Although wireless is common, I was accustomed to often carrying around my laptop but being stuck without access. Last fall's trip to Europe was a prime example. This seemed so common that I began to totally doubt whether the concept of a futuristic computing cloud could really work. That term denotes the possibility of having most data sitting out on the Internet rather than on a local hard disk. I’ve been tilting that way for many years. Windows Live Mail and Google Mail are two good examples. I can hardly remember the time when email messages were downloaded and lived locally on a hard disk. With the application and data online, I am confident that as long as I'm at an Internet location, then I will have access to my messages.
One conundrum is that I sometimes plan to be without Net access on my netbook. Today, I witnessed how we'll deal with this stop-gap measure. I can see how we’ll manage until there is a WiFi or 3G connection at every location on the surface of the earth. For you see, I just set up Gmail for offline use on this little computer. It syncs up a local database to the data on Gmail’s server. So, when I’m out and not connected to the Internet, I will still have access to my contacts as well as a few months of messages. When I get back in range, any messages and changes will be re-synced.
Just being able to blog and communicate by email means that this Acer Aspire One will be useful at all times. Even if later in the year, I'm deep in the jungle in Sri Lanka for days at a time, I can complete daily entries and messages. When I get to a wireless access point, they will be freed from the confines of this little device.