You’ve already reviewed my gift guide, but I wanted to give y’all a little more guidance before you continued to do any more holiday shopping. If you’re a geek, you’ll completely understand where I’m coming from - and if you’re not a geek, then there are a few things you should know about gifts for technophiles.

1. If a brand is listed and/or mentioned - name means everything. There’s a big difference between “any DVD burner” and “any Sony DVD burner.” Chances are, the geeks have done their homework - and they typically know what’s good and what’s not.
2. Removable media was not created equal. Find out ahead of time what kind of removable media your geek wants, needs, and loves - because a Memory Stick port simply was not designed to accomodate an SD card.
3. Anything less than a gig isn’t all that great these days. Sure, the corner store may be selling 32 megabyte CompactFlash cards, but that’s not going to do your geek much good. If you can’t score a geek.
4. Unless otherwise noted, accounts and gift certificates are teh suck. Here’s the prime problem with gift certificates: the only one who gets the gift is the store from which you purchased the certificate. Trust me, even if your geek hasn’t told you what s/he wants or needs, you simply need to dig deeper and listen longer.
5. Form a gift guild. If many items on a geek’s wish list are too pricey for your pocketbook, instead of settling on a stack of CDs you can talk to other friends and family members and consider combining funds to get a single gift. One “awesome” thing is 100x better than three “okay” things.

Every geek is different. To tell you the truth, the aforelisted points could likely be applied to anybody for just about any gift-giving occasion. It’s much better to give than it is to receive - I truly believe that. Still, that doesn’t make the gift buying process any less easy or important.

[tags]gift guide, gift, gifts, gift giving, giving gifts, geek gift, gifting[/tags]