Joshua Weisbuch, 33, of Jamaica Plain says he's visited the iTunes
Music Store about 30 times since it opened less than three weeks ago.

Peter Wood, 24, of Beverly says he's gone at least once a day.

Barbara Mende, a grandmother from Waltham, says she's been only
three times. "I'm staying away from it," she says. "It's addictive."

Airlines have long tried to mask the undeniable fact that to travel,
you have to leave home. Back in the '30s, for example, when Pan Am's
China Clipper began overseas service, it offered dining on fine china
and had beds.

Analogues of those amenities - hot food, blankets, and pillows for
all - eventually made it into coach. Other amenities were examples of
trying to make flying even better than home: movies, magazines, and
service at your seat.

LAS VEGAS - The hot items at the 37th Consumer Electronics Show,
which officially opened here yesterday, are not any particular gizmos
but "convergence" and "interconnectivity."

Spurred by the advance of broadband and ever-cheaper digital
storage, consumer electronics companies are actively pursuing ways of
linking the tools and toys that populate the contemporary home.

To millions of New York City commuters, 1010 AM means WINS radio,
where they say, "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world."

But the slogan for 1010 AM on a tree-lined block in Brookline, if
they had one, would be more like, "You give us until the traffic signal
at Beacon Street changes, we'll tell you about this condominium for
sale."

You probably know a family that has established a network at home to connect all its computers. Each person in the house probably uses the network to share broadband internet access, the printer maybe, or a few files.

What's far less likely is that you have friends who are
using their networks to share entertainment: music, photographs, shows
recorded from television, games, movies, and more.

LAS VEGAS - The plastic and silicon mountains of gear at the
Consumer Electronics Show last week seemed impossibly high and wide at
times, but they yielded more than a few products and services worth
talking about.

If DVD screening while careering down the highway sounds cool to
you, then check out the rear-view mirror: Satellite TV is coming up
fast. A Rhode Island company, KVH Industries, put its version on the
road in September, and competitors aren't far behind.

PETRA, JORDAN — A downside to visiting any of the world's A-list travel sites is
that they are not so much virgin experiences as they are comparisons
with what you learned in school, with photographs you have seen, or
with tales cousin Jerry told from his summer vacation.

At the other end of the spectrum, you could call it the Z list, are
a million places you have never heard of because there is no reason to
go.

GIBRALTAR - Driving down the AP-7, the toll version of the highway
that follows Spain's Costa del Sol, we saw it shrouded in haze about 20
miles out, but there could be no doubt: This was Gibraltar, and it is
one big rock.

It's not only size that makes the impression. Even in the hilly
topography of Andalusia, the rock bursts so abruptly upward from the
bottom of Europe that it is easy to see why the ancients called it one
of the Pillars of Hercules, placed there to mark the edge of the known
world.