A VC

It being the holiday season, I can't help myself from recommending some good gift ideas. 

I blogged the ski hat with headphone speakers sewn into it last month.  I wear it every day and its great.

I also blogged the top 10 CDs of 2004 if you are interested in getting some music for someone this year.

But the gift I am most excited about this year is the one I gave my brother Rod on our timeshifted Christmas last weekend.

I got him the Linksys Music System at Amazon.  Although the list is $264, they are selling it for $99.  This is a great price for a great consumer electronics product.

As you can see, the thing looks like a boombox.

But it's a wifi boom box that has Rhapsody and Music Match built into it.  And it plugs into any home stereo you've got in your house.

Here's a direct quote from Rod about the "out of the box" experience, including setting up wifi in his house.

"The wireless router was so easy, I just shut off the cable modem, unplugged my linksys router, plugged in the wireless router, turned on the cable modem, turned on the wireless router and it worked. I installed the software that came with the wifi music system to set my computer up as the music server, started Rhapsody on the computer, turned the wifi music system on it, found the music server and rhapsody, I could play playlists that I had on Rhapsody. Took less than an hour to do this and watch a thing on Napoleon on the History channel at the same time."

And here's another quote along with a couple of more pictures.

"I built a play list on Rhapsody called green day, turned on the "wifi music thing", found the green day playlist and hit play, It was playing Holiday/ Boulevard of broken dreams when I took the pictures of it outside on the deck, so it works outside."