Recommending
This is an in-development list of my favourite stuff; it’s also intended as a list of stuff that I recommend to anyone, but the primary purpose is for me to have it all in one place… 
myspace.com - Doris music presentation - wonderful music, created by my wife
Books
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - easily one of The Best Books I ever read (my PDF edition of Master and Margarita)
* Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (complete Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in PDF, and the LaTeX Template I used)
* The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky - often omitted book next to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, yet in my opinion best FD’s work
* Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche - even 108 years after his death, often misquoted and misunderstood author; these 2 books present to me best Nietzsche’s philosophical point, much better than often cited Thus Spoke Zarathustra; another, lighter to read, book I’d recommend is The Gay (Merry) Science
* The Trial and The Castle by Franz Kafka
* The Golem by Gustav Meyrink - “film-noiré among books”
* The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks - two (and the only two by OS I read so far) simply amazing books on psychology/neurology, in the form of short stories; you can easily read them simply as very amusing stories, but if you’re in mood, they make you think a lot about perception and brain functions
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - incredibly funny series of 5 books; if you love british humour, you’re gonna adore these. 
First 3 books of the series are posted elsewhere on my blog in PDF format.
Movies
* Love and Death (1975) by Woody Allen - wanna laugh? incredibly hilarious movie!
* Le Doulos (The Finger Man) (1962) by Jean-Pierre Melville - often forgotten, film-noiré at its best, with unpredictible - yet believable! - plot
* Shichinin no samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa - AK is simply a master of cinema
* Kumonosu jo (Throne of Blood) (1957) by Akira Kurosawa - AK’s version of Macbeth, better than any other I saw, or can imagine
* Yojimbo - The Bodyguard (1961) by Akira Kurosawa
* Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa - amazing, IMO one of Toshiro Mifune’s best performances
* Ran (1985) by Akira Kurosawa - can’t be left out
* Nora inu (Stray Dog) (1949) by Akira Kurosawa - japanese film-noiré
Programs
* Adobe Photoshop - simply the best photo manipulation and retouching program publicly available; my fave version is 7, but it’s up to your taste
* Corel Painter - natural media painting program, IMO the best one out there; you can paint from the scretch, or “clone” real photo
* Total Commander - the BEST file manager available
* knoppix - live distribution of Linux
Programming Tools and Libraries
* Microsoft Visual Studio - MS sure knows how to screw up stuff, but VS is for sure the best IDE I so far tried (and I tried more than 30 different IDE’s during my carrier); just like with PS, I’m “old-fashioned” - my fave version is VS6, but 2003.NET and 2005 editions are also very good; didn’t get yet to trying out the 2008 edition
* Whole Tomato Software’s Visual Assist X - there is not enough superlatives in the world to describe this program; you just have to try, and become a “VAX junkie”… My praise of VAX.
* TortoiseSVN - GUI to revision control / version control / source control software SVN (Subversion) for Windows; integrates directly into Windows Explorer, and all you need is then available via right-click of mouse; simply wonderful
* bzip2 by Julian Seward - just great
* Crimson Editor - among best free programming editors out there
