It is November 3, Right

People wonder why, by mid-December, I have no Christmas spirit. It’s ’cause the season is too long and too invasive.

Do You Trust the Cloud

Last month, there was a failure of The Cloud.

T-Mobile’s Sidekick phone kept data “in The Cloud.” The assumption the users made was that the data would be maintained by Danger (a Microsoft company), the back-end to the Sidekick product. However, when performing an upgrade to their storage, the data was lost. For a time, it appeared that there weren’t backups to that data. Users were advised not to let their phones lose power; otherwise, the data on them would be lost, too.

Ultimately, a backup was found, and they were able to restore most data. However, it drives home the challenge IT organizations have with backups.

As “Cloud Computing,” the use of services that are hosted on the internet to store, manage, and manipulate data, becomes common, it becomes too easy to leave the responsibility for your data to other people. However, I’ve seen a few risks. First, the lesson of Sidekick is that the only person who cares about your data is you. At the minimum, if you are relying on a third party service to keep your data, understand what their commitment is to backups. If you really care about it, having a backup strategy you manage is important. In the case of Sidekick users, if they were also syncing to their personal computers, their data was safe.

However, there is a second lesson. One commentator observed that The Cloud and Web 2.0 are a lot like the “Hotel California:” You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I can stop using Facebook, but there is no simple, clean way to pull your data out of it. So, if you aren’t retaining copies of your pictures and posts, you are stuck.

Personally, I’m taking several strategies. Most things I’ve posted are replicated in two and three locations. In most cases, my local system is among them. This helps remove my tie to any one service.

I’m also learning how to pull data out of services I currently use (even if it is some third party hack), and I consider “easy way to download/sync to my system” as a criteria when selecting new services. If there is no easy way to pull data out of a service, I determine if the data is something I don’t care about, like tweets. If I care about it, I find a new service.

As I said before, the responsibility for protecting your data is yours alone. Take the time to understand what happens to your data if you keep it in The Cloud.

Still Playing with WordPress

So, since its launch, I’ve had a blog on Vox. Vox has served me well, and I have a great community there. I”m quite reluctant to move it.

However, it’s not that powerful. I’ve been playing with WordPress for all of ten minutes now, and have discovered it has:

• The ability to directly edit my HTML
• Custom CSS sheets
• Export
• An iPhone App

At the same time, Vox seems to have fallen into neglect. Features never seem to appear.

I don’t know if I’m going to migrate to WordPress or not, yet. But, I thought I would at least play with it a bit.

WordPress via iPhone

I’m trying out the WordPress client for iPhone. So far, so good.

I can’t get my password in on my MacBook. I wonder if it is a Chrome issue.

Hello world!

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