Vancouverite Tim Bray: "In math, I had worked like a dog to get Cs, and all of a sudden I was getting As in the computer courses. God was reaching behind my shoulder, telling me, ‘Kiddo, this is what you ought to be doing.’" He went on to innovate search engines, partner with Yahoo!, and invent XML.

Drupal and other open-source, GNU-licensed software lets activists, students, and, yes, megalithic companies give back to the community.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.