‘Tis the season, and this year there are many choices for the geeks out there. Rather than list all the stuff, below are a number of links that you can check out for yourself.

For the gadget nut, one of my favorite sites is:

They have a wish list for him and a list for her. (come on ladies, find that inner geek that’s inside of you!!)

For the iPod fanatics, you have to see the annual gift guide from iLounge This .pdf download not has a ton of product information, it also gives great review and talks about the technology available along with tips for your iPods.

For the hard core techie, there is Chris Pirillo’s 50 Geek Gift Ideas.

Tags: gifts, engadget, chris pirillo, ilounge, wish list

Just a quick one about another music discovery service. Musicovery, lets you set the genre, the year and the mood. Then you can move around the “bubbles” to see what you like. Give it a try.

Are you getting tired of listening to the same old artists and the same old tracks on your iPod? There are 3 web services out there that can help you expand your music listening experience.

First is Pandora. This service asks you to enter some of your favorite artists and songs. It then uses a very sophisticated algorithm to mathematically quantify the music from those artists. Pandora will then play those artists as well as other artists and songs with a similar scoring.

You can play this through your computer, or if you have been reading my blog, via WiFi with the Sondigo Sirocco. Also, thanks to a partnership, Pandora also works with a WiFi player called Slim Devices (which was recently bought by Logitech).

The other service is lastFM. Similar to Pandora, it allows you to select your favorite artists and songs. It then uses the social community of its members to offer up other artists that were chosen by others as favorites along with your favorite artists.This service can also be played from your computer or wirelessly using the above devices.

The 3rd service is Yahoo’s Launchcast radio. You can select your favorites in several ways using this service. You can add a list of your favorite artists, albums, songs or genres. Or, you can simply select one of the previous options and start playing. As each song plays you have an option of rating the song, the artist or the album using 1-5 start or 0 for don’t play this again.To start, you may want to spend some time with this and quickly skip through the songs and rate them. Launchcast then uses these ratings to play other songs from artist or genre you have rated highly. Over time as your rate more and more songs, the “station” becomes more and more personalized.

So now you have 3 options to expand your musical tastes.

When I travel one of the more important features of the hotel I choose to stay at is whether they have good gym. I have stayed at some hotels that say they have a gym. Only to find out, once I got there, that they converted a meeting room into a gym by adding a couple of treadmills and some dumbbells.

Now there is a web site that can help with, not only the hotel selection, but also running routes, local gyms and their policies on guests and healthy places to eat. It is Athletic Minded Traveler.

 The site has reviews of several cities, including the main Canadian ones. If you check now, they have a free preview for Toronto. There is a charge for the service. It is $20 a year or $3 a month. But if you don’t want to put your fitness schedule on hold while you travel, it is worth it.

To say that Windows MCE is not something I would recommend to the general population is an understatement. It is one of those things, that if it goes right…no problem. But if it goes wrong, then (as in my case) you are in for 2 days of headaches. Now I see why it comes pre-installed on PC’s. I recently decided to upgrade my storage capacity on my main PC and thought it would be easy to upgrade to MCE at the same time. Everything was going fine, until I started doing the automatic updates. All of a sudden, updates started to fail, one after the other. I checked all over Microsoft’s site and knowledge base. They just kept saying to re-install. After 5 times, I figured I would have to re-install Windows XP and abandon my quest for a Media Center PC.

Then I happened to stumble across a blog site called The Green Button.This site was a Godsend. Not only did it explain in detail, exactly what the problem was with the updates, it broke out each update step by step with instructions on how to manually do the updates. Something about the order of the updates and whether you have .Net 1.0 or 2.0 installed and when you installed them.

So 2 days after I started, I now have a functioning Media Center.

Tags: Windows Media Center Edition, MCE, Media Center, The Green Button