Silicon footprint?

I've been diligently listening (while knitting) to my backlog of CBC podcasts, and much of it has been thought-provoking. A recent episode of Spark raised the issue of energy consumption and technology ; do people buy carbon offsets for ipod usage in addition to air travel? Now I don't feel so bad about the fact that my cell phone is turned off 95% of the time... Some of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed that there was one gift project that didn't make it to the last post: The Christmas Cardi ended up being finished in time for Ukrainian Christmas. There's a bit of a long story behind why I didn't finish it for December 25th - it involved being post call, The Gambler's antisocial brother, and some amaryllis bulbs...but we won't go there. The last seaming was done yesterday. I'm visiting The Purple Purl with Jackie this afternoon, so by the end of the day, the buttons will be sewn on and it will get mailed tomorrow. Together with the birthday shawls for my mom and my aunt. I swear. Really. No, I actually mean it this time... And now that the gift knits are done, it's back to the me knitting: I'm swatching for the Hourglass sweater from Last Minute Knitted Gifts. I am planning on striping these 2 Silk Garden colourways together. I had initially planned on doing 2 rows of each, but now I am thinking that it might work well to do 3 rows dark/2 rows light at the bottom, 2 rows dark/2 rows light in the middle, and 2 rows dark/3 rows light at the top. Or maybe it will look like crap. We'll see.