"The Cloud"

2012-01-21T17:44:00.000-06:00

A few years ago I was helping a non-technical friend with a laptop he had just bought. He did the usual thing and shopped price. He got what he paid for. Along with this wonderful piece of hardware he now had one of the first Windows Vista machines I had seen. My personal systems as well as my work computer were all XP. After a couple of hours literally fighting with Vista to try and get his new PC to do what we wanted I was adequately nudged in the direction of my first personal computing experiment.

At the time I was a somewhat avid PC gamer. I was dutifully programmed to tout the superiority of the keyboard+mouse combo versus console controllers, along with all the other boasts of your typical pro-PC anti-console gamer. But my mind had begun entertaining the notion of sitting on the couch with a controller in my hands, and most of my Guild Wars guild had migrated to Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare on the Xbox360. I was being recruited. I came up with a plan to sell all my PC hardware for a song to my good friend and coworker, buy a MacBook and an Xbox360, and begin my first little personal computing "solutions" experiment.

The end result was a success. I became a bit of a Mac-evangelist, and I traded-in my BlackBerry for an iPhone. I have been extremely satisfied with my Apple devices and the operating systems ever since. I roll my eyes when people complain that Macs cost too much. I won't dive in to the actual debate here but in my experience they're better hardware and vastly better included software. After a somewhat lengthy period of adaptation to FPS using a console controller I became a successful convert on that front as well. The difference with the Xbox was that it has many glaring deficiencies when compared to PC gaming so I've tried to remain realistic about why I like it, but all the reasons a PC gamer is a PC gamer remain valid, so I am not so much the evangelist for the console. I will take up the debate just to annoy my friends from time to time, but that's the only reason. For general convenience and social reasons it was a better fit for me personally.

Now let's flash forward to today. One thing that seems evident to me is that Apple does not spend much energy ensuring that iOS innovations and thus updates do not impact performance on legacy devices. That would be fine if their management system allowed for forking to alleviate the problem but it doesn't. I don't count that as a huge problem only because for the less-technical technology customer I think the way they approach it is the right way. I could not imagine my Mom trying to use Ubuntu or Android and being happy with them. I think sometimes geeks fail to consider the notion that some people don't share our technological priorities. People tend to think that their way is the only way. I definitely fall into the mindset from time to time but I try pretty hard not to. Anyway, my iPhone 3Gs and my MacBook have been a couple of the great gadget loves of my life, but they have become old dogs now. I recently decided to see what kind of Android devices I could switch to for little or no upfront cost with my provider. After some hemming and hawing I eventually decided that I didn't care too much about the fact that the Infuse had been more or less abandoned in terms of OS updates because I could ROM it, and while the Atrix was more powerful on paper, the screen and the overall form factor of the Infuse where the most important features to me. I pulled the trigger on the change, but I was very nervous about it. I really do love that old iPhone. It had just become so slow by iOS5 that I'll go back to the old dog reference.

What I've found since the switch is that Android is really neat. Like really, REALLY neat. I have found a paid Exchange client (Touchdown by Nitrodesk) that gives me back filterable email alerting which is a godsend when you are a support person, and that is something I haven't had since my BlackBerry. I have been living with SMS alerts instead because of the offsetting benefits of the iPhone. Now I don't have to compromise at all. I fully expected that I would have ROM'd the Infuse by the end of the first week, however I haven't run into a can't-do-that function yet that has given me a good reason. I'm not saying I won't ROM it but for now I'm actually very pleased with the stock Samsung Froyo 2.2 it ships with. User swap-able batteries, SD cards, and standard micro-USB are all huge wins. I do not purport to be first on the scene to point out those advantages over Apple. I just want to iterate that they are a big deal to me.

I have reached a duration of use with my Android phone that I was comfortable wiping and selling my iPhone. It actually made me a little sad but hey - $102 for it? That took the edge off. Now I have a new Android phone I like very much and an old MacBook that, while working, is clearly in rapid decline. This brought to mind the potential for a new experiment. Over the last year, even before changing phones, I have come to use and appreciate more of Google's products. In fact I've always used Gmail and Picasa. My more recent experiments have been with Docs, Reader, and Blogger. It occurred to me that I may actually be able to put all of my content in a cloud, even Google's. I started checking and found I could probably do it for free based on what I have and the amount of storage Google provides. I don't have tons of data. Furthermore I found that to increase my space with Google to more than I would possibly be able to use any time soon was a whopping $5 a year. Finally, Google music will house 20,000 songs at no cost. I knew I was in serious need of some deduplication of my iTunes library and once that was complete (thank you dougscripts.com) it put me at just over 5,000 tracks. The planets were aligning for the experiment.

One hurdle that I had to overcome was trust. Historically I have been the untrusting geek when it came to this sort of personal information management. I understand the concerns and I'm actually not on Facebook for privacy and principle reasons. But I have migrated to a much less guarded perspective about my files and who wants to see them over the last couple of years. I'm geekish, but not really hardcore. Let's just say I've never argued on Slashdot before. As for my personal data and cloud storage I've concluded that I'm just not that interesting, and I actually pay for my music. I'm also completely willing to abandon the modern world at the drop of a hat and go live in a log cabin North of the frost line. I totally understand why many of my fellow and much geekier geeks would never consider going 100% cloud. I just don't worry about it like I used to. I'm opting for the convenience and I suppose the potential for increased laziness. I am archiving all of these files to disk for mothball storage, and I am not ruling out the potential for the experiment to be a total disaster. Reverting would suck, but it's doable.
So here I am, spending weekends organizing and uploading my data. It's kind of exciting and I faintly remember the invigoration the last time I revamped my personal I.T. universe. The cornerstone of this whole experiment hasn't been mentioned yet though. That is the tablet. Before I had crystallized my plans for my computing after my MacBook gives up the ghost I was already seriously... OK, very seriously looking at the Asus Transformer. I didn't have the Android phone yet, I was looking for a new adventure, and while the obvious choice was a MacBook Air (I'm insane for portability), I wanted to expand my OS horizons. I had realized a while ago that I don't ask much at all of my computers anymore. I don't make music with them. I don't play games on them. I don't even use iMovie anymore. Don't be sad. It's because I've actually found that simplifying makes me happier than just about anything else other than I suppose backpacking. So I am content with just a Picasa stills gallery now as opposed to an iMovie. If I have time to make music I'd rather just find new music, play a guitar, or make electronic music at my buddy's. He's much better with the software and it's more fun to go over there and do it anyway. You get the idea. I have come to look at my computer as a means to access the simple things like documents, websites, and email. To me that sounded like overkill for a MacBook and right in the wheelhouse of a tablet. In my wishy-washiness I never did make a move on the Transformer. I'm glad I didn't. While I plan to take my time picking my tablet, I am closely monitoring news of the announced-but-not-released Asus Eee Pad MeMo 370T. Barring any major changes of heart I think it may be "the one".
One last piece of this puzzle I'll touch on quickly is the Xbox. I noticed that OnLive supports Android devices. I have a great deal of investigation to do but the first couple of reviews I've read are surprisingly favorable. I cannot imagine how satisfyingly simple it would be to be able to include even my gaming into this solution. I'm not sold on cloud gaming yet but it would be so very slick, and I'm more than willing to give it a chance. I've been a member since the beta but I've yet to actually try it.
I fully expect to be told I'm crazy ad nauseam over the coming months and beyond. Regardless I am going for it, and I will continue to post about my experiences here, at least when I'm not bitching about politics and assinine drivers. Hopefully some will find it mildly interesting.

Hello World

2011-12-14T20:34:00.000-06:00

I have had the netchamploo domain for a while. I always wanted to have a secondary domain that wasn't *myname*.com. I never really was able to decide what to do with it. For now I am pointing it here, and I'm going to blog about random crap. Based on my limited understanding of what "Champloo" or more acurately - "Chanpurū" means - I think it's somewhat fitting. My primary Blogger site is all backpacking. This one is whatever I feel like brain dumping. I'm thinking it will end up being a combination of complaining and technology.