It's coming down to crunch time if you're celebrating Christmas. Nothing's better for last-minute gifts than software -- you can just download it, burn the installer to a CD, and slip that in the ol' stocking. You don't even need to leave the house and brave the parking garage (unless you need to go to Best Buy to grab some blank CDs, that is!). But the question is: what do you get the geek who has everything? Or, worse, what do you get the ordinary person who doesn't care what they run on their computer? Well, everything below is cool in the way that getting things you do everyday done easier and quicker is cool.

Two years ago I introduced the Juniorbird.com t-shirts; they're back this year, the same classic designs on new, great shirt options, for your last-minute holiday shopping needs. That's right, if you like the somewhat-snappy textual stylings you've seen here on Juniorbird.com, you can now carry them with you all day long, on your chest, where all one's opinions and feelings should be worn. (It's better than on your sleeve.)

You know what I don't expect at Best Buy? Great customer service. You know what I just got at Best Buy? Really great customer service. Great like, they changed it from from "I'll never buy a computer here again" bad situation to "I'll always buy my computers here in the future." Following in Auros's footsteps, the Christmasy things to do seems to be to blog about it.

Occasionally someone compliments my photography. Misguided though such a sentiment may be, there are a few specific items that I would recommend anyone interested in taking better shots buy. Since it's the holiday season, why not help yourself to one of these?

If you say "1980s movie character archetype," maybe you come up with John Rambo, or Ferris Bueller, or Charlie Sheen in Wall Street -- America kicking ass, America growing up, America getting rich -- but the ultimate character archetype of the '80s for me is someone with a lot less hair, a lot more coiled rage, a lot more cool. Let's face it, the '80s were all about Louis Gossett Jr. And the '90s, for every Brad Pitt or tight-lipped Robert Pattinson, there's the standard: all the cool, none of the rage, it's George Clooney.

I like to cook. You may have read. Any chef loves their gadgets, and, being a geek, I do so more than most. While I do tend to think that the solution to almost any problem is technology, I don't like to keep things around that don't really, really work. Since it's the holiday season, and that means getting stuff for both of the major world religions of which I am a member, here are a few such gadgets I suggest you put on your wish list this year. For your online shopping convenience, I've included links to buy all these goodies at Amazon, which incidentally gives a smidge of the price of your purchase to me, at no cost to you. I've also tried to pick reasonably-priced entry-level options, for particular holiday season.

I saw a double feature over the weekend: The Blind Side and Precious. Yes, it was a depressing double feature. Yes, I cried. Actually, I cried a lot more for The Blind Side; Precious just left me exhausted. And, while the whole wanting-to-go-to-bed-at-3:30pm-on-a-Sunday thing was a bit of a downside for the whole plan, I would definitely recommend seeing the two in a row; they just have some kind of an affinity for each other.

I live in a cool house. It's not large, except apparently by the standards of WiFi networking. For an urban elitist liberal like me, being separated from my Gmail or Photobomb¹ for as much as a few hours would be... disastrous. Plus, I work out of the garage, so I have to get e-mail² there. Thus, my quest: cover the property with WiFi.

I have this dream, a very, very hopeless dream. My dream is that someday I will be able to print greeting cards on my very own color printer, featuring the photos that I took my own self. OK, so I have small dreams. The point is, I'd pay to live this particular dream. And that worked for parasailing, so I don't know why greeting cards would be more difficult.

Like any good geek, I'd rather do things online then, you know, have to call or go to an office and interact with an actual human being. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I barely have to buy any technology or home products in a store anymore. In this household, we've tried to do some of our governmental-interaction things online as well. And it's been a complete, unmitigated disaster. I can say with confidence that I will never, ever, do any government-related activity online again.

Now that I live in a blended household, I find myself using our phone number at checkout counters to save the few percent that some loyalty program gives. In the old days, this would've been an easy job: type our happy home's phone number into that swipe-your-credit-card-and-sign pad and we're done. But, like the modern kids we are, we're cell phone-only and our happy is phone number-free.

I may be predisposed to a bit of hoarding. Not that I collect empty yogurt containers or save used tissues; I just often find myself inclined to keep, you know, bowls that people gave me twelve years ago, or maybe I forget to throw away the stub of the movie ticket for Exit Wounds.¹ One time, Mrs. DJ L'il Bit said this thing that helps me out, whenever I'm struggling to decide to throw something away or not: "that decorative peeler is not your mother's love."

I've been using a Time Capsule to back up my Mac for some time now, and have been very satisfied. I was wishing that I could run some kind of over-the-air backup for my wife's laptop, which runs Windows XP, too. So I attached a USB hard drive to the Time Capsule, and tried to mount that on the Windows XP laptop. First I did it the wrong way, and there was much sadness. Then I did it the right way, and life was easy. I couldn't find a description of how to do it right in a quick Google search, so here's my story. It's probably true for an Airport Extreme Base Station too, since that and the Time Capsule are similar.

The hardest part of coming home isn't the end of the adventure, or the not being alone together, or driving on the right side of the road; it's the lack of drums. At Lalati, drums tell you about everything. Happy hour? The drums will call you. Dinner? Drums! Time to go on the group snorkeling trip? You guessed it, drums. I keep on forgetting to have lunch because there's no drums to tell me it's lunch time, and I spend all afternoon looking forward to the 5pm happy hour drums, yet they don't come.

Fiji, obviously, was an incredible, happy, relaxing getaway. We both came away refreshed, and eight days of just enjoying ourselves in complete indulgence was the perfect conclusion to our honeymoon. But, I have to admit, it was a little odd quite how intimate I got with the staff at Lalati Resort. I mean, practically as intimate as I was with my brand new wife.