Cloud-based Anything

I'm spoiled. My google web history is turned on, my google talk chat history is turned on, and right now i'm really frustrated because i was trying to remember the site of a book fair that connet ( i can use your name here, right? oops, too late. :p ) mentioned but I'm not sure if Yahoo messenger is saving your chat history (in the cloud) so I can't find it right now (I was using pidgin at work when I chatted with her). My google calendar, though lately has been ignored, is still my main calendar. I can't live without del.icio.us (i have learned not to trust my memory too much) to annotate my web browsing, and I can't live without my foxmarks. The list goes on.

The thing is I'm one of those who are really sold out to the idea of putting things (well all that makes sense to put there anyway) in the cloud. Yeah, privacy be damned - frankly I don't worry much about privacy concerns, because 1) I either put things that are private in services whose security I trust, or not put them up at all, and 2) the convenience of easily accessible information very much outweighs the privacy paranoia that seems to plague the mindset of most users and naysayers.

I remember when I was on my way to a job interview more than a month ago. On my way there (around 45 minutes before the appointment), I suddenly realized that I left the index card with address to the building where I'm going and I'm not really sure about its exact location. Knowing that I probably won't have much time left to look around, I was faced with dilemma. I contacted my friends and tried to request them to google the building for me, but almost all of them were either offline or got my message too late. Salvation came from Jason, a good friend at work whom I had to call. I gave him my google password because I'm quite sure that I added the address as a note to my calendar event of the said interview (this was also the first time that he learned that I was moving to another company) . I was in MRT the whole time, and as I look at my trusty (well, used to be anyway) Nokia 1100, i couldn't help but wonder then how things would have been different if my phone was more capable (read: has a web browser).

Anyway I did get to the place on time, but the punch line came at exactly 15 minutes before the interview: my phone (which i was bashing moments before) buzzed with a new SMS message: a notification from my Google calendar giving me every bit of information that I was frantically looking for just minutes ago. I setup my SMS alerts in GooCal and i forgot about it. This is one of the best things about information in the cloud: they can be made accessible through devices other than your internet-connected desktop computer. It may have not worked in the most ideal way (i should've trusted my system more), but in the end, at least for that moment, it paid to have things in the cloud. :)