In search of the best geek vacations

June marks the beginning of vacation season, when offices empty out, traffic lessens, and the daily pace grows languid. The classic vacation mentality is all about getting away -- or at least that's what I've been told. Personally, I start getting crazy without access to my phone, favorite Web sites, blogs, and the like. On my last vacation to Yosemite, after several days of relative isolation, a fellow camper told me about a nearby lodge with an Internet-enabled public terminal. Much to my wife's chagrin, I visited every day for the rest of the trip.

Maybe I'm a hopeless geek, but I suspect I'm not alone. Do you have a geek vacation you'd recommend, some place where you can get away without leaving it all behind? Send your suggestions for vacations with a techie bent to steve_fox@infoworld.com. We'll take the best submissions and publish a guide to the best vacations for geeks later this month. Maybe there will still be time to change your summer plans.

Of course, if you just want to figure out an easy way to stay connected and informed, even when you're on the road, I have a simple solution for you. It's our just-launched InfoWorld Mobile Alerts program, a handy way for our cell-bound readers to stay current on critical IT news.

Here's how it works. Go to InfoWorld.com and sign up to receive news alerts in up to five categories: tech business, security and compliance, servers and datacenter management, storage and business continuity, mobility and unified communications. Whenever a big story breaks -- generally, no more than twice a week per category -- we'll send you a headline and story link in an SMS message. That may be sufficient for you, but if it's not, one click will bring you to a WAP page, where you can read or listen to an audio stream of the full article.

Another way to get InfoWorld.com content when you’re away from your browser? Two new e-mail newsletters. As you know, enterprise data protection is a growing concern for IT professionals, and our new weekly EDP Channel Report aggregates the best of the week’s coverage on that topic. And on Thursday, we’ll be sending out our first issue of the Green IT newsletter. It will feature exclusive, newsletter-only content from Sustainable IT blogger Ted Samson, along with links to Ted’s latest posts and all the other related InfoWorld content on sustainable IT. You can sign up for both newsletters here.

When you visit InfoWorld.com to sign up for Mobile Alerts, you should also check out the CTO 25 awards, our annual celebration of 2007's most innovative IT pros. This year's crop, culled from hundreds of candidates, comprises a particularly impressive bunch of forward thinkers. But more than just a slick collection of who's-who profiles, this year's awards provide a blueprint for IT success, as demonstrated by 25 men and women who figured out how to use technology to give their companies a true competitive edge.

Finally, we've got one more spanking-new feature on the site: the SOA Center, an all-in-one resource for service-oriented architecture. Along with the latest news, videos, highlights from our SOA Executive Forum, discussion groups, Dave Linthicum's Real World SOA blog, and pointers to the most relevant SOA commentary around the Web, we've pulled together a collection of our best how-to articles and SOA primers from the recent past.

The SOA Center is the first of many topic-related microsites we'll be rolling out this year. After all, we wouldn't want you to get bored… even if it is vacation time.