Time to try the cloud

Ok, a series of events have prompted this post about trying the whole cloud computing craze. A tweet, a blog, and a hard drive failure. The tweet (from Mark Greenfield) asked “As I move more and more of my business to the cloud, should I be thinking netbook rather than fully loaded laptop?” He was answered by pointing him to a blog post at camplesegroup.com.

Then, the next day my hard drive said it was about to go out. So I started to think, I can do this as well, and now seems like a good time to start. The aforementioned folks are both considering a lighter and easy to manage laptop. I’m thinking why not be able to just find an open computer with an internet connection and be able to be productive. This concept would work great at conferences, some teachers, or people that travel around a bit. I also realize this isn’t for everyone, just yet.  In the web world, most of the stuff I do and interact with is on a different server already, so I have that going for me.

So much is already there. Bookmarks, pictures, music, docs, email (both work and personal).  The only thing that I didn’t automatically know of is storage space. I have since found Dropbox and Humyo. I decided against Dropbox since it requires a local installation, where as Humyo doesn’t. I’m not against local installations, because there are things that I don’t know of a replacement for yet (Gimp jumps to my mind for me), but it would be nice to rely on local installs as little as possible.

So how has it been for a few days? I am currently working on a Linux box and it’s been fine. So far I haven’t needed any of the 16 GB of stuff (all work related) that I had to copy, makes me wonder… So the next time you send me a Word doc or Excel doc, you’ll never know, but it was probably edited on Google Docs.

todd