When I'm Mobile...

I do a lot of work from the field...almost literally the trenches. *grin* So the laptop I use has every possible connectivity option under the small G2 star we orbit around...even an antique 56K modem!

But the option to take the laptop with me is sometimes stymied by the destination or the abruptness of the "housecall" I have to make...so I have started placing copies of the important documents and such to a place where I can access them from anywhere on anything that professes to have a browser. My email is Gmail, I have a .Mac account to use their synchronization, shared calendaring, and hosted disk space services, and now I have begun to get familiar with the Google version of office productivity software - their spreadsheets in particular.

Look, pretty much we all know Excel, yes? So to have this ability through a browser makes the worry of which version is installed, which virus macros are going to delete my data, etc. non-existant. Security? Ha! Don't talk to me about security. If you are still in that fallacy, I could just point out all of the recent news articles on stolen laptops, purchased lists, and so forth. No, instead of security, your best defense is distribution...have your data anywhere you want it to be and if something gets stolen or compromised, you simply make the contents out of date or useless.

Yeah, Microsoft's twigging this whole thing slowly but surely...however, like their damnable Xbox-Live pseudo-ISP mockery, to use their products you will have to use their atrocious MSN services. I'd rather put up with Google ads than be pestered with a .Net key login and other proprietary muck. I want my YouTube to be Microsoft free, my itunes not married to a Windows Media player, and my spreadsheets so shackled to the latest rev of Excel that I can never really share them with others.

So when I'm mobile, I don't have to worry about forgetting my laptop, or having it in two places at once...and as far as data synchronization is concerned, there are dynamic links that work across the Internet...so there!