The System Goes Awry

I’m writing this from an Internet cafe about a mile from my home. Since late Thursday night we have been without telephone, internet, and — in some places — electrical power, due to a huge ice storm that hit and took out many trees and above-ground service lines.  We’ve been lucky at our place in that we have electrical power but no internet, cable or phone. Luckily I had posted some entries for this blog ahead of time.

I know that “cloud computing” is a current buzzword, allowing people to do things like post blogs using shared software resources, and do other things like word processing, calendar functions, etc. via “clouds’ of software available through such places as Google.  That’s great and it makes life easy.

That is, until it doesn’t – in times like the past few days when our access to the “cloud” has been cut off.  We’ll survive as will the work we do. But, a sobering reminder that even clouds of access can dissipate in a coating of ice.

The good news is that much of my computing and creative resource ware is NOT on the cloud and I can work blissfully from home until it’s time to go find the Internet cafe. So, all’s not lost. But, it’s amazing how you can get used to having the Internet at your beck and call and never think twice about it’s ubiquity until it’s gone for a few days.