Wednesday, 27 June 2007

Upgrades and Downtime

The main problem of living on the cloud hit me last night when I got home to find my phone line was dead. The UK is experiencing a lot of flooding at the moment, and although the area I live in is unaffected, I'm guessing the rain has waterlogged a box somewhere and killed the line.

As always, BT claim that testing the line reports that all is okay. When pressed, they offer to send an engineer (but it will be chargeable if it's not BTs fault). After agreeing to this (I've done it enough times to know it's a delaying tactic), they immediately noticed that the problem was not just my line, but affected a significant number of lines in my area...(!).

So the "take home" from this is that life on the cloud is only as good as the connection to the cloud. Obvious stuff, but it's amazing how reliant one becomes on a permanent net connection.

Got to work this morning to read that Google Docs and Spreadsheets have been upgraded. The new interface is better and supports folders. It's still missing a way to bulk download documents for backup purposes. Will need to investigate this a bit more, but it's a good upgrade.

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