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This story was originally published on Sept. 18, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

Right after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, I bought a used Netra T1 (a 1 rack-unit Sun box). I got it for a song on eBay from a hosting provider that was going under, and for the price, how could I pass it up? Sure, it was unnecessary -- but it was so cheap! I had to have it. ...

Folks in IT tend to ask a lot of questions. We're a curious breed by nature. In fact, we have to be. Change comes about so quickly in our industry, technology moves so fast, and our businesses adapt so fluidly that we have to ask questions just to keep up. Some might even say that a healthy curiosity is the hallmark of a successful IT professional -- and I wouldn't disagree...

Some people say that there's nothing worse than a sour economy. I, for one, don't agree. What could possibly be worse, you ask? Simple: a bad economy in the middle of a budget cycle. ...

Physicists tell us that only a small percentage of the universe can be seen directly. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is what they call "dark" -- composed of matter and energy that we know is there but that we can't observe, identify or analyze directly. ...

Ever heard of Themistocles? In case you haven't, it's a tragic story. ...

Physicists tell us that time is not constant. Interesting as that may be for physicists, it's also a concept that the rest of us can get behind once we put a little bit of a different spin on it. ...

Want to try an experiment? ...

Nobody likes it when people renege on a promise. You don't have to look very far to see how we as a society view people who lie, break promises or misrepresent themselves. In movies, the bad guy is always dishonest. In books, liars invariably get clobbered: Iago gets tortured, Claggart gets walloped, and Dante puts the liars all the way at the bottom of hell. In fact, even our English word "hell" is derived from the Old Norse "hel" -- a place for punishing "oathbreakers and criminals."

Ever heard that story about the mother who lifted the car off of her son? I thought it was an urban legend until I looked it up. But apparently it's true: In 1982, Angela Cavallo saw her son being crushed by a 1964 Impala. Seeing that happen brought Angela to a state of panic so severe that she (temporarily) gained superhuman strength -- enough strength necessary to lift the car off her son...

Have you seen that movie "Groundhog Day?" You probably have, but on the off chance that you missed it, it's the movie where Bill Murray's character (who's kind of a jerk) wakes up every morning to find that it's the same day -- Groundhog Day -- over and over again. He's forced to relive the same day repeatedly, and as he does so, he slowly learns enough about life to transform into a pretty likable guy...

"Do you remember where you were on Y2k?" ...

Ever heard of a tarpan? ...

For some people, November is all about festivity: turkey, cranberry sauce and the start of the long ramp-up to the December holidays ...

Have you seen the "change of plans" commercial? I can't remember what it's an advertisement for, but the ad consists of a series of clips of two businesspeople in a series of airports talking to each other via cell phone. Every time they talk, they say things like "change of plans, going to Singapore" or "change of plans, on my way to Australia." Like post-modern "Carmen Sandiegos," they "pop" around the world from city to city, never quite knowing where they'll wind up...

It sounds tremendously obvious to say it this way, but applications are everywhere. Think about it -- your office suite, your e-mail reader, even the software you're using right now to read this -- these are just a fraction of the thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of applications you use daily both personally and professionally ...

Do you remember the "Perfectly Normal Beast" from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series? If you haven't read about it (or don't remember), the Perfectly Normal Beast is a fictional creature -- kind of like a buffalo -- that migrates twice a year across the fictional "Anhondo Plain." ...

It seems like everybody's talking about e-discovery nowadays -- just take a look at any IT trade journal or IT news source and you're likely to see at least one article about what e-discovery is and how to prepare for it ...

It goes without saying that most IT shops operate in a high-stress, high-workload environments. As technologists, we have limited budgets, limited staff, and dozens of projects on our plate -- it often feels like there aren't enough hours in the day just to keep up with today's workload, never mind planning for tomorrow's ...

We don't typically stop to think about it, but we all need feedback in order to succeed. Imagine, for example, trying to cook a meal without periodically tasting it to see if the spices are right. When it comes down to it, trying to do anything -- even the simplest of tasks -- is much more difficult without empirical validation ("feedback") ...