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Cheap gift ideas for your TechHead Valentine's date!
As Valentine's Day encroaches upon 21st Century Romantic Expectations and the Reality of Latter Day Arroyonomics, we find ourselves once again at an impasse: you want/need/were-requested-to-buy your TechHead Better Half a halfway decent techie gift but without it crimping on your other plans for that Day of Days – what to do what to do?!??!!?
Here are five gift ideas that just might save your life for the coming 14th!An MP3 player – Count the ways you love your loved one via 2 gigabytes (GB) worth of looping love songs! I used to do this back when all I had going for myself was a two-deck cassette player-recorder and a bunch of tapes with run-down ribbons, a 60-minute blank tape, and a couple of scratchy tape heads I had to wipe clean with alcohol after every other dubbing. But now, thanks to compact disc-ripping and -burning and peer-to-peer file sharing networks and digital music players that have the capacity to store libraries' worth of music, the limitations to wooing your way to your loved one’s heart is only limited by your knowledge of the history of and quality of taste for music! Fill an entire 2 GB MP3 player with the complete and unadulterated The Theory of Everything by Benjamen Walker! The numerous variations of Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love”! A complete set of podcasts on the hit ABC TV show Lost! An eight-hour recording of you reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in a mock English accent! Regardless of the lineup, it will always say “I love you!”
A digital photo frame – Reminisce on your better days while you drink the 14th away with this portable photo album in a photo frame! Just transfer your pertinent Kodak memories to a memory card and plug it in to this device, and lo and behold, a shuffling presentation of the moments that you did not allow to pass you by! If you have a digital camera, you can even take hundreds of photos the entire Valentine's Day, and come night time, you can view them all in the photo frame while you discuss how the day went and how much you appreciated that walking photo op you did in Timezone! Also: you can prepare a love letter in Photoshop and save it as an image file you can import into the photo frame. Voila, a digital love letter! Yes. I am a Love Genius.
A shrine website – Back in the days before social networking sites and weblogs, one of the chieftestly cheapest ways to declare your love for someone through the internet was through building your loved ones their very own website! And not just any website: a shrine site! Technically speaking, a shrine site is a type of website one creates to celebrate a certain personality – usually a celebrity of sorts – where one can talk at length about the personality, their virtues and their vices, their likes and dislikes – pretty much everything under the sun that made one appreciate the person the shrine is dedicated to! I once made a shrine for comic book legend Alan Moore, and I uploaded a lot of his interviews I transcribed from magazines and comic books, even scans of relevant comic book pages – why not make one for your loved one? Transcribe journal entries and love letters! Scan your old NeoPrints and studio photos in an online gallery! Upload MP3s of your favourite songs, even recordings of poems you’ve written for each other and stream them in the website! Make a humorous Flash cartoon about your future life together in marital bliss under one roof in the Marikina suburbs and call it Passionate in Provident! Take a crash course in HTML coding and celebrate the Magic that is the Two of You.
A copy of The Sims 3 – Some people say that for a couple, living together before marriage is a safe way to gauge compatibility before the usually-irreversible usually-inevitable decision of marriage, but there are some people who frown upon the idea due to a few moral issues. Skip the forthcoming hassling from nosy family members and conservative neighbors by managing your and your loved one's lives in a virtual apartment in The Sims 3! This new sequel for the famous life simulation game lets you have your heart-shaped cake and allows you to eat it, too! Model your avatars on one another and practice managing the other’s life as if it intertwines with your own as if the two of you are already living in together! Is he a messy slob? Teach him to clean up after himself! Does she have the tendency to flirt with the neighbours? Tie her on a short leash! This game teaches you to value each other’s opinions and personal space, not to mention giving you a glimpse of the joys of married life without committing you to the perils of truly living it. And best of all: nobody gets pregnant! In the virtual world, nothing is real, so everything is permitted, even … Love!
A portable LCD projector – Take the cinematic experience into your living room by hooking up your DVD player and stereo sound system to a portable LCD projector! Watch the new Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams in high-definition visuals as wide as your house’s wall! Celebrate the entire Valentines Day together by staying in bed on a Dollhouse Season Two marathon! Play an entire tournament of Wii Tennis as a doubles team or even as rivals and have your game projected onto the wall so big it’s almost virtual reality! You can even rewatch old home movies you made together – or maybe even make a new one *wink-wink* - and reexperience the moments as if they were really happening in front of you. Better yet: film a short subject video that centers on your loved one and the love that you share together as a Calvinoesque travelogue to a foreign city as seen through closeups of your loved one’s body parts and call it the Cartography of Cardiology and have it look like an Alain Resnais retrospective! Nothing says “I love you” like big fat letters projected on your house’s wall saying “I love you I love you I love you!”
Photos: "Pixelated Heart" by author. Some rights reserved.
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