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The buzz surrounding the long-anticipated first shipments of Apple’s iPad has even managed to briefly eclipse Tiger Woods’ punctuated rehabilitation, but I’m finding it hard to get very excited. Perhaps some of my lukewarm reaction is because Apple’s latest darling has deliberate limitations on the types of web content and applications that it will support, or its numerous other shortcomings. But mostly it’s because I’ve fallen in love with another high-tech gadget: my new keyboard.I’d gotten along nicely with my trusty Microsoft ergonomic keyboard for a couple of years until it fell victim to an involuntary christening by the mug of Genmaicha tea that took a swan dive off my desk. After futile attempts at emergency resuscitation with a high-powered hair dryer failed, I borrowed the keyboard from my daughter’s computer and hit Tiger Direct’s web site to survey my options. A few days later, I swapped out my “loaner” for a shiny new Logitech Wave...

Imagine the shame of being the nine-year old brother of the thirteen-year old who snuck out of a school dormitory in Paris, so that he and his mates could visit Les Folies Bergère and down a few liters of booze…Well, I was the little brother. Big brother and companions would probably not have been caught by our vicious De La Salle Brother chaperones if it hadn’t been for the fact that he suffered a fit on his return to the dorm. I was rudely awakened with questions as to whether this had happened before, and, much worse from in locum parentis teachers, what they needed to do about it. What was I supposed to know?It’s probably just luck that big brother didn’t choke on his own vomit that night, and it was quite an end to a school pilgrimage (which was one hell of a laugh) to the religious sites of Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux in the Northwest, and Sainte Bernadette de Lourdes in the South, of France.Ever after that night, and with a diagnosis of Grand Mal Epileps...

My first personal experience of credit card fraud came while I was trying to buy a new piece of luggage at an outlet store on the Oregon coast. I was told that my card was “over my credit limit.”It was a weekend, of course, and at that time the 24/7/365 mentality of the credit card companies had not really clicked into vogue. On the Monday I discovered that my account, with a fake card, had been charged well over $10,000 in perfume purchases from a Parisian vendor. The perpetrator had even charged his return ferry fare to the UK on the same account!I was not out of pocket one penny – why should I have been? – but there is somehow a lingering mental feeling that perhaps one has been guilty of some indiscretion that allowed a criminal the opportunity to undertake his thieving ways. The credit card company was, of course, also not out of pocket because they simply debited the bad charges from the vendors involved.That was not the case some years later when, back in Oregon again, someone c...

I’ve been staring at the power outlet for about an hour now. I started about a meter away, but I have now reduced the distance to just a few centimeters. And I still feel OK. Maybe the side effects I am supposed to experience take longer to develop, or grow, inside me. Or perhaps I am just exposing myself to the wrong outlet. How am I supposed to know? Well, of course, I should have invested in a Graham-Stetzer Micro Surge Meter… Every large community in North America seems to have its own complimentary publication – typically an advertising rag with news items that have little to commend themselves. In Victoria, BC, we are lucky enough to be able to opt out of the distribution list of our local Black Press publication (one of over one hundred titles coming from seventeen presses in North America), vastly reducing our paper recycling. The screed for the local rag reads, “The Peninsula News Review has been the Saanich Peninsula's newspaper of choice since 1912…” Ever...