And if you’re looking for what is sure to become his classic Geekfoolery work, it will be right here.

Mr. Alex’s article archive at Gizmos for Geeks.

1. Hackers: It seems as if every awkward guy from about age 12 to maybe as old as 25 who has ever had an AOL account or played a Playstation is a grungy, arrogant, mom’s-basement-dwelling geek hacker who is never more than a few clackity keystrokes away from announcing, “I’m in” before clicking on a garish button that says “Launch Network Virus” and wreaking havoc.
   In Live Free or Die Hard, the Bruce Willis franchise is updated from the sophisticated bank-robbery plots of the first couple sequels to an even more complex hacker plot to cripple the nation with coordinated infrastructure cyberattacks. The bad guys are evil geeks that can take out traffic lights, cellphone networks, and the power grid from their laptops. The good guys include Justin Long, the “Mac” guy from Apple’s Mac and PC ads. Justin tags along as a good-guy hacker in over his head, complimenting the more primitive action-hero stylings of Bruce Willis. While I don’t demand strict realism in a Die Hard franchise, we at least have to be kept from leaping through the more obvious plot holes until after the movie. The story starts plausibly enough by suggesting that the mastermind spent a great deal of time and money planning his cyberattack. But it’s still too easy for the writers to turn their hackers into invincible omnipotent god’s eye masters of the universe. They can still hack anything from anywhere, most notably in the absurd climactic chase scene, where the evil hacker geniuses, while driving at breakneck speed are able to call up a high-tech F-22 jet from the Air Force to take out their pursuer. My willing suspension of disbelief dropped at that point of the movie like a cell phone call between towers.
   An even bigger offender was Transformers, though admittedly a movie that was a remake from a cartoon that was itself a spinoff from a kid’s toy should be held to a less-stringent credibility standard. But still, the movie’s teenage, long-haired, coke-bottle eyeglass-wearing hackers came from the same shrink-wrapped boxes on the Toy “R” Us shelf that the robots did, with the possible exception of the hot blonde with the British accent, though it should be noted that she didn’t actually do any actual hacking in the film.
2. Hacking. This annoys me enough to warrant a separate category from the hackers themselves. Actual hacking is probably about as exciting to watch as a tax audit. Hackers run scripts from command lines, probing ports on a target system, hoping to find an exploitable hole, a lapse in security, or a virtual door that should have been locked.
   Back in 1983, Wargames started off with a promising level of realism by having Matthew Broderick running a wardialer (a hacker term that actually came from the movie) that dialed phone numbers in sequence until a modem picked up the other end. Sometimes if the filmmakers just throw us a bone of realism, we’ll stick around for the ride. Despite the snotty-kid-as-hacker motif, Wargames didn’t stray too far off the mark, or at least if it did, we really couldn’t tell back in the early 80’s.
   Fast forward 20 years and a more sophisticated audience gets a more sophisticated Harrison Ford as a network security expert at a bank. Ford got the unlucky task of having to hack his own security system in Firewall or bad guys would kill his family. The bad guys in this movie were supremely stupid to take this risk–their entire caper depended solely on Harrison Ford getting into his own bank and stealing the money. Apart from basing your gig on someone openly hostile to your cause, these guys never seemed to ask the question, “what if he can’t do it?” People who build network security systems aren’t necessarily the best people to crack into network security. In fact, the best part of the movie came when the bad guys showed up in the server room and Harrison Ford got to tell them ha, ha, you’re too late, we just moved everything offsite! By the time the bad guys regrouped and forced Ford to think of a new hack, they’d already lost me.
   But the absolute worst offender in the category of “this is not the way hacking works” is the forgettable John Travolta flick, Swordfish. In it there is an absurd scene where Travolta throws a stress test at his hacker by holding a gun to his head and having his girlfriend find other ways to distract him, then throwing a laptop at him and demanding that he crack some difficult coding scheme–in 60 seconds, even though both men had just agreed that it would normally take a couple hours. I would compare this to grabbing a plumber off the street, and asking him to install a sink at gunpoint, without his tools–in 60 seconds.
3. Computers: While you and I can bicker endlessly about MacOS X vs. Windows XP/Vista vs. Linux, movie computers, particularly computers used by big secret government spy agencies, all have displays with stylish graphics and GUIs that animate every action on the computer. Encrypting a file? Watch all the letters swirl across the screen into the random encoded sequence. Sending an email? Watch the envelope spin around before disappearing down an animated mail chute. Copying a file to disk? Watch as 3-D graphic of the file swirls across the screen. The mind-numbing reality is that government computers are running the same crappy OS you and I use, or used a decade ago, or in some cases, some custom app that was written by contractors who didn’t have an extra 3 weeks to code up a slick GUI.
   But the main problem with computers in the movies is that they are constantly doing things that computers just can’t do. Way back in 1986, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, there’s a cute scene where Scotty asks to use a 20th-century computer, and upon being shown a Mac SE30, he confuses the mouse for a microphone. Ha ha, you see, we talk to our computers in the future, but for a man who has probably never used a keyboard in his life, Mr. Scott manages to whip up an equation for “transparent aluminum”–a 23rd century wonder material–with what, MacWrite?
   Macs must have good agents in the movies, because just a few years later, geek actor Jeff Goldblum manages to use his Mac laptop to upload a virus to a computer system on an alien spaceship in Independence Day. I know Mac fanboys are constantly going on about how their machines don’t get viruses, but this is little ridiculous.
4. Tough Guys: Suppose you wanted to hire a tough guy–a bodyguard, maybe or an elite soldier. You might think a guy like Rambo or Schwarzenegger would be the best pick. We used to think so, in the 80’s. Or you might realize that you don’t want musclebound, you need smart and tough, lean and mean–maybe like Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, or Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. Nope. Both wrong. For sheer lethal strength and speed–we’re talking about a killing machine who can take out four or five trained killers in the blink of an eye–what you are clearly going to have to find is not muscular tough guy, but instead, a 105-pound waifish fashion model with perfect skin, teeth, hair and makeup. Think Aeon Flux, Ultraviolet, as well as Live Free or Die Hard, where Bruce Willis’s bare-knuckle brawling is no match for a woman half his fighting weight. The lovely and stylish Maggie Q ultimately had to be run down with an SUV, pushed down an elevator shaft, where the truck then fell on top of her. Anything less would have just pissed her off, I’m sure.
5. Remakes of TV Shows: We ask a lot of Hollywood. We want new ideas, new stories, week after week, summer after summer. So can we blame filmmakers if they dip into back issues of TV Guide every now and then to bring back an old favorite? Well, yes. Not a lot of TV was worth watching the first time around, and only occasionally has a franchise successfully made the jump from the small screen to the big screen. Star Trek was one of the first. Mission Impossible has done OK. But another go-round with The Beverly Hillbillies? McHale’s Navy? As much as we enjoyed these shows at the time, we have to remember how incredibly stupid we were back then. What was Robert DeNiro thinking when he agreed to do Bullwinkle? Did Bugs Bunny Space Jam improve upon the body of work laid down by Chuck Jones and Mel Blanc? Is there anyone who liked Jim Carey’s Grinch better than Boris Karloff? It seems we can look forward to another round of Get Smart in the near future, a new and improved (and perhaps more expensive?) Six Million Dollar Man, and the Knight Rider is supposed to ride again as well, albeit on TV. Isn’t Hollywood worried that someday they will run out of old TV shows to rip off? Shouldn’t they be rationing this out? Future movie producers will find themselves trying to make movies out of TV shows while they’re still being piloted. There will be clear sign that we can all look for that will tell us when the supply of recyclable TV shows has reached critically low levels. When some producer manages to convince a studio that we need another movie about World War II, set in a Nazi POW camp, and that the movie should be comedy–a remake of Hogan’s Heroes–then we will know that Hollywood is completely out of ideas.

It’s easy to get totally sucked in, and come away thinking that a computer shaped like a cube is going to be The Next Big Thing, or, if you’re trying to overcompensate, to come out and say that Apple thinking they can play with big boys in the cell phone market is lunacy of the highest order.
The big deal this time was the MacBook Air. Jobs pulled it out of a manila envelope, and everyone, including me, oohed and ahhed with envy. It is a glorious, sexy, machine. Reviewers have gushed over it, while others have pointed its lack of optical drive, ports, user replaceable battery, and high price tag. I think both sides make valid points, and the official Geekfoolery prediction is that Apple is going to sell every one they make, and people who buy them will make every effort to be seen using them in coffee shops. Expect more than a few people to carry them around in manila envelopes just so they can feel like Steve.

But as cool as the MacBook Air is, it’s really just another laptop. In one or two more laptop generations, you’ll be able to get nearly all the same features in the laptop of your choice, but apart from saving a little shoulder strain, there’s nothing in the Macbook Air that will fundamentally change what you do with your computer.

The revolution will come instead from the newly revised Apple TV. The new Apple TV lets you watch movies, listen to music and podcasts, and view pictures from Flickr.com on your living room TV instead of your computer. The biggest innovation over the previous version of the Apple TV is that you can use every feature of the new Apple TV without ever connecting it to your primary computer. With a wireless connection to the Internet, you can rent movies using Apple’s new iTunes Movie Rentals, you can buy TV shows, and download music. You’re not strictly limited to viewing and listening that you have to pay for, either. You also have free run of all the podcasts available in iTunes as well, the vast majority of which are free, and many of which are video and even in HD quality. You can also view all the photos online in Flickr.com.

All of this without a computer–just a $229 Apple TV.

The dominant revolution in home video right now is TiVo, of course, and Apple TV isn’t going to unseat TiVo just yet. But the reason TiVo needs to be careful is that the function of a TiVo is a device designed to intercept what is being broadcast on cable. It’s a fairly intelligent machine in the way it goes out and finds the bits of the broadcast stream that you’ve told it to get and then it stores them for playback later. TiVo users say they no longer know or care what channel their favorite show is on, or what time–it’s just there on their TiVo.

But what TiVo can’t do is go back and get something that wasn’t broadcast, or that you didn’t realize you wanted to watch until after it was on. What Apple TV does is prepare us for the day when broadcast is no longer the preferred way to deliver video content. This is already happening with music and audio–who listens to radio stations anymore? XM and Sirius are stopgaps, and even iPods are just audio TiVos that are bridging technology from where we are now to the time when you’ll able to listen to anything, anytime, anywhere, over the Internet.

So Apple TV is here at the start of the revolution. You probably don’t even notice it happening. But just like we joke now with kids about how when we were kids, there were only 4 channels, and if something came on and you missed it, you were out of luck until they ran the Grinch again next year. Our kids won’t even be able to explain what a channel even is.

Promising 200+ miles per gallon, I figured the engine would pay for itself in a couple of months in gas savings alone. And if it didn’t work, or was too much of a hassle, I only had to use it for eight weeks or so and I would come out ahead. And even though I’d be going on surface streets, I estimated via Google Maps that I’d be about even on commuting time.
The engine I chose was recommended from the pages of Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, a website of user-recommended tools “that just work.” The Golden Eagle Bike Engine came with mounting hardware, and excellent customer support. Anticipating that the using the engine on a daily basis would put extra strain on the bike, I took my bike in for a full tune up. The payoff period grew by about two weeks.

The engine arrived, and I installed and tested it. Things were looking good. There were no difficulties in mounting the engine, and it seemed work as advertised. Time to start getting my money’s worth by actually riding it to work.

Day 1. Things were great for about the first three quarters of the commute. The first 10 miles or so are on a wide, flat, downhill road, and I imagined this was going to be roaring success. I then got into the gnarlier parts of downtown LA, and had to refuel. With about 5 miles to go, the the engine seemed to get very anemic. Wheezy and losing power. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but the advantage of the bike engine was that when the engine doesn’t work, it’s still a bike. Not great, but I was able to pedal the rest of the way in.

I called the good folks at Golden Eagle, who diagnosed too much oil in the crankcase. I had followed the supplied instructions, but apparently the recommended amount of engine oil was too much and apt to clog the breather element. On my lunch break, I walked to the hardware store and got some tubing to drain some oil, and some WD 40 to clean the breather. The idea was that it was supposed to clear the engine’s throat, but it I couldn’t get it to work, and it was getting dark, so I ended up pedalling a long way, and getting met by Mrs. Geekfoolery and the sag wagon for the ride home.

After some weekend fiddling, the engine came back to life. I took it on a shakedown ride around the neighborhood, to make sure I was good to go.

Attempt number 2: Again, about three quarters of the way to work. Flat tire. Can’t blame the engine for that. But I was noticing that there really wasn’t a smooth route to cross downtown LA on a bike. The roads were pretty crappy. So even though I managed to get the tire fixed on my lunch break again (paying the guy to fix the wheel, adding about a week to my payoff period), and was able to successfully make it home, I noticed as I pulled the bike into the garage about 7 broken spokes. The flat tire and the bumpy rides had trashed my wheel.

There is really top-notch bike shop in Pasadena, so I took the wheel there to be rebuilt. I explained what I was trying to do… commute with a bike engine… and he told me that large guy like me, combined with the extra torque of a bike engine, was simply a bad combination. Golden Eagle disagreed, saying they had customers my size who do OK, but they did recommend tying or soldering the places where the spokes crossed. I wrapped them with copper wire and soldered them. Another week to the payoff period.

And another shakedown ride. This time I am not sure what happened. I had taken it out for a test ride on the new wheel that went great, but the next time I tried to use it for something useful (if I wasn’t going to commute, at least I could save gas on local errands) it just wouldn’t start. Odd. I downloaded the manual, I checked the compression, the spark plugs, the breather element. A single-piston engine isn’t that complicated, but I couldn’t figure it out, and when I called the mechanic at Golden Eagle, he was stumped as well. Warranty work would be free, but I still had to pay shipping… another week to the payoff period.

I got it back, and then the holidays came… a month and a half of weekends gone. So this Sunday, I re-mounted the repaired engine on the bike with the rebuilt wheel and gave it another shakedown ride. All seems OK, but it’s now winter and the sun goes down at 5pm, so I am either going to have to wait until daylight savings time to try the commute again or invest in a decent light system, which will add another 2, maybe 3 weeks to the payoff period.

I think I have enough data for a verdict here:

The bike engine as a commuting alternative can work, but there are some things to consider:

• Don’t be overambitious. Although these bikes go faster than you can pedal, about 25 or even 30 mph, unless you have some good straight riding with no lights and no cross traffic, you’re not going to average much more than 15 miles per hour. Also, if you’re a big guy like me–think XXL T-Shirts–you might just be asking too much of a 35hp engine.
• The engine is going to stress your bike and break parts. Adding an engine and the added torque, plus attempting to add a LOT of miles, you’re going to break spokes, loosen nuts, and go through tires. Be prepared to invest in the bike as well as the engine.
• Exertion. People may look at you think you’re not getting a workout, but you will. The engine I got doesn’t take over completely, especially when accelerating or when you hit a hill. You might still have to change clothes and clean up when you get to work.
• Range. The fuel tank on the engine gets you about 15 miles, more or less. You can carry extra gas in camping bottles, but then you’re bringing bottles of gasoline with you, which is an added complexity. Plus you can’t really refuel without spilling yourself, so you’re going to smell like gasoline. Refuelling at a gas station is tough, because you’re trying to squirt about a quart of gas into the tank. Unless you’re very careful, you’ll spill more than you get in the tank.

I am still going to try to get this thing to pay itself off, but it is going to take a while. Commuting on this thing is going to depend on my having a fairly light day at work, and no urgent need to be home at a particular time when I am done. Weather in CA shouldn’t be a huge issue, but daylight could be. If I am lucky, I’ll get 10 rides in this summer, then I’ll at least start to pay this thing off. Add to that some rides around the neighborhood, and I might start to get ahead of the game.

From a purely financial standpoint, if the intent is to save gas and commuting time, I might have been better off getting a second-hand motorcycle, or even a Vespa-like scooter. There would have been a larger up-front investment, plus ongoing expenses of insurance and registration, but it would have been more practical for the distance I need to cover, as well as more reliable.

On the other hand, even though I have been through a lot of trouble with the bike engine, and I am still in the hole financially, I have to admit that when it works and when the sun is shining, and the road is smooth, it’s pretty darn fun. And while gas is currently more or less stable at just over 3 bucks a gallon, I am willing to bet it’s going to go up sooner rather than later. If gas prices give us a shock, and I am still looking at 70 miles a day, the bike engine math may change. When it does, I am all set up and ready to go.

Or there may yet be another gizmo that meets the goal of saving gas and being fun to ride. We’re about due to start shopping for a new car, and while the popular choice might be something like a Prius, there is another choice that might just be the Geekfoolery pushbutton vehicle of the 21st century…

The Aptera is planned to roll off the production line in California this year, with an electric model and a hybrid that claims 300 mpg. A $500 deposit secures your place in line. I’ll update when Mrs. Geekfoolery and I decide to take the plunge.

Eye-Fi: The Eye-Fi card appears to be a standard-issue 2GB SD memory card, but the secret is the built-in WiFi transmitter. The Eye-Fi’s gadget magic trick is automatically downloading pictures you take with your digital camera to your computer, either as you take them, if you are in range, or when you return home. It works on PC and Mac, and the software you need to install on your machine comes pre-loaded on the card itself, which ships with it’s own USB SD card reader.

Additionally, you can set up your Eye-Fi to automatically upload pictures directly to online album sites like Flickr, Picasa, and most of the popular album sites.

There are two flaws in the Eye-Fi for Mrs. Geekfoolery, on whose camera the Eye-Fi is used. The problem was that we were always finding ourselves out somewhere with the memory card in the camera full, because sitting down and finding the cable or the SD card reader and offloading pics from the camera to be one of those tasks that one is always meaning to do, but never does. The Eye-Fi was supposed to be the cure-all for this… put it in the camera, never take it out again, and all you have to do have the computer and camera on at the same time to clear out the next batch.

And the Eye-Fi does this just fine–but only for pictures. Our digital camera, like most these days, also takes movie clips, and this is one of our favorite uses of the camera. To download the movie clips, you have to remove the Eye-Fi card and connect it to a USB port, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid.

The second issue is that while Eye-Fi can send pictures to online websites just fine, what it can’t seem to do is load pictures directly into iPhoto on our Mac. It downloads to a well-organized folder on the hard drive, and it is fairly simple to import them into iPhoto, but the reason for the Eye-Fi to exist is to remove ALL the intermediate steps in getting pictures off our camera.

Eye-Fi’s email support team indicates that these features are not currently supported, so it seems that it’s just a matter of software to fix them, but it’s not clear when Eye-Fi will update these issues, if at all.

The second photo gadget to arrive on Christmas was actually a camera. Specifically which camera it was is actually unimportant–it was chosen based on the following criteria: We wanted a recognizable name brand and the lowest price possible. We ended up with an Olympus from Frye’s for around $100. This gift was for the 12-year-old geekling in the house who has been bugging us for a camera of her own for some time, and she’s been enjoying it immensely. The point is not to review the pros and cons of this particular camera. It’s simply to acknowledge that we’ve gotten to the point were digital cameras are now commodity-priced. You don’t really need to agonize excessively over which camera to buy these days. If you go with a reasonably well-known brand and buy from a fairly reputable outlet, you’re going to pretty decent camera. If you are a total shutterbug with money to burn, there are plenty of much higher-quality cameras and specialized features to learn and compare, but for the vast majority of the snapshot taking public who just want a better camera than the one on their cellphone, it’s hard to go wrong.

The final camera that is coming into the Geekfoolery Manor this holiday season is a classic camera with a long pedigree. I’m old enough to have owned this camera once before, many years ago, as a hand-me-down from I forget who. If you’re old enough, you might have owned one as well, or certainly your parents did. It’s the Kodak Brownie.

We we were hiking in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, when I saw a man hiking the opposite direction carrying the unmistakable brown Bakelite camera I recalled from my youth. I turned and asked, “Is that–a Brownie?” Indeed it was, and he was off to take pictures of the beautiful scenery of the sandstone arches onto glorious medium-format film. I had heard some time ago that Kodak had discontinued making film for the Brownie, which comes on rolls that you thread onto a spool and wind up inside the camera. No cartridges or sealed 35mm cannisters. The owner of the Brownie Hawkeye we spotted told us that it was in fact true, but with a little ingenuity, the old Brownies could be made to use modern 120 film without too much trouble. We were advised to seek one out on ebay, and we bought a Hawkeye yesterday for five bucks (nine bucks shipping). We’re looking forward to fiddling with the film and running our first roll through it. No 4GB SD cards that will take 2000 pictures at high resolution, though–just 12 exposures, and we’ll have to take it to a real camera store to get it processed. In the meantime, here are a couple galleries of modern Brownie pics that we can use for inspiration.

No doubt radio programmers tasked with non-stop Christmas music (as one LA radio station does FOR AN ENTIRE MONTH) simply gather every Christmas song ever published and hit “shuffle.” Pop artists with one album or even a hit single under their belt can pretty much guarantee airplay by recording “Jingle Bells” or “Winter Wonderland,” secure in the knowledge that their afternoon’s work in the recording studio will get played for at least the next two decades until it drops off the bottom of the list. After all, who wouldn’t LOVE another version of “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Um. Me. I can’t stand Rudolph. Never liked the song… and HATED the well-loved Rankin/Bass animated classic. Call me a Grinch… er, that’s a different story… but I think there are serious problems with the Rudolph story.

First, there’s the question of the apparent theme of the story, something along the lines of “every one is different, and we should appreciate their differences.” OK, nice idea. Except this theme is sabotaged by the fact that Rudolph’s ostracism and exile didn’t end until fate and bad weather led to the realization that what Santa and other reindeer had once considered a gross deformity was in fact going to save their bacon when the chips were down. This is akin to the story of the geeky nerd, to whom the head of the cheerleading squad won’t even speak, until it turns out that he’s the only one who can hack into the school computer and change her grade from an F to an A. The message seems to be everyone can be appreciated, as long as your pull your weight, and if you’re really weird, you better have some tricks up your sleeve. If Rudolph had a blue mohawk instead of a red nose, he’d still be selling records at Newbury Comics, not leading Santa’s sleigh.

The second issue I have is the predicament itself. Santa’s grounded because of a snowstorm? He lives at the North Pole, and he circumnavigates the globe every year in the middle of winter, and he’s grounded by snow? If Santa was based in LA, where traffic comes to a halt at the first hint of rain (like it did today), I could understand, but how could he have not foreseen this and beefed up the sleigh, de-iced the reindeer or something. I think the old guy has more oomph than to have to call off Christmas on account of mere snow.

The last problem I have–and this has always been the biggest issue–is the solution to the “one foggy Christmas eve.” Rudoph, with his nose so bright, was supposed to guide the sleigh through fog. As anyone who has ever driven a car knows, the last thing you want to do in fog is to turn on the high beams. All a big bright red light is going to do is illuminate the fogbank immediately around the sleigh. Maybe if Rudolph’s nose was fog-lamp yellow for that better short-wavelength light dispersion through fog, we’d have a case.

Another problem with the bright-nose-leads the sleigh argument is this: the bright red light is TWO INCHES FROM RUDOLPH’S EYES. Even granted that red light is supposed to preserve night vision, bright light of any color right next to your eyes is going to effectively blind you, leaving you seeing nothing but spots and afterimage. You can’t guide a sleigh if you’re squinting.
So here’s what would need to happen for me to go along with the Rudolph story:

First, a segment explaining that Santa and his reindeer thugs weren’t going to be such judgmental conformists, and that your deformity/unique qualities don’t have to save the world in order to gain group acceptance.

Second, up the ante a bit on the snowstorm. Make Santa and Rudolph really work to get out of this one. Maybe the melting ice caps are threatening Santa’s secret fortress of solitude at the North Pole. Maybe the hole in the ozone has blinded all the other reindeer, and they need seeing eye dogs who can fly.

Finally, if we have to stick with Rudolph leading Santa through the fog, then let’s upgrade the red nose for a halogen fog light. Also, put it lower on the Rudolph frame so that it’s not lighting a “wall of fog.” Maybe “Rudolph the Reindeer with High-Intensity Fog Light Knees.” Or in a perfect world, Rudolph the Radar Reindeer whose echolocation helps him get from house to house.

So that’s my request. Rudolph’s been around for 40 years now. I think we can do better.

And don’t get me started on Frosty the Snowman.

It’s been a long time, but I recall that the ability to understand the story of Santa flying all over the world in a single night to deliver presents to good little boys and girls arrives almost in tandem with ability to doubt it. It’s those toddler years when you start asking Mom and Dad questions like, “how does Santa fit down the chimney?” and “does he really travel all over the world in a single night?” and “where does he get his elves?” Parental answers are vague, but reassuring–”I don’t know, but he does it!”

Some kids of a certain age simply accepted the story on faith, but the future geeks like me still weren’t sure. Assurances from teachers and aunties were fine, but even then I didn’t regard such sources as terribly scientific. But once on Christmas Eve, Mom and Dad played the annual radio bulletin from NORAD that a fast-moving unidentified craft has been spotted leaving the North Pole, apparently powered by nine flying reindeer. The cold-war era Santa-spotting coming from Cheyenne Mountain, the hardened military base at the center of an ever-vigilant global network on the lookout for Soviet ICBMs coming over the North pole, seemed to be a highly credible source for information verifying the truth of this Santa business. The Air Force was a bunch of no-nonsense guys–I mean c’mon, these guys flew jets. Plus it was a friendly reminder that Santa wasn’t going to be making any stops at any commie worker’s collectives in Omsk or Vladivostok.

So I do recall the feeling that morning seeing the pile of gifts that seemed to dwarf even the tree, thinking “Oh my god, it really is true! He really came!”
Now my Mom was not a geek–but I was. I can recall that even as I was opening gifts marked “From Santa,” I began to apply the kind of critical thinking and analysis to the forensic evidence Santa had left at the scene that is used by conspiracy theorists endlessly who pore over the Kennedy assassination. First, I applied graphology–I noticed an uncanny similarity between Santa’s handwriting and my Mom’s. Also, Mom and Santa used the exact same wrapping paper. The young FBI profiler in me noticed that in talking to other witnesses–my school classmates–it seemed that Santa applied a different MO at nearly every house. One particularly irksome observation is that while my Santa’s gift list included socks and underwear, and topped out his budget with a table hockey set, just a couple blocks away it seemed Santa had color TVs or new bicycles or minibikes to give away in a manner that at the very least cast doubt on Santa’s ability to discern the difference between naughty and nice.

Inevitable conclusions are of course inevitably reached. Yet even well into my teens, my Mom refused to give up the illusion, hinting only once that if we pushed her to admit her role in the conspiracy, than the game would be over–completely over. So we continued to go along with it in the spirit of enlightened self-interest.

Geeks continue to examine the mechanics of Santa’s trip–there are many variables, of course. How many kids are naughty, how fast must Santa go, how much time does he get at each stop. It’s examined in some amusing detail here in an article that originally appeared in Spy magazine.

The Spy article is fine, as far is goes, and while the article appears to be geeky, due to the added math, it falls short. A far more elegant and plausible explanation of the Santa phenomenon is here. In this case, quantum mechanics is applied to explain the apparently impossible flight of Santa.

Quantum Santa… now thats geeky.

Today, Mr. Alex invites a dear old friend as a guest blogger for the 12 Geeks of Christmas series. Jean Thomas is based in Boston, and has endured the annual gift exchange with Mr. Alex for more years than anyone should have to endure. Here we discuss the aspect of what a non-geek thinks when recieving a gift from a geek like me.

Gifting the Non-Geek: Tips for Holiday Shopping
Hello, and Happy Non-specific Holiday Season! Mr. Alex has invited me to offer the non-geek perspective on geek gift-giving. I will state upfront that I am not familiar with all 12 Geeks of Christmas. (Apparently neither is Mr. Alex, or he wouldn’t have weaseled his way out of one by inviting me to write a guest blog.) My qualifications extend to my being the non-geek recipient of gifts inflicted on me by friends of geek persuasion over the course of many years.
As any of you non-geek gifters know, the bests gifts are those that reflect the recipient’s interests, desires, and personality as perceived by the gift giver. But to a geek, a gift apparently means any item with some nifty quality (such as it’s solar powered, takes the word gadget to new levels of hilarity, or is portable in the sense that it breaks down into 237 component parts that can be packed into a duffle bag approximately twice the size of the one provided) and is only tangentially related to the giftee. This explains why I have been the recipient of such wonders as topless flip flops, a baseball cap with LED lights in the brim (which, apparently, is only useful if you want to read what’s written on the front of your T-shirt at night), and a case of WWII army surplus hand warmers. Or maybe they were IEDs. I couldn’t tell. I am not relating all of this to you because I am ungrateful, but because these gifts are all fine examples of …
Gifting the Non-Geek Rule Number 1: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Yes, you CAN give someone a pair of flip flops that relieve one of that irritating toe thingy by adhering directly to the soles of the wearer, but unless for some reason you want to trick your friend into removing the flesh from the bottom of her feet, you SHOULD NOT.
Gifting the Non-Geek Rule Number 2: A perfectly ordinary item will not necessarily be improved by adding more technology to it.
You’re thinking, “But what about my new Kate Bush CD with built-in GPS?” I know geeks are fans of novelty (or they like to bite the heads off live chickens, according to Merriam-Webster), but trust me on this. Perhaps this is all the fault of us non-geeks. Every time one of our geek friends says something like, “Hey look at my new umbrella with the built-in weather forecast receiver,” and we say “Neato!”, we give the false impression that we find the thing, well, not completely stupid. We’re just being polite. Please don’t run out and get us one. If we want to know whether to take our umbrella with us, we will look out of the window before we leave the house. (And before you think that instead you will give us the companion lightning strike detector, let us hasten to tell you that if it is thundering, we are pretty sure there’s lightning and we shall throw down our golf clubs and go not stand under a tree.)
Gifting the Non-Geek Rule Number 3: If you think it’s simple, it’s probably needlessly complex. (Also known as the Never Give Me a Gift that Involves Putting Electrodes on My Head Rule).
I really only made up this rule so I could talk about the cup that electrocutes you in order to make your hiccups go away—the “simple way to cure hiccups” according to Gizmos for Geeks. Before you start jumping up and down and screaming that just because you create an electrical circuit between a metal cup and your head doesn’t mean you are being electrocuted, let me tell you here and now that I don’t believe you. Besides, as any old wife knows, a little bit of sugar, placed far back on the tongue, stimulates the vagus nerve just as well without actually killing you. Plus hiccups usually just go away by themselves.
Gifting the Non-Geek Rule Number 4: The Devil is in the Details
The use of technology to transfer one’s photos onto mugs, mouse pads, and so on is perhaps one of the most successful efforts to bridge the gap between the geek gifter and the non-geek recipient. But don’t give me a Lord of the Rings calendar with your face photoshopped onto to Aragorn’s or featuring your collection of Leatherman tools.
In full disclosure, I must admit that Mr. Alex gave me a custom paint by numbers kit, so that I may reproduce in acrylic paint a photo he had taken of me and my family when we were all on vacation together. Ok, I’ll admit it’s kind of cool on the face of it. It even gave me a nostalgic twinge for the simple pastimes of my childhood. I remember doing paint-by-numbers as a kid. I don’t, however, remember the little shapes with numbers in them being the size of amoeba. Also, I remember only about 10 little tubs of paint. This thing has 42 tubs of paint. It is called, by the way, “Easy Art 1-2-3.” It really should be called “You Need the Fine Motor Skills of a Neurosurgeon Art 1-2-3-4-5- 6-7-8-9-10- 11-12-13-14-15- 16-17-18- 19-20-21- 22-23-24- 25-26-27-28-29 -30-31-32-33 -34-35-36-37- 38-39-40-41-42.” But what really makes it geeky is that my friend asked the company to remove the pole behind my head in the photo. Yes, you learned that in Photoshop that you can remove offensive reality, like unsightly poles that appear to jut out of peoples heads or the Men’s Room sign above the bride and groom. But really, he should have asked them to remove one of my chins.
In sum, you can probably forget all of the above and just go with this rule of thumb when out shopping for non-geek friends and family: If in one hand you are holding something you would really like to have and in the other hand you are holding something you wouldn’t, go with the latter. Unless you really want an iPod. I’d take an iPod.

There is no shortage of lists of gadgets that geeks want to receive for Christmas (or to be more inclusive, Chrismahannakwanzakuh). Gizmos for Geeks, Geekfoolery’s parent site, is just one of many that review and highlight the many shiny electronic objects that we geeks desire, which in the interest of time, can be summarized as “all of them.” So this post is not about what to get for a geek on your list, but rather, some suggestions on what you as a geek can give your non-geek friends and family. Gifts that will not only appeal to your nerdliness, but will also be received with more joy by your non-techie Aunt than she expressed last year when you gave her an HDMI cable (which, seriously dude, was completely thoughtless of you. What she needed was the HDMI to DVI adapter, not the cable).
Pictures

If your giftee has kids, or possibly pets, and you have pictures of them, then you’re in luck because it has never been easier to turn a JPEG into a custom gift. Of course there are T-shirts and mousepads and coffee mugs available at Cafepress, and through partner sites associated with Flickr, QOOP and Zazzle. I like the options at QOOP to print custom coffee table books with your own pictures, something I have also done through Apple’s iPhoto software several times, including this year. QOOP and Zazzle’s offerings push the envelope (ahem) with photo stamps and even photo neckties.