Frequent visits mean familiarity at the pharmacy and later riding the balance between a bearable level of pain and enduring hallucinations from the hundreds of dollars' worth of medication bought there.

Our columnist continues his dispatches from the front line against cancer. This week, how moving to a small town with great pizza doesn’t help with a lump in his gut.

Why you must always check the whereabouts of your football, and perhaps guard the goodies inside from your friends, too.

Nobody wants to die. I’m pretty confident that’s true, although I am just extrapolating from my own opinions on this one.

Dave Watson, the Straight’s AWOL Dot Comment man, circles the drain with a crafty tumour, his liver, and his ladylove, and stays afloat.

Normally, I wouldn't pay much attention to a site that collates news stories–especially one that's still in beta form–but an article by Newser ( www.newser.com/ ) cofounder Michael Wolff in the October issue of Vanity Fair intrigued me. Wolff, who indicates he was involved in some kind of disastrous never-again venture during the first dot-com boom, spends much of the article talking about why one shouldn't get into the news business these days.

New iPod models have some of the cool features of Apple's iPhone, but for real gadget fun, Brian the Brain is the one to pick.

When your summer hits are barely outperforming reruns of Friends, you know your broadcast model is in need of revamping.

Let's say you were interested in the noble rural sport of moose-taunting. ("Hey moosie, your mother's a whore.") Like cow-tipping, it can be dangerous (I have two cracked ribs that indicate I may be more than a little familiar with the consequences of teasing large ungulates), so perhaps you decide to research it a little using Google.

In the days before computers became a primary means of artistic expression, people had to make do by stretching the media formats they had available. One of the legendary magazines in the history of multimedia experimentation was Aspen , although it only put out 10 issues between 1965 and 1971. Andy Warhol, Marshall McLuhan, Lou Reed, and John Lennon were among its contributors. Now Aspen has been translated onto the Web ( www.ubu.com/aspen /) and is quite an intriguing artistic time capsule.

Of all the marvels of the Internet, key is being able to search it. The information you want could be out there, but it might as well not exist if you can't find it. Searching would still be impressive even if you had to go to a special building downtown to do it; the fact that it's accessible from your home or workplace is simply amazing.

Every so often, a technology comes along that has a subtle impact on our daily lives. It doesn't have to be a big before-and-after invention like the light bulb or the telephone. It can be just a little blessed thing like the rewind feature on a VCR (and its refinement on digital video machines–a buffer of just-watched live TV). This is the sort of thing that insinuates itself more subtly into our media-consuming lives, because it's a feature so useful it should have been there all along.

There's nothing like a multifaceted collection of sites built up by the long-term efforts of a single person. Minneapolis-based newspaper columnist and author James Lileks ( www.lileks.com ) is one such self-publisher who has a particular fascination for the quirky charm of mid-20th-century media and advertising. There's a lot posted here: unappetizing photos taken from cookbooks, postcards of diners, forgotten comic strips, matchbook covers, even some telegram art.

Consumer Reports has been around for a long time, but it still beats anonymous Web ratings for helping to make electronics purchases.

As pop-culture institutions go, the 90 years that Ripley’s Believe It or Not! has been around are practically a record. That also means that Ripley’s has appeared in most media forms, from print to radio and TV. And now it’s kept up-to-date on the Web ( www.ripleys.com ), where a well-designed site offers video clips, news items, podcasts (called oddcasts), and even archived episodes of the old-time radio series.

Recently, while perusing the advertisements and Web sites of a few major electronics retailers, I had several occasions when I was spontaneously moved to declare out loud (even though I was alone) that I couldn't believe how inexpensive some products had become. Take hard drives. I found a terrabyte unit (that's right, a thousand gigabytes) for $329. Admittedly that price only applied to sales via the on-line store, but it's an indicator of what we'll be paying soon in the malls.

By turning the tech-company model upside down with a mix of geekiness and business savvy, Google has made itself indispensable.

Summer is here, so it's a good time to look at some Web sites. If you were to leave your computer and go outside, you might discover that you're actually in some kind of huge Matrix-style virtual-reality simulation. I've been out there–I'm thinking of calling it First Life or something. Best to stay in the house, I figure.

It was bound to happen: Now even Web-distributed content can win an Emmy Award–if it's good enough, that is. That's what happened with It's JerryTime! ( www.itsjerrytime.com/ ). And after watching the handful of short animated films posted there and browsing some of the accolades the site has garnered ( American Splendor 's Harvey Pekar seems to be the most-referenced cultural touchstone), you'll probably agree there's some merit in going the independent route. But don't forget–you have to be good.

Since the summer television season is turning out to be one of the lamest on record (with the possible exception of Traveler ), maybe it's time to buy or rent some shows from the past. For several years, TVShowsOnDVD ( www.tvshowsondvd.com/ ) has tracked current and upcoming releases, offering reviews, comments, and rumours, plus on-line polls on what people would like to see out next. Or you could go outside and play, I guess.

The past few weeks have seen a lot of speculation on which public or private entity would purchase the parent company of the Bell mobile-phone service. Even Telus was in the fray for a few days, staying in just long enough to further drive up the price of BCE's stock. That offer made some people nervous, since the combined firm (Belus, perhaps?) could hold the contracts of about two-thirds of Canadian cellphone users. I guess they worried that would create a monopoly situation.

A few months ago, I thought about recommending the on-line graphic novel Shooting War ( www.shootingwar.com ), but it wasn't finished yet. Now all 11 chapters are available, and are even scheduled to appear in print later this year. Oddly, some of the more fanciful plot points of this terrorist struggle set in 2011 have come true, so you might as well read it now before it's as old as reruns of The Daily Show .

How would you feel if the government decided which mobile phone you were allowed to buy? Pretty pissed off, I'd imagine. How dare it restrict you to a few models with inferior capabilities? What gall.

If you wonder sometimes, 'bout sound and vision, panicking in Detroit, or who looks a lot likeChe Guevara, you must visit the David Bowie Wonderworld Fan Site ( www.bowiewonderworld.com/ ). You won't have to stand on a chair to make your point of view.

Last week, I talked about how a friend's surround-sound system would stubbornly and persistently revert to stereo playback, leaving three-fifths of the speakers with nothing to do. Turns out the core problem was with the programming that the installer performed on the universal remote.

The other day I was watching a movie at a friend's house (the excellent Mrs. Henderson Presents , starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, if you must know), and she complained that the surround sound in her home theatre never seemed to work. I'd watched a movie there once before but hadn't really noticed the lack.

There's no question that computer games have been one of the major driving forces behind the last couple of decades of computing, with programmers and hardware developers constantly challenging each other while gamers have provided the commercial impetus to keep everything going. But few people know that the first computer game was created in 1952.

A long time has passed since I reviewed a computer game—I usually leave that for Trigger Happy—but Star Wars: Empire at War managed to make the leap from Windows to a Mac version (Intel-based Macs only) relatively quickly, so I thought I’d leap too and buy it (Lucasarts, $60, rated teen). Not to mention the fact that May 25 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of the original movie to theatres, and much of the cast is represented in this game—in likeness and voice-clip form, anyway.

Too lazy to e-mail yourself chunks of public-domain books to read on your smartphone or PDA, or via your Web browser’s RSS feature? Then try DailyLit ( www.dailylit.com/ ), a free service that’ll educate you up with the classics, a chunk of text at a time.

"Open the pod bay doors" just wouldn't mean as much without our constant companions.

Theodore H. Maiman passed away at age 79, here in Vancouver, on May 5. Twice nominated for a Nobel Prize, winner of the Japan Prize and the Wolf Prize in Physics, and an inductee into the American National Inventors Hall of Fame, Maiman will perhaps be most remembered for building the world's first working laser in 1960, while conducting research under the auspices of the Hughes Aircraft Company.

High-tech gadgets.

Curious about the history and development of video games? Visit the Game Innovation Database ( www.gameinnovation.org/) to learn how we got to where we are today. And feel free to contribute anything you think is significant that hasn’t been added yet. I’d probably contribute a few things, except I’m too busy playing Star Wars: Empire at War and Silent Hunter III.

Even though the World Wide Web is about 20 years old, and Web-browsing software for things like Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer is under 15 years old, the impact has been considerable. And traditional media have probably been hit the hardest.

There are some interesting self-published e-books out there. Take Ray Newman's Abracadabra!: The Complete Story of the Beatles' Revolver, 103 pages of research documenting the making of Revolver , complete with quotes from interviews and Web links. It's a free download as a PDF from www.revolverbook.co.uk/ . Also check out the Google Earth–enabled views of London as the Beatles knew it in 1965 and 1966.

Now that there are so many Web logs (okay, I'll give in and call them blogs), people have developed innovative ways to organize masses of them. Placeblogger ( www.placeblogger.com/ ) goes by neighbourhood, city, region, and country to make it easier to pick up the chatter from far-off locales.

There are a couple of comments on the redesign of a favourite Web site I'd like to make. Yes, the venerable Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com/) redesigned its look a couple of months back. Even though I use the site dozens–sometimes hundreds–of times a month, I've been fairly indifferent to the changes. The old design (which persisted for about 600 years in Net time) was good for quick glances at movie ratings and viewer comments–perfect, in fact, for a five-second visit.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd digitized the good stuff from my collection of videotapes and stored the files on DVDs. I bragged about how much more accessible the files had become and how much less room the discs took up compared to the tapes. Naturally, that made some people jealous, and one reader even wrote in and requested a few more details on how one might go about doing such a conversion. So here goes.

Some Web sites are so huge that you could spend weeks seeing what's there. That's certainly the case with Archive.org, which holds constant surprises behind every click. From live concerts to corny old corporate-training films and absolutely everything in between, this site alone is almost all the Internet anyone needs.

This week I'd like to highlight a few interesting gadgets that have come to my attention. And I'd like to start by praising WowWee ( www.wowwee.com/ ). That's a great name for a company that makes such fun products. Most shoppers are probably familiar with the Robosapien and Roboraptor lines from WowWee–they always seem to be on display in electronics and toy departments because they're so cool.

Most people have heard of cyberpunk, that rapidly-becoming-real species of science fiction that involves plugging directly into cyberspace. Less well known is an entertaining subgenre called steampunk, generally set sometime in an imaginary 19th century in which steam technology and mechanical computers have reached the kind of potential imagined by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

If you're looking for original art in bulk quantities, check out the Daily Painters Gallery ( www.dailypainters.com/ ) for art by "painting a day artists and habitual painters". Sounds like we'd just be enabling the 130 artists involved by purchasing anything, but then you see a puppy you simply can't resist among the five dozen or so works added each day…

Although I've been discussing all-digitalentertainment setups lately–and obviously music is a big part of that–there's not much point in delving into further details of my activities. Picture a man ripping a CD. Now picture it thousands of times over the course of a year. Imagine him alphabetizing the resulting files and storing them on blank DVDs while watching TV in a window on his computer screen. Not too thrilling, is it?

Just over a year ago, I started to make the transition to a fully digital living-room setup. That meant converting my existing archives from videotape to DVD (it took a few months, but the chore is finally over) and, going forward, I've done all recording of television broadcasts directly to digital. There are a variety of stand-alone digital video recorders (DVRs) on the market, or you could do what I did and buy a video card equipped with a TV tuner and record directly onto your computer's hard drive.

Yes, the Net is stuffed with stores that sell weird crap but even so, British retailer I Want One of Those ( www.iwantoneofthose.com/ ) deserves special mention. Whether it’s a kit of decorative plastic pieces that turn a potato into R2-D2 or Darth Vader, a radio-controlled pirate ship, a USB–powered humping-dog toy, or an inflatable sumo-wrestler suit, it’s likely that your shopping cart won’t remain “disappointingly empty” for long.

Interested in learning how to block leg kicks while kickboxing, do a U-turn with a dogsled, or plan a vacation in Bigfork, Montana? Well, hie thee down to Expert Village ( www.expertvillage.com/ ), where there are more than 15,000 short on-line videos featuring purported experts who teach you the obscure and the practical, all for free. Here's a yummy one: how to cook Cajun-style deep-fried whole turkey in 15 easy steps. Then let's learn some trick billiards shots.

Without planning it, I've spent the past year migrating to an all-digital living-room setup. I knew what I was doing, but the full effect of it is only now sinking in. All the effort that went into ripping CDs and digitizing stuff that was on videotape (okay, maybe effort is too strong a word, but compulsive dedication wouldn't be too far off) has finally paid dividends in terms of ease of finding things when I want them. Plus, I have a lot more space on my shelves.

Feel like you're missing out on too many commercials because modern technology makes ads easy to skip over? Then immerse yourself in the stunning array of corporate logos at The History of Branding ( www.historyofbranding.com/ ). After being dazzled by all the familiar shapes and colours, you can read about each design's history, or you may have the urge to go out and do some shopping.

Over the years, broadcast radio has had its share of ups and downs. Unfortunately, most of the ups occurred during the first half of its history, while the downs have filled the last 40 years or so. At one time, radio was the single media form that pretty much everybody accessed, but then those damn scientists came up with new inventions (Walkmans, iPods, CD players for cars, televisions for every room of the house) and everyone got distracted.

Tired of eating a bowl of ordinary cereal every morning? Then visit Mr Breakfast ( www.mrbreakfast.com/ ) or Mrs Breakfast ( www.mrsbreakfast.com/ )—depending on whether you're male or female—for articles, product reviews, 9,600 restaurant ratings (including several in the Lower Mainland), shopping hints, and more than 1,700 recipes for the most important meal of the day. I can't decide if this is useful or just plain loopy. Isn't the Internet full yet?