so what is the cloud anyway?

Big brain geeks and IT professionals all over the world keep on debating exactly what cloud computing and ‘the cloud’ actually are. To me it seems what you think the cloud is depends on what you’re trying to do. Here’s just a few, you can Google for others:

• The academic description.
• A much simpler description – only the first bullet applies
• A euphemism for the internet

If you want to geek out try Nati Shalom’s post.

So which is it?
It’s all of the above. But as far as we’re concerned here the cloud is online software that replaces programs installed on your hard drive, available for free to consumers or for a low pay as you go price. The idea is to replace bloated programs like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, Outlook, Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, GIMP, Money, or Quicken that require huge hard drives and ever growing processors. It’s services that let you replace local hard drive storage and data backup with online storage and file management services. It’s completing tasks like shopping – for books, movies, music, appliances (large and small) electronics, travel, even cars and groceries. It’s scheduling appointments, tracking your kids, educating yourself or your family, keeping in touch, earning some income, finding a job, or finding your high school sweetheart.

The cloud is the internet, used to entertain yourself, organize your shedule, communicate with anyone, save yourself time, improve your quality of life, and save yourself money. My definition cuts across all the geekspeak you can find earlier in this post. I don’t want to debate the cloud, I want to use it. I’ll use my worktime to argue the technical points. I’m at home and I want to relax, with my head in the cloud.

thunderstorms at the beach

June, July, and August – not my favorite times to be at the beach. Too hot, too humid, too crowded. But we come anyway, to get away from the day to day routine, to relax just a little bit. And I come for the thunderstorms. The summer weather down here almost guarantees late afternoon or evening thunderstorms - monsoon rain, lightning that fries your retinas, and thunder that shakes the walls. Oh yeah, and the wind too – 30 to 40 mile an hour gales of cool air providing a short respite from the oppressive tropical heat. As soon as the clouds pile up and the wind starts to stir I like to sit on the porch and just watch and listen. Tourists scatter, and until the thunder booms you can hear them clattering over the bridge off the island, clogging the road back to whereever they’re parked for the week. The birds disappear, the frogs go quiet, and the gators go deep into their ponds and creeks. The golfers look for shelter and the bottom drops out.

Waves of rain blow down the fairways, the trees sway dangerously close to toppling over, and your ears pop with every peal of thunder. Strobes of lightning freeze the scene, only to be replaced a few seconds later by a new one. Other people talk about nature’s fury, but for me there’s peace in the chaos of wind, rain, light and sound. The only thing better than an afternoon thunderstorm is a nighttime storm.

Because of where we live down here once the sun goes down, if we turn off the lights our porch is almost pitch black dark. You sit in the dark, only able to guess at what’s going on around you. Then the lightning bursts across the sky, and you’re surrounded by literally millions of tiny sparks as the raindrops reflect each bolt. It’s almost like looking into the night sky from the middle of the ocean, the only light coming from he raindrops and lightning.  I can clear my mind and just listen and wait to for the next flash.

The storms are too short, usually less than 30 minutes. But each one is completely unique tiny vacation. There’s not a lot of reasons to come to the beach in the summer in my opinion, but 1 good storm can make the entire trip worthwhile.

why a netbook?

I made a deliberate choice in shifting my personal computing to a Dell Mini 9 Netbook PC. To be completely honest, the first reason was the ‘toy’ factor. I like digital toys, and netbooks are the new cool toy. But there’s other reasons for the mini.

First we’ve been blue skying the idea of low powered pcs and cloud apps for most of the employees of Duke Energy for a while as a cost management option. We haven’t done anything with it yet, but I figured I’d play around with one for a while and see if I could work with it. If I can, than most of my colleagues who do general office type documents, email, and web surfing can, and we can save millions of dollars on hardware and software. So much for the “I have a serious reason for doing this” bullshit – I want to have fun with it!

But the main reasons are these: The mini runs a low powered Atom processor (1.6 GHz), has relatively little memory (1GB RAM) and little internal storage (it shipped with a 8 GB solid state hard drive and arrived with about 3.5 GB free). So I can’t load a bunch of bloatware like Office, Photoshop, sound editing apps, etc plus store my music and photographs. I have 15GB of music alone, plus another 8 GB of photos. So the mini forces me to rethink how I do my computing.

I need thin versions of all the software I use, so I look to the cloud. I need separate storage and my options are to buy more storage media or use online storage. Online storage is free, so let’s start there. And the machine isn’t powerful enough to do anything more than display multimedia files – it will play mp3s and videos, but you can’t edit them. Look at all those requirements and the cloud is worth spending some time exploring. There’s a lot of options, and what you choose depends on how you prefer to work, store, and share your information, but we’ll look at a couple of different approaches, mix, match, combine and separate to get to what works best for what you want to do.

Finally, back to the ‘toy’ factor. It’s a lot of fun to take the mini to Starbucks or the library and see how many people stare before they come over to see just what this tiny thing is.

STOP IT!!!!

While the death of Michael Jackson is a tragedy for his fans and family let’s remember who he was. A very talented child and young adult who got pretty freaky as he got older. I just heard him compared to MOZART for Christ’s sake. The man hit his peak at 10, after that it was a long slow decline. Yes he was talented, but no he wasn’t Mozart, and no, he wasn’t bigger than The Beatles, and no he wasn’t bigger than Elvis. Tragically, his offstage life by far overshadowed his talent. Death and hyperbole go together I guess.

netbooks and the cloud – some rules

For me, working in the cloud is something of a social experiment. I already run software that does everything I intend to move to the cloud and then some. But the idea here is to minimize the time and money spent on computing while maximizing the flexibility. So I have to set some rules for myself and this blog. Followup posts will dive a little deeper into the how and why of individual rules.
1. No device (computer, phone, multimedia device) I use for any computing can cost more than $300. A seeming arbitrary number, but more on that later.

2. The computers I use for all cloud computing will be a Dell Mini 9 Netbook. More to come here as well.

3. Any device used must be mobile, or not owned by me but guest accessible at no cost.

4. All applications used must be free. They may offer premium, fee based services, but there must be a cost free entry point.

4. All software used must be “open” i.e. not requiring any provider specific supporting components that are not considered open standards by the geeks who run the web. There is ONE exception, I’ll talk about that too.

6. I can’t use anything provided by my employer, that would be cheating.

That’s probably all the rules we need. Remember, one of my main goals is to save us money and time. Because of that there will be tradeoffs in almost everything we try to do. Most of the time it’s trading advanced features and performance for cost. Then again, who really needs all those bells and whistles anyway? Well, professionals and serious hobbyists probably do, but even they don’t need them for everything they do so I think we’ll find there’s something for everybody here. At least I hope so.

a new series – netbooks and cloud computing

I can’t help it – I’m a geek. I feel like writing a series of posts, with occasional followup, on netbook computers and cloud computing. At least you’ll get my spin, hopefully without too much techie talk on those subjects