Bozos in the cloud

Wavy Gravy famously used to say, "We are all bozos on the bus, so we might as well enjoy the ride," meaning none of us really knows what we're doing. We do the best we can, try to look cool and hope nobody notices when we screw up, when it'd be so much easier to simply admit we're all just trying to figure it out, and let our mistakes hang out for all to see, so others don't have to make the same mistakes. You've got to take chances, and that's what I've done by moving from the safety and familiarity of the desktop to the cloud.

Let me start by letting you know I'm a total bozo when it comes to this cloud thing. I think we all are. It's so new, nobody really knows how to do it all right, and many people are afraid to try. Will their stuff be safe? What if there is no Internet connection? So I'm putting on my red rubber nose and diving into the cloud for everyone to see -- hope you enjoy the ride.

My cloud journey started unexpectedly, eighteen months ago, when my 72-year old mother embarked on an adventure driving across the country. To help her keep in touch and plan the next leg of her journey, I bought her a Dell Mini 10 with 4 GB SSD drive, 512 MB of RAM and Ubuntu for $198. At that price, it was disposable.

I showed her how to get online, set her up with accounts on Yahoo, Blogspot, YouTube and Photobucket, and I told her not to save anything to the machine's tiny hard drive, just in case the computer was lost or broken. She had no idea what a cloud pioneer she was.

The Dell Mini (and my mother) survived the adventure and she left the netbook with me, the evidence of her travels safely uploaded to her blog and other sites. I was so impressed with how much she'd been able to do with such a basic machine, I was sold on online services and started to move myself to the cloud. I started a different journey.

At first, I thought of it as my emergency backup plan. I uploaded important documents to Office Live and Google Docs, just in case. Then I realized how convenient it was to be able to get to my work anywhere I had an Internet connection, and I started using my online versions exclusively.

There were relapses. Photoshop does a lot more than online photo editor Picnik. It took less brain power to do things the old way, instead of figuring out how to do it online. I'd cheat by powering up my Windows desktop when I couldn't figure out how to do something online.

A turning point came several hours into trying to recover data from my other half's crashed laptop. I decided it was time to burn some bridges. I wiped my Windows machine, created a 4 GB partition, installed Ubuntu 10.10 and the Chrome browser, and uninstalled all the programs Ubuntu would allow. I'd have to sink or swim.

So far, my experience has had mixed results. I started out using just apps and extensions from Google, but found I needed more than that, so I've tried a few others that got good reviews, and I've abandoned a few that just didn't work for me. In a future post, I'll write about which apps and extensions I really like, and which ones I uninstalled after trying them. I promise to tell you about my great big flops along with my eureka moments. I hope you'll enjoy the ride with me.

Robert Wolf Mirasol is a systems administrator at a large company. He recently decided to move his entire digital life into the cloud and share the experience. He's a military veteran, and triathlete who was given a citation by the mayor of Chicago for his work mentoring underprivileged teens in the field of computer technology. He has embraced minimalism in areas beyond technology -- he owns fewer than one-hundred things. Two are motorcycles, which he races at Southern California racetracks. He crashes. A lot.