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It's time to upgrade my crummy old refurbished Moto cell phone to a snappy smartphone. (Yes, I will recycle the relic.) I've narrowed down my choices, and I'm either going to hold out for a next-gen iPhone, or go for the BlackBerry Curve.

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Train travel, glamorized by film noir, is in vogue once again, thanks to soaring oil prices and the dismal state of air travel. But attractive prices alone won't fill those railcars with business passengers.

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Ken Abendshien is CIO of Midwest Health Systems Data Center, a tech support organization that provides outsourced data center services to 27 small county hospitals and long-term care facilities in Kansas, and two in Nebraska. Some of those sites are really tiny -- treating one or two patients a day. And with those hospitals having even tinier IT budgets, Abendshien needs to stretch his resources very carefully.

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It's the eve before Interop here in Las Vegas and we've just wrapped up Energy Camp where, as can be seen from the user-decided agenda, the conversation went deep and wide on a variety of subjects related to the reduction of information technology's carbon footprint. Two key takeaways for me were (1) many so-called "green" remedies have a dark enough side to them that they may not be as green as we think they are, and (2) it may take another 15 or 20 years before we have it all sorted out. It's not as bad as it sounds, but ...

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As another Earth Day passed, I thought it was appropriate to pass along some green tidbits within the content management and IT space. I ran across Jarrod Gingras' post referring to how the green movement is affecting purchasing decisions for SaaS-based Web content solutions.

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It might be tempting to write off corporate activities on Earth Day as empty, cynical, or too little too late. But as I was driving to Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition in downtown Los Angeles this morning and saw the skyline and its brownish air backdrop, my real thought was "Now more than ever."

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Today is Earth Day, and if your hype-filter is on the fritz, you'd better go some place quiet, where the big green machine can't find you. Otherwise you're likely to encounter a cacophony of well-intentioned greenness.

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Apple plans big changes to its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks, with new versions that use more powerful, recent Intel processors, eco-friendly materials, and that borrow design elements from the new, thin MacBook Air and aluminum iMacs.

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Three well-known tech bloggers have had heart attacks since December, and a story in the New York Times suggests that the high stress of blogging may be a cause.

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Do you continue to regularly blow money on books, even though you haven't read one cover-to-cover since The World According To Garp? What if there were a way to indulge your love of reading and simultaneously save some trees?

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Are you coming to Energy Camp on April 28 where we'll be having an open conversation about green technology? If not, why not? Why do I ask? I was just checking the logs on our YouTube channel (TechWebTV) and noticed something unusual. Or maybe not.

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If you're an IT professional, solution provider, or someone else with an interest in how to trim back the energy consumption of technology (especially if you're someone with domain expertise to contribute to the broader conversation about "green IT"), then I hope you'll join me and Energy Camp master of ceremonies James Governor (blog) for Energy Camp in Las Vegas on April 28 (just prior to the start of Interop). Registration is free and it gets you a coveted hall pass into Interop, too.

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I'll get to the undercrackers in a moment. First, a word about a global event scheduled for Saturday, March 29, which is either a planet-friendly gesture we can all feel good about, or a misguided act of "environmental indoctrination."

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This is the time of year many of us start thinking and talking about losing weight. Again. Vague goals like wanting to "slim down for summer" are tough to achieve,in part because they are imprecise. (And in part because pancakes make superior butter delivery platforms.) The desire to "be more green" is another vague yearning I'm hearing a lot these days.

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My first post of 2008 was a content management trend watch: number two on the list was the movement toward green IT.

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The XPrize Foundation is doing for cars what it has already done for commercial space flight (and is trying to do for human genomics and lunar exploration) -- it is pushing for groundbreaking technical innovation by offering big prize money.

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In a study of 100,000 IT professionals surveyed by The Corporate IT Forum in the U.K., "About 58% said it was difficult to make a business case for green IT; they found it difficult to overcome the 'so what?' factor."

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Here's the problem: Power costs keep rising, while storage needs keep growing. Whether your data center is a couple of servers or a roomful of racks, creating efficiencies doesn't have to be complicated. Here are five ways to start cutting costs today.

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Call it sinflation. The Vatican has doubled the number of mortal sins and one of them is really dirty: polluting the environment.

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If you're certain that daylight-saving time is good for the planet, put your hands up. Now put your hands down, because a recent study of more than 7 million residential meter readings over a three-year period shows what many of us have believed anecdotally for years. Electric bills go up when we switch to daylight-saving time.

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E-mail governance might not be the sexiest thing when it comes to content technologies, but don't tell that to your CIO or general counsel. Besides keeping them out of jail, a solid e-mail governance strategy drives compliance, improves information retrieval, and reduces paper.

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California dairy cows are giving the state's power grid a blast of renewable energy, but the real money maker in bovine biogas may lie elsewhere.

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GM announced plans Tuesday to roll out a second-generation version of the GM Hybrid System with a more powerful lithium-ion battery. The announcement comes just weeks after GM vice chairman Robert Lutz called global warming a "total crock of s***."

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I'm as eager as anyone to see more products that can be fired up with solar power. But some gadgets should never have made it off the drawing board -- they're just too goofy. Like these.

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If Daniel Plainview weren't fictional, he'd be howling bloody hell. Congress on Wednesday passed a bill that would yank $17.65 billion in tax breaks to oil companies and reallocate the savings to fund tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy technologies.

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Michael Specter's article "Big Foot," in the current issue of The New Yorker, examines some common assumptions about carbon emissions and how technology is going to have to step on the gas to tackle the climate change problem. It's worth a close read.

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IT budgets and tech staffs were clobbered during the recession of the early 2000s. But how would they survive this time around? Hasn't most of the "fat" already been slashed, or has much of it returned?

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A Virgin Atlantic 747 topped off its fuel tank with the oil of 150,000 coconuts and flew from Heathrow to Amsterdam Sunday. The odor of pina coladas hanging over the economy cabin should have been a giveaway -- this idea is a stinker.

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New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning received a trophy, a ring, and his pick of Cadillacs for being the game-winning MVP of Super Bowl XLII earlier this month. But he won't be driving his new Caddy anytime soon.

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The U.S. Navy says it is "very confident" it blasted a defective spy satellite to bits with an interceptor missile Wednesday night. Its next order of business, after definitively confirming the strike today or Friday, should be to play up the positive environmental benefits of the mission.

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Last week the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced a list of grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. The goal was to identify what needs be done by the engineering community to help humanity thrive.

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The MDI OneCAT may be the cleanest car ever invented. It may also be a smokescreen for the dirt-cheap -- and dirty -- Nano from Tata Motors.

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Scientists have developed a knee brace that captures energy from a moving knee, much like regenerative braking charges a battery in a Toyota Prius.

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Crunches at dawn? Wind sprints on the beach? No. Try hauling photovoltaic roof panels and lifting solar inverter systems instead.

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Let me knock down two tired reasons why just about none of us will be able to vote online today, Super Tuesday, or at any time during the 2008 presidential primaries or general election.

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What else ya got? Super Bowl XLII (double extra large!) will be remembered for the stunning outcome on the field (Giants 17 - Patriots 14), not for the NFL's environmental efforts off-field.

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In his final State of the Union speech Monday, President Bush outlined his goals for building a future of energy security. It's predicated on a move toward cleaner coal and building up our capacity to generate nuclear power. Here's what we're aiming at.

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Solar and wind technologies are as popular as Tom Brady and his sparkling choppers. Everybody wants some. Sadly, the green initiatives investors should be pushing for even harder are as glamorous as snaggle-toothed Nanny McPhee: data center efficiencies.

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Intel is now the single largest corporate purchaser of green power in the United States, according to the EPA.

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Can green business be good business? Two companies highlighted at Demo '08 this week are foregoing the not-for-profit model. One has unveiled a smarter charger for consumer electronics, the other tracks and shares users' energy-saving actions.

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Green technology isn't exactly filled with tales of heart-stopping adventure and miscreant behavior, but a new series of environmental videos sure makes it sound that way.

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The green rush is in full swing. But like overzealous forty-niners soiling themselves over a chunk of pyrite, companies are discovering there's a lot of fool's green mixed in with the good stuff.

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