My friends and family are constantly telling me how thoughtless gifts certificates are because they don’t care what they get its the thought that counts. To them a gift certificate shows no thought. Me I’d much rather a gift certificate than a useless gift.
Do you have all of the Straight Dope books? Do all of your relatives have them? Chocolate is always nice, too.
For MY birthday I’m probably going to get a router(?), which will enable all of our computers to go online at the same time, and which will enable my daughter to send a print job to our printer, without copying the file to a floppy and coming in here and kicking me off MY computer.