Here is a beautiful poem about gift giving. It’s from a lovely site called Beyond The Crossroads

I loved it as soon as I read it.

I won’t put it all here, go to the site and read the poem for yourself.

I will however put the first paragraph here so you can get a taste, read the rest on the website.

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Now here’s a free – and unusual gift for a man with a difference. The Rasterbator.

Now I can see you going Hmmm…………….should I keep reading? Yes keep reading, it’s nothing like you’re imagining.

The Rasterbator is an online imaging service, where you take an image and convert it to a black and white, color or monochrome colored dot image. Have a look at their website and they have a whole gallery of photos of Rasterbated images there for you to get an idea of exactly what you can produce.
Download it in a pdf file and print it in individual A4 sheets.

Then put it on a wall and it makes a wonderful and arty wall hanging, or painting, or ??? I don’t quite know what you’d call it. But it looks great.

You can use any image you like. Why not a photo of you so he can have a stylised picture of you on his wall? Or even a photo of him?

Or perhaps his dog? Any photo of something that is important to him really.
It’s completely free to use and it’s pretty self explanatory, I worked out how to use it in a few minutes, just follow the prompts. It takes a while to “rasterbate” the image, so maybe you need to make a cup of coffee while you’re waiting, otherwise it’s pretty simple.

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This just took my fancy. A clock made from a recycled cd. A nice gift for a geek, or any man who likes things that are a little different.

It takes 3 cds to create the strange cracked effect. It’s handmade, and useful of course, it’s a clock.
Hang it on the wall, or freestanding on the desk. For $15.95 I think it’s extremely good value. That’s a good price for anything that is hand made these days.

Not much more to say about this, I just found it and thought it was a fine mans gift for $16.

There’s something to be said for hand made gifts too, maybe I’m just old fashioned but I like gift ideas for gifts that aren’t just mass produced in a Chinese factory. And there aren’t so many of those around now.

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