When was it that you were hit with your first Christmas commercial this year? For me, it was sometime right after Halloween, when I was watching a local TV station and was suddenly confronted with that overweight guy in a red suit who was urging me to think about what I wanted to get my friends this year.My first instinct was to growl that I would simply ship them all the Halloween candy I had left over -- but then I started thinking. While I'm not a huge holiday gift-giver, I do have a number of friends and relations who get periodic gifts for birthdays and other occasions, and many of them are highly enthusiastic about tech toys. You know the type: Their favorite pastime away from the computer is to wander around Best Buy or the local tech junk shop and examine the merchandise with an eye toward its usefulness, its feature set, and its coolness factor (but hardly a glance toward the price tag).

They are the folks who are figuring out if they want to move away from the iPod and try out Microsoft's new Zune; who are thinking strongly about moving toward the new Mac Pro (as long as they can still run their favorite Windows apps), and who want to get HDTV not only to watch the latest adventure flick, but so they can get NASA's live space footage in glorious high definition.

You know, I'm not sure why I'm talking about these people in the third person, since I strongly suspect I'm one of them as well. In fact, if you count yourself in this category, I'd like to ask you a favor. We're putting together a Gift Guide to exhibit what we think will be the most exciting tech gadgets for this holiday season. If you've seen something -- or heard rumors about something -- that you would love to find wrapped and with your name on it, leave a comment below and let me know what it is.

I can't promise you that the overweight guy will deliver it, but at least you might be able to point at the Web site and say, casually, "You see that? Boy, that looks really cool. I wonder if somebody might.... nah.... still, it would be nice if...."