It’s Christmas, and you’ve got a geek in your life. Congratulations! Maybe you’re a new boyfriend or girlfriend, bewildered by your love interest’s tech savvy, or maybe you’re a parent whose progeny has recently taken a sharp turn toward geekdom. Perhaps, on the flip-side, your long-time significant-other has always been a geek, leading to endless gift-giving frustration. In any case, DaveRea.com is here to help. This handy guide post should help get you started in navigating the strange and contradictory world of geek gift giving…

Let’s get one thing out of the way right up-front: Unless you know your geek extraordinarily well, or are a fellow geek yourself, avoid tech gifts like the plague! Chances are, your geek researches the living hell out of every technology purchase, analyzing myriad specifications and exploring minutia of compatibility. The odds are stacked – much like a ready-to-topple Jenga tower – very much against you. If you must buy technology, get ready to do your homework: you’ll need to make sure that your gadget gift of choice will play nicely with everything in your geek’s current stable of tech goodies, not to mention scope out the reviews to make sure it meets with other geeks’ approval. Simply aiming for the cutting edge isn’t enough, either – it can actually be a negative if your target hasn’t been “rooted” or “jailbroken” yet. All that said, if you’re still insistent and a fan of the “dog ate my homework” school of research, most things endorsed by Limor Fried, Linus Torvalds or Steve Wozniak are at least a good start.

Next up? Accessories. You might think you’re home free now – your geek already owns and loves their smartphone, tablet or camera of choice, so picking up some attachments should be a sure thing! “But,” as Jeremy Clarkson is wont to say, “you’d be wrong…” Geeks are nearly as choosy about their accessories as they are about their gadgets. After all – if your phone accompanies you every waking hour, how it attaches to your waistband is probably nearly as important as how it synchronizes with your personal cloud. Compounding the confusion, some accessories actually use magnets, RFIDs or Bluetooth to affect the way their host gadgets operate – something that your geek might find fascinating and useful, or annoying and intrusive.

At this point, you might be left wondering what’s left?! Thankfully, the tech world is a big place, filled with extravagances that your geek probably finds endlessly amusing or interesting, but insufficiently-essential to break out the PayPal account. It’s in this treasure trove of extravagance that we find some of the best geek gift ideas. Take clothing, for example: Consider apparel (or, if your connection with your geek is a romantic one, various undergarment permutations) from ThinkGeek.com, XKCD or that epic Pandora’s box of personal printing sites, CafePress.com. If this weren’t enough, all three of these places offer various other gift options – from cube goodies to brain teasers – that are likely to glom onto your geek’s favorite memes and offer endless amusement (or, at least, a reminder of your thoughtfulness that’ll make them smile with the warmth of knowing someone finally embraces their geekiness).

Failing this, geeks’ tendencies to go over-the-top on certain things is another great source of gift ideas. For one thing, most geeks have an ongoing unrequited love affair with security. They adore encryption, enjoy (or are at least thoroughly intrigued by) lock-picking, and – among other common threads – possibly harbor a penchant for philosophy or an enthusiasm for entrepreneurship. Some ideas to consider along these lines? Check out the latest in mechanical info-sec, locksmithing for dummies, geeky deep-think or startup savvy. If your geek has constructive tendencies, you might consider applying your gift to their creative side. A gift certificate to Adafruit, Sparkfun or your local electronics (or, if you’re crazy daring, pyrotechnics) surplus house can go a long way – and it’ll give them the opportunity to analyze and scrutinize their purchase to their geeky heart’s content.

You know your geek best – so bear in mind that the advice here may apply to varying degrees. Note that I haven’t mentioned gaming (a. because this is a complete Pandora’s Box in itself, and b. because if gaming is high on their list, relationships that might result in gifts probably aren’t) – though this can offer as many gift-giving opportunities as it does land-mines. Bear in mind, too, that the best gift for a geek might be something entirely and decidedly non-geeky – because even geeks need a break from geekiness once in a while. Sentimentality is not lost on us – one of my favorite gifts remains a framed duo of hair-brained invention ideas on coarse, yellowed typing paper – borne of my 6-year-old brain and transcribed by my patient-to-the-point-of-sainthood grandmother. It was a collaborative gift to commemorate my completion of grad-school: my Aunt saved the letters, and my wife had them framed. For the record: No combination of silicon, wires and software can bring quite the smile to my face that appears when I look at those notes. They’re artifacts of the past, connected to the me of the present by the hands of the people I love.

[Image credit: David Miles]

I planned to get back to our hotel around 6PM – leaving plenty of time to take Kelly to see Red Rocks Park and stand on-stage at the ampitheater made legendary (at least to us) by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, among others. Instead, in a dirt-filled rental car, toting a half-functioning rented Ellsworth mountain bike covered with red-clay mud and snow, I pulled into our hotel parking garage a little after 11PM. I still couldn’t feel my fingertips, and the mixture of mud and blood that washed off me in a hot post-ride shower would have been well-suited to an action-movie recovery scene.

The warm cafe where I’m sitting and typing this entry – with jazz, the smell of espresso and the sound of lighthearted conversation floating through the air – feels almost as otherworldly as the landscapes I just endured with two other riders…

The madness actually began the day prior. I picked up an Ellsworth Glimpse from the Golden Bike Shop in (wait for it…) Golden, Colorado. The owner suggested I give the Chimney Gulch Trail a try – “an easy out-and-back with some climbing.” Sitting in the rental car at the trailhead, waiting out a rain shower, the trail didn’t look too bad. Then – knock! knock! - a knuckle on the passenger window pulled me out of my internal pre-ride self-pep-talk. Another rider had gotten an ear bud cord tangled into his freewheel, and wondered if I had any pliers. After a few minutes’ conversation, through the combined dexterity of the rider, his friend, and I, we managed to extricate the remains. I learned their names – PJ and Dave. Both were paramedics – and had recently returned from stints as civilian professional firefighters at Al Asad airbase in Iraq.

A few minutes an an enthusiastic invitation later, we were saddling up at the summit of the trail. My perception of a quick 2-mile out and back rapidly disintegrated as PJ’s truck had sliced switchback after switchback, climbing to the far-end trailhead. The town of Golden, far below, looked like a miniature model. After a few quick seat adjustments and a rattlesnake warning from PJ, we clipped in and started descending. It only took about 100 feet of trail to put massive grins on all our faces – shuttling this descent was a decidedly good idea!

At the bottom, after we exchanged all the requisite post-awesome-descent fist bumps and exclamations, came the invite: Kenosha Pass tomorrow? I was in. I’d head to REI that night to pick up some cool-weather gear, and we’d meet a little before 9 to head 45 minutes into the Rockies.

I did. We did. And moments after cresting Kenosha pass on Highway 285, I got the news – the plan had changed, and we were actually headed much farther into the Rockies, to the Monarch Crest Trail. Starting elevation: 11,386 feet. Length: 32 miles. We’d leave my rental car at the bottom, then shuttle our bikes and ourselves to the top in PJ’s truck. Ride time? About 3-5 hours, according to most of the reviews. My response? What the heck – let’s go for it. After all, this ride was apparently #6 on someone’s list of the 10 epic rides you should take before you die.

We arrived in Salidas, Colorado at about Noon, and headed to the Sinclair gas station whose owners operate a shuttle service for mountain bikers. The shaggy guy slinging roller-dogs behind the counter – who warned us he was new to the area – told us that 6 inches of snow had fallen at the pass overnight. With clear skies and bright sunshine, we figured most of the new snow would have burned off through the morning – even when we reached Monarch Pass, only a dusting was clinging to the ground in the shadows. We suited up – gore-tex socks, insulation layers, fresh-powder-worthy rainproof jackets, and sunglasses all around – and headed up the fire road toward the trailhead. A few minutes’ pedaling and pushing gave us the view pictured here: the summit of Monarch Ridge. Pulling in a shred of a Verizon data signal, we downloaded directions for the route – which would prove, quite literally, to be a lifesaver a few hours later.

While the trail started snowy, it was completely rideable. The sticky layer of high-country white stuff allowed surprising traction, and within minutes we were 2 miles into our adventure. That was about when things started to get interesting… The Monarch Crest route, for the most part, follows the Continental Divide Trail (or CDT) from Monarch Pass to Marshall Pass. Our portion? It winds around the windward (Western) peaks of Mt. Peck, Pahlone Peak, Chipeta Mountain and Marshall Pass, predominantly above the tree-line. With precious little shelter from 40+ mile-per-hour winds and sporadic bouts of snow and hail, we trudged along the 9+ miles of trail separating us from the leeward face and the miles of grin-inducing downhill we’d set out to find. In many places, early October snows had drifted to thigh-deep – we mixed slogs through snow with occasional frozen trail riding and crunchy pedaling over the permafrost tundra.

Just prior to reaching Marshall Pass, we reached a spot sheltered enough to allow a few gloves-off minutes, and a short break in the snow allowed a quick photograph:

Just to be clear: our starting trailhead was on the far side of the most distant mountain visible in this photo – at the top of an even higher summit that’s shrouded in clouds. The view is Northerly, so the wind was out of the left side of the frame – the Pacific drainage – the same side of the mountains our trail followed. The only visible trail here drops from left to right, just above the pine forest on the pass.

After clearing Marshall Pass, we found a clearing and took a few minutes to recover. Since the Camelbak hoses were frozen, we took the opportunity to crack into the not-yet-frozen bladders and take on some much-needed hydration, as well as load up on calories and lash our cold-weather shells to our packs. Safely out of the wind, we started descending toward the Silver Creek Trail – which past reviewers assured us was composed of long, sweeping single-track descents.

Before we could reach the Silver Creek Trail, however, we had more dues to pay: another mile of climbing on the Continental Divide Trail that took us nearly an hour, followed by a long uphill fire-road slog to reach the Silver Creek trailhead. By the time we arrived there, the sun was ominously low in the sky – and not knowing how long our dirt road descent into Poncha Springs would be, the risk of not making it back to the car by nightfall was very real. The climbs paid off, though: the final stretch of fire road to the Silver Creek trailhead was a fast descent over drainage ridges that had all three of us airborne, alternating with banked berms around tight corners.

At last, with PJ nursing a slow front tire leak and fighting exhaustion, and me thoroughly motivated to get a message through to Kelly that we were OK, we started down the Silver Creek Trail. The descents were as-promised: fun, fast and technical. Frozen fingers struggling to stay anchored on my ice-cold brake levers, I pushed the Ellsworth and myself as hard as I could – and the O-rings would later indicate I used every bit of its 5+ inches of front and rear suspension travel. Silver Creek offered a vast array of lines, with terrain ranging from glassy, banked, sweeping red clay single track, to tight-packed gravel, to steep roots, rock gardens and switchbacks. At the bottom of the trail – with minutes of dim twilight remaining – we even encountered a trifecta of stream crossings, one of which offered no bridge or stepping stones – we forded this one on nothing but knobby tires.

Finally – 6 hours after we set out – we reached the dirt-paved Silver Creek Lakes Road, descending from 9,000′ to Poncha Springs at 7,500′. With one final food stop to stave off an imminent bonk, we took on energy for the last frigid descent, and beelined for the car. Our way was lit only by moonlight, diffused by a thin layer of cirrus clouds and the headlights of occasional passing cars. Thankfully, Dave had a small headlamp to provide a bit of supplemental illumination, as well. I arrived at the car at 8:03PM – over 7 hours after we started with the sun high overhead – and the others would follow shortly.

All told, taking those first few pedal strokes to set out on the Monarch Crest trail was likely the riskiest, most reckless and dangerous endeavor I’ve ever undertaken. Between high altitudes, bitter cold, unfamiliar (and unforgivingly-rugged) terrain, and complete ignorance of how long or how difficult the trip would be, the adventure could quickly have turned into a nightmare. But it didn’t – we prepared as best we could, we pushed hard and worked through each challenge as we encountered them, and we reached our goal. I’m sure there was as much praying as swearing, and as much fear as confidence, but when we arrived at trail’s end there was nothing but agreement: it was hard, it was scary, and it was as fun as it was insane. And at one point, sometime during the hours we spent plowing across the wind-battered tundra on the Western face of the ridge, the horizon tearing away at 45-degree angles to vertical on either side, I thought back to my first “real” mountain bike ride at Dryer Road Park. If you’d have told me the pursuit of great mountain biking (mixed with a touch of peer pressure and blissful ignorance) would someday take me here, I’d never have believed you…

Featured “IRL” Comment: ”So, you do know how close to death you were?” – Craig

Just in case you enjoy such things, I’ve finally gone and set up a Twitter account: @mtbkrdave

I’ve made a somewhat startling realization this week: Beginning July 15th, I’ll be participating in some sort of organized cycling event every weekend for a solid month.

On the 15th, I’ll be kicking off the craziness with a ride in the 6th Annual Fat Tire Festival at our area’s definitive singletrack destination, Dryer Road Park. But that’s just a warm up – the following weekend, I’ll be burning about 6x the energy of the Fat Tire when I ride in a twenty-four hour mountain bike race – thankfully, as part of a team of 4 riders.

From there, the fun moves onto the road, with the Ride MS century (that’s 100 miles, kids) the next weekend, and a 55-mile tour one week later.

I suppose the training rides have already started – but I sure don’t feel as ready for this epic month of cycling as I did for last year’s race!

(Happy Earth Day everyone…)

Occasionally, staunch environmentalists make a good point or two. But in many cases, despite their enthusiasm for the term “sustainability”, they’re just not willing to look at the big picture. Case in point? Greenpeace recently released a scorecard for the “green-ness” of datacenters operated by the world’s cloud computing behemoths. Here it is:

“So what’s the problem?” you might ask… According to a Greenpeace quote highlighted by Boy Genius Report, everyone’s favorite eco-terrorism troupe based their siting scores on the typical sources of electricity for the states where the datacenters are located. But if we’re going to talk genuine “sustainability” (which, by the way, eco-nuts are completely uninterested in) then you’ve got to consider a lot more factors than just the makeup of the power grid sources in a particular host state.

If we take a look at an infographic from the ever-so-transparently-named CoolerPlanet, we can see just how “green” the electricity sources in each US state are:

So greener is always better, right? Not necessarily. Greenpeace specifically bad-mouthed Apple for choosing to locate its newest datacenter in North Carolina, where the energy supply is notoriously un-green. But what were their alternatives? A California site would expose the datacenter to earthquake risks – and I’m sure your neighborhood Greenpeace operative isn’t keen on downtime for their favorite iDevice. Coastal Texas isn’t really an option due to the risk of severe weather. That leaves inland Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and New York.

“Great, relocate there!” say our tree-hugging friends. Not so fast – remember that inland Texas can throw down a wicked heat gauntlet in the summer, while Oregon, Washington and New York get downright frigid in the winters. The DOE estimates that almost half of a typical datacenter’s energy consumption is used for climate control – what happens to that number when the ambient temperature is well over 100°F? Or -10°F? Suddenly, choosing a comfortably-temperate and relatively disaster-free state like North Carolina or Virginia – despite the un-greenness of their energy supplies – doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. I’m sure the stewards of these datacenters would much rather not use as much as 10X the total energy – along with all it’s concomitant transmission inefficiencies – and keep their overall consumption low.

When you start factoring in second-order causes and effects – such as the environmental impact of pulling power, water, fiber and vehicle conduits into remote places, landfill and recycling capacities, employee commute emissions, construction impact – the sites that Apple, Google, Facebook and others have chosen start to look even better. As is almost always the case, monovariatic analysis in pursuit of a pre-selected conclusion falls flat on its face when a bigger-picture view is considered.

Unfortunately, datacenters consume a lot of energy. Choosing their sites carefully – not only based on energy sources but also based on consumption – can reduce this. The people whose jobs, reputations and employers’ solvency are on the line have no choice but to look at the big picture. Ultimately the true solution for Greenpeace’s gripes is likely for them (and the rest of us) to give up their iPhones and App Stores – but then – how would they coordinate their naval blocades, nuclear power plant break-ins and cargo ship boardings?

Harvard Business Review: “Big Content” is Strangling American Innovation

When you want to foster innovation, a good place to start is to look at who’s putting up roadblocks to it. The most reliable answers lately? Government, deep-rooted and deep-pocketed existing industries, and those who are out to extort an easy buck from others’ hard work. So that logic, I suppose, puts the RIAA on the same level as the world’s many patent trolls. Too bad our government of-late seems all-too-happy to cater to both.

[Update: Here's a perfect example - Time Warner removes channels from iPad app (facing pending battles with content providers)...]

We in the open-source world hear a lot of flack about all the things open source supposedly “doesn’t do”. Looks like we can add one more thing to the list of things Linux and other open-source software offerings don’t do: provide funding for international crime syndicates.

These days, it seems like everybody and their brother is running an app store. What began as closely-controlled walled-gardens of BREW apps for flip phones, curated by mobile carriers charging steep entry fees, grew into Apple’s benchmark term-coiner “app store” and then exploded into a plethora of application delivery platforms. Google’s “Android Market” is hot on Apple’s heels and closing in on a quarter million applications. Commerce heavyweight Amazon has announced their own app marketplace for Android, and several independents (such as AndSpot, AndAppStore and others) have sprung up recently too. Even Microsoft has 5000 apps in their scintillatingly-named “Windows Phone 7 Apps Marketplace”.

Which begs the question – what’s next? I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction for 2011: Mobile App Rental. It’s not something you see every day in the desktop application world, but it exists. In the fickle mobile space, however, rental could be a real differentiator. As mobile apps become more tightly-focused on specific tasks, the likelihood that they’re not needed on a continual basis increases. If I’m visiting an unfamiliar city (or country, for that matter), I wouldn’t necessarily drop $1 on an “insider-guide” or offline transit map application for my destination. But if a rental offering was sufficiently differentiated from on- and off-device free alternatives, I’d gladly spend 10¢ to use a copy for a weekend. Another example might be navigation: if I’m headed to a place (say, Canada) where a mobile data connection will cost me extra roaming charges, I’d gladly rent an offline navigation app while I’m there. Once my rental expires, the app store could simply auto-remove that app from my device. Such a model trades off purchase price for volume – people who wouldn’t normally buy your app might be willing to rent it, so you can meet the needs of a larger customer base with less customer risk.

Extending the navigation example, such a model could even be implemented in-app. I use an offline GPS navigation app called CoPilot Live, which normally goes for $10 on the Android Market. My version includes only USA maps – but nothing (except, perhaps, certain app store distribution agreements) stops CoPilot from renting me maps for other countries should I only need them for a brief period. Ordinarily, purchasing the global version would cost me $40 – a cheaper alternative to paying per-diem for a car-rental-agency GPS or overseas data roaming, but still more cash than I’m willing to drop for an app I’ll only use for a few days. But paying $5 to rent that map set for the week? That I would do – it’s a powerful value proposition.

The possibilities really open up when you consider gaming – where extra levels, seasonal themes or bonus features could see greater uptake through a timed rental offering. Then, go one step further – pull GPS location right into the app store, enabling rental apps that expire when I leave the geographic vicinity they target, without ever sharing the user’s location with the app or its developer.

Will my prediction pan out? Who knows – but as developers, manufacturers, OS developers and carriers get more creative with mobile business models, I wouldn’t be surprised to see rentals hitting the streets before too long.

[Reduced-resolution image icons used in compliance with the "commentary" doctrine of the fair use clause of United States copyright law. Images and trademarks are the exclusive property of their rightful owners.]

Most folks have probably seen the commercials: an upper-middle-class family is stuck in some domestic conundrum, then someone raises an eyebrow and exclaims: “To the Cloud!” And soon, thanks to some magical cloud computing wizardry, their suburban snafu is solved.

Working “in the cloud” is great for some things – anyone who uses GMail or manages projects on Basecamp will tell you that – but when it’s the foundation for an entire product, my advice would be: Wait for a sunny day to buy. Microsoft – purveyors of the afore-mentioned cloud-hawking commercials – have, in a fit of ironic self-interest, proven my point mightily.

You see, last year, Microsoft cozied up with Verizon Wireless to introduce the Kin line of mobile phones. Squarely targeted at tweens and hipsters, Kin devices were “cloud-based”, meaning they synchronized all their owners’ personal goodies – such as photos, videos, contacts and social networks – with “the cloud”. In this case, “the cloud” meant Microsoft’s Kin Studio online service. Which, as of the end of March, will be shuttered.

That’d be all well and good if Kin devices were as useful without cloud connectivity as they were with it – but sadly, this isn’t the case. In fact, without Kin Studio, Kin owners’ handsets will have around the same feature set as your typical feature phone. The moral of the story? Before you sink your hard-earned money into a device that derives its usefulness from “the cloud”, or worse-yet sign a 2-year contract to get such a device on a carrier subsidy, learn what might happen if the cloud services upon which your new toy depends should, one day, turn to vapor.

Not long before I went to work for GM in 2005 – which, as an aside, suddenly seems like it was a long time ago! – my Dad sent me a promotional video for the new Audo R10 diesel-powered LeMans race car. It looked something like this:

The first time I watched it – and every time thereafter – I got goosebumps. I remember thinking it did a damn decent job of scooping up most of the emotions that engineers feel when they stand back, and look at what they’ve designed and built, and smile a bit while they think, “yeah, that’ll do.” And not long after I got my first look at a GM fuel cell engine, I remember thinking how great it would be if GM produced a similar video. Just as Audi did, show just enough to convey the complexity of the machine and the care that went into building it.

Well, they didn’t quite make my dream of a top-down, time-lapse, pull-away video of a fuel cell engine build come true, but at least they put forth an inspiring effort on the new Chevy Volt. Here it is: