Clouds Blocked My Cloud

I've written before about how I'm leeryof this “Cloud” thing. The basic idea is storing your data on the internet so you can get it everywhere. There are two main problems with this.

First is the old line of A Secret Told Is A Secret Lost. If the data is “out there” it can be seen by people either at that company or by a hacker. If you truly want something to be secure, save it at home on your local PC and back it up.

That wasn't the problem. The problem is that if your connection goes dead, what do you do?

That second problem is what I had happen to me yesterday and this morning.

We had serious weather go through here last night. It showed purple on the weather radar and all over the island there were tree limbs down. The worst thing that happened here was my Mango Tree In A Pot got knocked over.  I picked it up and there was no damage.

While all that was going on, I was chatting with a recruiter about a Project Manager's position. Great spot for me, it has all the things in a position I'm looking forward to it so I told the recruiter to pursue it. He said great and wanted me to email me the specifications.

No Problem right? Well since that storm went through, we lost internet for the next hour and a half. I did promise him that I'd email him back with all the requested information in 30 minutes max since it was 4:15 and he wanted to go home at 5PM. Oops. After 20 minutes of panicking and restarting the cable modem, I called and left a message that “I can't” and that the storm did its damage to the connection.

He called back and I got him the information when the connection came back after the dog walk. We're working on it and hopefully...

This morning I was sitting here going through the job listings before tackling the assembly of the monthly newsletter for my board and all the sudden my internet dropped. We had a problem with Comcast doing work at exactly 1015am since 'nobody's home at that time' and I'd be down. I figured they were starting to have that problem again.

This time it was simpler even if I couldn't get to my data stored on The Cloud. You see this time I caused the problem by 'bumping' the wifi button and disconnecting the little laptop from the net. I realized it when the radio station I was listening to in Martinique (Zed-Jay-Bee) was still playing the Calypso music I like from time to time but all the chat services stopped polling on the net on the laptop. The music was on the old iPhone, the chat services were on the laptop.

Ok that time it was a “duh” moment, last night it wasn't.

The idea is that if you really want to have constant 24/7 access to your data, the cloud just isn't there yet. Sure, Google and Microsoft are getting better, but they still have to worry about whether you are going to be able to get TO them. It may not be important for me to listen to a radio station in Montserrat but I really do need access to my resume. That's why the radio station is “out there” while I keep my data close.