Brad’s Sketchpad

Amazon expands its shipping program to independent online retailers.

Silicon Valley startup Vudu creates an Internet movie store for the television.

The new wave of social networking for the mobile phone.

Last summer, with my brothers Brian and Eric, Jennifer and I took an incredible rafting trip down the Colorado River, through the first half of the Grand Canyon. One of our guides, an erudite, friendly guy that we all called “Dr Michael,” seemed to know an awful lot about fatal mishaps in canyon history. For good reason: it turned out that Dr. Michael Ghiglieri was the co-author of the longtime Arizona bestseller, “Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon,” which pretty much covers the territory you’d expect.

During one of those sparkling nights in the canyon, the doctor mentioned he was working on a new book: Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. My razor-sharp journalistic instincts kicked in. Back at home after the trip, I bided my time and kept in touch with him. This week, I took the opportunity of the new book’s impending publication to meet Dr. Michael again in Yosemite and write this article for the Escapes section of the New York Times. Needless to say, rational readers of his excellent, thorough and chilling book will not be wandering off Yosemite’s marked trails anytime soon.

RIM’s Blackberry service went down Tuesday night for 10 hours. I didn’t notice but plenty of others did.

There’s no use denying it- online discourse can get pretty ugly. Maybe it’s the relative safety of flinging insults from our computer desktops that lead so many online discussions down dark alleways of ire and verbal abuse.

After one recent brouhaha - the kathy sierra affair - a few digerati took notice and decided to act to improve civility on the Internet. Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are crusading for a Blogger Code of Conduct - a set of rules that bloggers can voluntarily follow and use to implicitly guide the behavior of guests to their sites.

I write about the effort, and its chances for success, here, in Monday’s paper.

Former police officer Mike Bender was a huge help while I researched my Wired magazine story last summer on the theft of our transponder-protected hybrid Civic. Then I discovered that Mike wasn’t just an aid to curious journalists, but a invaluable resource to many detectives and insurance investigators, who need all the help they can get when to understand the technology in 21st century cars.

In today’s auto section of the Times, I write about Mike, his assistance to law enforcement, and his campaign to illuminate the connections between street racing, auto theft and insurance fraud.