Anyway, most people, in an attempt to find Christmas gifts for geeks, end up looking in electronics stores and then try to find some sort of gadget or gizmo that the aforementioned geek doesn't happen to have just yet. This plan often doesn't work out all that well, as most of the time, the geeks will put the gadget or gizmo in question aside, until one day they get bored with it and decide to take the thing apart. Being left disassembled for prolonged periods of time, parts begin to get lost, and eventually, it becomes rather impossible to put back together, although this doesn't often stop the geek from attempting to do so. Thus your typical geek is left with a significant quantity of half-disassembled gadgets and gizmos strewn about... kinda' explains how the den looks most of the time, and how it would loko right now if it weren't for the fact that someone decided that this place was going to get cleaned up real good. It seems that since this was done, temporal disturbances are down about 65% and gravitational pull is also declining. And the really scary thing about all this is that the cases are now on 2 of the 4 systems we have currently up and running (Lazarus has been brought back up with a new HD and CD-ROM.)
Anyway, back to the eternal challenge of doing Christmas shopping for a geek. Despite the inherent challenge of the geek mindset that always puts function over form, there are still ways that one can appeal to the interests of the geek, such as with Star Trek merchandise. Star Wars merchandise can also find useful purpose in this regard. Then there's also Dilbert, who us quickly becoming the image of the archetypical geek. Dilbert has begun appearing on T-shirts of all sorts, any kind of office paraphenelia you could imagine, and even in computer software, in several places. In fact, when dealing with geeks, they'll gratefully accept just about anything as long as it has some sort of sci-fi related logo (star Trek, Star Wars, The X Files, and even (gulp) Babylon 5.)
Of course, there is always the option of bying tools for the geek. Geeks have a tendency to have all sorts of useless tools just lying around. A few more of them would fit right in, even if they never serve any sort of useful purpose. Our garage around here is the perfect example of this. We have all sorts of tools that we may use once in a blue moon, but most of the time they sit in one of the overflowing drawers of the myriad of toolchests we have sitting out in the garage, just taking up space. Maybe there's some reason that they exist in the first place, and maybe at some point in the future, we may figure out what that purpose is. But for now, they'll just sit in the corner of the garage and look useful.
There's always the usual gifts that most people would at least use once in a while, such as ties and other articles of clothing, but how often do you see geeks wearing ties? There is always the fabled soap on a rope, which may be useful as a subtle hint to some geeks that they may need to take hygiene into consideration more often than once a month. All in all, the choices of gifts tend to be somewhat limited with geeks, but there are ways that you may be able to get them to acknowledge your existence.
Anyway, since the column seems a bit short at this point, I might as well throw in a little update on the den. Like I said, Lazarus has been brought back up, but without a monitor, which we're trying to work on. Another 3.5GB has been added to the network, and the whole place has been cleaned up by my brother who has decided that he is going to mount a crusade to make sure that the computers have cases on at all times. All in all, chaos has ensued once again. We're just waiting for the bookshelf to collapse and make a mess in here again. Reality may be creeping in here, but that's never stopped anything in here...