Welcome to the year-ender non-special installment of the Groovee Playlist™ series (see the previous list). To remind you, the Groovee Playlist is my way of highlighting the recently (relatively) released songs that I dig. As in previous playlists, I’ll link to the Wikipedia article about the song (if it exists) as “[W]”, and to the YouTube search (or official music video) for the song as “[U]” so that you can sample the song and see if you like it as well.

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My Christmas is starting to be pretty happy for me (notwithstanding all of the troubles and worries like the worldwide economic downturn), and I hope that you all feel the same as well. May God bless you, your family, and your friends. (And general well-wishing for those who believe in a different or no god at all.)

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It’s been a pretty interesting year for amateur map making using crowdsourcing techniques. OpenStreetMap has been going strong while Google has released Map Maker just last June while Wikimapia followed up with their Beta website. I came across these two interesting and remarkably similar maps showing the extent of efforts in OpenStreetMap in the past year and Google Map Maker since its launch.

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I plurked a few days ago that one thing you should definitely do before you die is to watch 100. I managed to catch it last Sunday at Robinsons Galleria and I must say that the journey to Ortigas and the 151-peso ticket is worth it. 100 is the best film I have seen this year, easily bumping The Dark Knight from the top spot. It’s movies like these that give me hope for the local movie industry. Kudos to Chris Martinez, the writer and director of the film, which marks his debut.

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As if Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap were not enough, Wikimapia had publicly opened their Beta website, which is yet another crowdsourced road mapping project, early last month. It seems that they had a private beta going months before and they have not opened it to the public until November. (I learned of the announcement from Google Maps Mania.)

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Thanks again to Andrew, I got to attend another Google event for developers (the last one was the TechTalk last year) and this is the first ever Google DevFest Manila, which was held last November 7 at the CSWCD Auditorium in U.P. Diliman. Unlike last year’s event which was mostly a short meet-and-greet and roadshow affair with two Filipino American Google engineers from Mountain View, last month’s DevFest was a really long conference where plenty of Google engineers came not only to talk about various APIs of Google, but also to give demonstrations as well. Developer attendees were encouraged to bring along their laptops as well and to try out the demos for themselves via the intermittent free Wi-Fi from both Globe and Smart. (I actually came armed with two ASUS notebooks: my old A6500R laptop and my Eee 701 netbook.)

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