Our next stop was Lake Engure nature park. It is unique European wetland and one of the most important nature protection sites in Latvia. It’s a home of birds of different species. As well there are deployed wild cows and horses to maintain biotope (or, simply speaking – to eat all the grass at coast to keep the lake from overgrow).

Well, because of continuous rain we got drenched and decided to return to Riga and go to Kolka another time. And it was late afternoon already, too. Still despite the rain our trip was very nice. And I know that I will return here soon – in some sunny autumn day.

For photos see the gallery Port of Engure and Lake Engure nature park.

iPower.com

Ipower.com is company where I buy international domains (.com, .net, .org, .info)  - they have pretty nice prices. And now they have 50% discount on their best (in my mind) hosting plan iPower Pro if you buy hosting for a year or two. Its a good bargain if you have several web sites to host. With discount it comes USD 3.98 per month. And here’s what you get:

Web based account administration. Bonus: one free domain, USD 30 worth Google AdWords and USD 50 worth Yahoo! search marketing credit. More about this hosting plan read here.

My previous experience with this company is good  though I’ve used only domain services not hosting.

Unlimitedhostweb.com

Other cheap web hosting service which i’m still using for one project is unlimitedhostweb.com. It costs 4,50 USD per month. If you pay for 3 years at once then it comes 3,95 USD per month. No bandwidth, storage or domain limitations. Each domain has its own FTP account. You can choose between UNIX and Windows hosting.

Pro:

• price;

• no bandwidth limitation;

• no disk space limitation;

• unlimited domains;

• each project (domain) has it’s own FTP account.

Contra:

• SQL for additional cost (15 USD per year);

• subdomains are for extra cost.;

• no domain parking (possibility to point several domains to one place);

• Ir PHP4, not Php5;

• only 3 e-mail addresses;

• problems are solved slowly.

Conclusion

If to compare i would choose ipower.com though it has disk space and bandwidth limitations. First of all ipower.com has web based account administration (both hosting and domain). All necessary changes you can make by yourself – there’s no need to wait for someone to do them as in the case with unlimitedhostweb.com.  And allowed disk space and bandwidth are big enough. Of course, except you’re going to host big collection of images, audio and video files.

P.S.

If you know some cheap yet reliable hosting service – drop a note in comments.

At my work I use Microsoft Outlook for my e-mails and works organization. Though I have Outlook, installed on one of my home computer I don’t use it. Reason – I better prefer online tools.

Few days ago I decided to try Google Calendar. And found it to be very handy time organizer and useful for my free-time organization. Google Calendar works stable and sends reminders to e-mail and even to my mobile. Last option I found very useful because I can get reminders when I need them most of all – when I’m out of office.

And what’s also good - Google Calendar can be synchronized with Outlook, as well as other desktop calendars like Thunderbird or iCal. To synchronize Google Calendar with Outlook you have to install Google Calendar Sync on your computer. Installation is fast and easy and took me less than minute. After installation enter your Google login and password and basic sync settings. Synchronization is supported for Outlook 2003 and 2007 running on Windows Vista or XP. On how to synchronize Google Calendar with other calendars read at Lifehacker.

I should add that only primary calendars of Google Calendar and Outlook can be synchronized. So if you need some item to be on both calendars (Google and Outlook) you have to copy that item to one of the primary calendars.

Questia is worlds largest online library. They offer more than 5,000 e-boks for online reading for free. Besides that every 2 months Questia offers 15 free books each on different topic – from literature to art, to law, to science and more. E-books are for reading online – to print them you need to subscribe.