discussion Forum RSS Feed downtime
[...] I just realized that the The Unofficial DreamHost Discussion Forum RSS Feed (what a name!) haven’t been updated since I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.4 three days ago (forgot to change my .htaccess). [...]
By: Ian Sealy
Sorry about the delay in replying. A very busy couple of weeks. I doubt that having a large feed is a problem, but I think that having two separate feeds would be best. That way people can just choose which one they prefer. Thanks for looking at this.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - Just realised that I misread your comment. Somehow I thought that you wanted a feed for each forum (category/board). Sorry! Ian, Josh - I've now experimented with a feed that includes all the posts' content. It works pretty well, and it's really nice to be able to read the entire post in a feedreader. The only problem is that the rss-file is around 150 kb. Is this too much? Would it be better to limit the feed to only last 24 hours (currently it contains last 48 hours), or to only include excerpts. Another option would be to keep the existing rss feed with headlines only and then have another full post feed as an alternative. I would really like to hear your opinion on this... Thanks.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Josh - I agree that it would be more useful, but it would also require that I requested and parsed every single post in the feed every time I regenerate the RSS file (every 5 minutes) or saved a copy of every post in a database. I might give it a try, but I won't promise anything...
By: Josh Santangelo
Seems to work fine, but it would be far more useful if the actual post content were included.
By: Unofficial DreamHost Blog
Ian - I guess that would be possible. Let's wait a couple of days to see if there's any problems with the main feed. <del>If more people would like category specific feeds please say ai!</del>
By: Ian Sealy
Would it be possible to put each forum post's content in the feed?