I've tried buying different kinds of gifts for Catherine, but they've all been failures. CDs? Already had em. Jewelry? It's sweet that I tried. Books? Oh lord. Let's not reopen that shameful chapter. Girls don't like Neal Stephenson, it turns out.

But there's one thing I can buy: technology. I can sustain enough of an interest in it to learn about it, so it's possible to pick things thoughtfully. The aesthetics of clothing escape me, but I can tell you that that MP3 player simply does not match with your computer's peripheral bus, at all. What were you thinking?

Unfortunately, the pace of invention for actually-useful consumer technology can't keep up with the pace of a boyfriend's trinket obligations, and for Christmas I sucked it up and got Catherine some earrings. They went over okay, but the experience was terrifying. The jewelry counter was staffed by an astoundingly beautiful girl with a thick Russian accent, who had no doubt been shipped in specifically for the holidays. She radiated a cool unattainability that made every hapless male patron sure of two things. First, regardless of how much money he had planned to spend, he was a cheap jerk who deserved to die alone. And second, and more definitively, he would never, ever score with a hot Russian ice princess (although if you were to buy a couple thousand dollars of jewelry from her, she might at least not belittle your masculinity with her supermodel girlfriends later on).

I quickly retreated and bought the same earrings for $20 more from an excitable Indian kid manning a counter two stores down. He made me feel emasculated too, but only because they were giving away teddy bears with every purchase.

So buying jewelry does not agree with me. The margin of error is low, the financial stakes are high, and interaction with the salespeople is terrifying. Technology is my home court. All of which is to lead up to the news that Gizmodo might have just supplied me with a compromise (or at least another internet-based means of horrifying Catherine).