And I’m not talking about the city here.
So one of the things about the “modern” internet is it’s insistence on moving to more of a “cloud” based set up. I’m about to go on a old man (at 31) rant here that will basically be “Get off my lawn you damn kids” If you don’t feel like reading the comments of a lone person as they go into what they think is a structured argument against the cloud stop reading…. otherwise you have be warned and you are not allowed to complain.
Ok so while I appreciate this whole cloud thing, I also fully understand that the data that is up there because someone (most likely) me put it up there. Now in some cases the cloud isn’t so bad… pictures for instance photography has gone almost completely digital and pretty much anyone can do really nice pictures with nothing more then a mid-range SLR and some editing software. Hell with the CCD setups in some of these cell phones who needs a point and shoot.
Other things while not practical make sense… off site backup for insistence I recently signed up for carbonite for my MAC since you know it has those photos of my grandmother that mean alot to me and if anything happened to them pissed would not begin to describe my general attitude. So a few photos is no big deal…. My home folder on my MAC is ~115GB between documents, photos, music, videos, and virtual machines. If you take away the virtual machines and about 30GB of various applications and temp data you are left with ~82GB of either my purchased or generated content. It took the better part of a week and half to upload all of this information. While that part I don’t have a issue with it would have been just as easy to make a copy of my data on a portable hard drive and mail it to my parents and say “Put this in the gun safe and hope I never have to ask you for it” But I don’t because when it comes right down to it I’m lazy and if I can have a daemon run in the background and upload stuff to the internet I’m going to do that rather then wander down to FedEx and hope my parents don’t lose a portable hard drive.
Lord knows they can barely keep track of a super Nintendo left out in plain sight 10 years go.
And then there are the parts that I really should be doing on the cloud but insist on doing them on a application on my computer because that is where I’ve always done them. Of course by this I mean email. Now while I do appreciate the advances that Google has brought to email and that I can hook up to a Google email service either through pop3 or imap accessing email on a client sucks! No I don’t want to use a browser window that gives me easy on line access to everything in my every growing mail box… I want to use Outlook damit because it’s what I use at work and it does what I need it to do well! I want to read my email and reply with either a Ctrl-R or a Ctrl-shift-R and send with a Ctrl-enter I don’t want to use what ever new thing that Google has come up with I want to use the same keyboard commands I’ve been using since 1995… you know when the only way to get a pretty gui interface was to buy a MAC!
Basically I want to do my email through a text only client on a telnet/ssh session using pine.
End of Line.