The Cloud is Great If You Can Get To It

Today, Second day in a row Comcast / Xfinity had internet connectivity problems.   

I guess they forgot to “Feed the Squirrel” that powered the net here in Wilton Manors.  Creaky infrastructure aside, this shows one very important shortcoming to the Cloud Based Internet and business model we have been migrating to lately. 

If you can’t get there from here, it’s worthless.

Sure, it is great to surf web pages far and near.  I launch 170 web pages every morning, and yes I did count them, in order to job search.   I was in the process of writing an email to a recruiter I have worked with about a position that reads like a perfect fit, Web and Mainframe Business Analyst, when the clock struck 9AM.  At that point my radio stopped.  I was sitting in my chair under the ceiling fan, sipping coffee I roasted from beans that I bought from a company in rural Wisconsin, listening to “Triple J FM” in Brisbane Australia and trying to attach my resume to an email to send to someone in Dade County when it happened.

Yesterday when the net was “down” I went outside like the T Shirt said and spent 90 minutes playing with the weed eater.  Today I went into the laundry to reset the router to no avail, then into the kitchen to make a mug of Café Bustelo Decaf and empty the Mosquito larva out of the glass that is rooting my cactus pear.

Nothing out of the ordinary there, it is as if I was in Pennsylvania on a normal summer morning instead of here in Florida.

Since it went down at "exactly 9PM" both days, I suspect they're doing some work to "improve our service".  Might make sense to do it at 2AM instead, folks.  If you're running a business or trying to do some work on the web you have just put people out of work for two hours "for Permanent Improvement".

The Cloud is a great place, but it does have its shortcomings.  I build web sites and do social media work, all on internet based applications that I have no idea where the data resides.  You have to trust that those who maintain the Cloud Apps are doing their job, maintaining their infrastructure, backing up your data and hoping it’s all safe.

But if you can’t get there from here it isn’t worth a hill of coffee beans in Wisconsin.

Good beans though they are.

I may just have to turn on the broadcast FM radio for music.  Now THERE’S a change for me!