If you have a moment, own a Mac and use Internet Explorer, then pop on over to Alexander Wilson Studios sometime.

Wilson, a (deep breath, now) singer/songwriter, author, developer, actor and “comic stripper” (get your mind out of the gutter — he draws comics), has created a series of dandy little icons to sit in your Explorer toolbar, and take you to your favourite sites.

There’s icons for everything from Amazon.com to NAACP to National Public Radio to Michael Moore in all their tiny, tasteful RGB glory.

Wilson is a member of a surprisingly large club of people who create stuff and post it online for people like you and me to use for free. Desktop pictures, icons, software — all offered without any apparent ulterior motive except glory.

It’s the same spirit of altruism, community and, okay, obsession that leads people to spend endless hours crafting guides to obscure TV shows and other arcane online resources… arcane, that is, until you need one.

Even where such sites sell banner advertising, the goal is usually to pay some small portion of the costs of running and hosting the site. A very few of them might one day turn a profit, but most webmasters are in it for love of the subject matter and a genuine desire to make a contribution.

It’s a cheery thought in a week when both AOL and Microsoft have unleashed marketing blitzes for their respective very-much-for-profit online services.

Theirs is a mindset where you don’t put a thing online that doesn’t, at the end of the day, enhance shareholder value.

But at least for now, the Net is still a place where social capital is still just as important as the other kind.

While we’re talking about matters athletic, Canada AM has a piece on sports drinks and nutrition, including this passage:

“Study after study from the Gatorade Sports Science Center has shown that athletes stay better hydrated and perform better when they use a sports drink instead of plain water.”

Well, shoot. If you can’t trust the folks at Gatorade to give you a completely unbiased opinion on the value of sports drinks, who the hell can you trust?

I’ve started running, inspired in part by an article in Runner’s World. The gist of the article was that getting out, working up a bit of a sweat and coming back again is the goal; whether you spent some or even most of that time walking is your business.

Maybe you’ve known that for years, in which case you’ve probably progressed to triathlete status and have your own endorsement deal with a sports drink maker, and more power to you.

But the rest of us carry around some sense of obligation that if you strap on a pair of running shoes, you had damn well better run in them. Anything less isn’t worth doing.

It’s easy to get trapped in that mindset with just about anything. Yeah, you could take up painting, but deep down you’d never be brilliant at it. I could write a novel, but it would never qualify as great literature. And so we never do.

Which is actually more than a little dumb. Set aside the question of whether those doubts are well-founded. Why assume that we have to excel at something to make it worthwhile?

It’s the Star Trek fallacy. (Bear with me for a sec.) One of the show’s memes (especially in Next Generation) is a near-mystical reverence for the captain’s chair and the thrill of command. It seemed there wasn’t a single character on the show who didn’t have some kind of ambition in that direction.

The two exceptions:

• Miles O’Brien, who started a family and left for Deep Space Nine. Figure he wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t so career-crazy?
• And Wesley Crusher, who dropped out of the whole Starfleet rat-race altogether to transcend human existence, time and space.

But there are things that are well worth doing, even if you can’t be the best, great or even noticeably good at them. And while we generally recognize that fact in many areas of our lives, sports and the arts seem to be exceptions.

So now I’m doing a workout that won’t put any Olympic records at risk… but that will get me out into the Endowment Lands, and will get my pulse pounding the way it ought to at least three times a week. Ten minutes of warmup, then I get into a rhythm: two minutes running, one minute walking, for the next fifteen to twenty minutes. Then it’s another five to ten minutes of cooling down and stretching.

And that’s it. For now.

I have ambitions. Like being able to run comfortably for half an hour at a stretch. And doing one of those fun runs — or even a marathon — sometime next year.

But in the meantime, I’ll settle for making modest progress. The time may come when I’ll strive for something more, but until then, I think Miles O’Brien had the right idea.

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse — A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics.

Now this is long overdue.

For the past several years, webmasters have been fighting a losing battle with intellectual property lawyers and the corporate interests they represent. Someone will put up, say, a fan site for their favourite hockey team. The next thing they know, they get a sternly-worded letter from the NHL’s lawyer ordering them to remove logos, photographs and other material. That letter is often copied to their web hosting company… which often plays it safe, and pulls the plug on the site.

I’m not sure if the numbers are out there, but I’m willing to bet that cease-and-desist letters have brought down more web sites than hacking has.

Read on…

It’s been a punishing few years for writers in Canadian TV drama. Long-running shows like Traders vanished without warning, and the networks are leery of new one-hour series. The number of new all-Canadian drama series launching this fall: one.

One possible reason: new CRTC rules, according to an article in Canadian Screenwriter. Those rules loosened TV drama requirements in 1999 Ôø? and the results were, ahem, dramatic. “Since 1999 we’ve gone from 12 dramatic series to five, and the trend will continue,” says actor Paul Gross in a recent Canadian Press story.” I think it’s desperate.”

Read on…

Tonight’s the night Ôø? the premiere of the most promising Canadian sitcom in ages, Rideau Hall on the CBC at 7:30 p.m.

Actually, the premiere was back in January, when two one-hour specials aired back to back: Rideau Hall and An American in Canada (which will pop up in January as the CBC’s first high-definition project). So many viewers have already met Governor General Regina Gallant (Bette MacDonald), the one-time disco diva named to the vice-regal post by a cynical Prime Minister bent on destroying Canada’s monarchy from within.

I’ve read an early draft of one of the scripts, and it looked smart, funny and surprisingly politically savvy — which is saying something, given our national record of cranking out sitcoms that land squarely in the creaky-to-godawful range.

Read on…