In life, there comes a point in time when you suddenly ask yourself some questions, like, why do we always complain about the ruling government when we don't make any attempt to make a change ourselves, or, why am I still paying my building society garbage-man 500 bucks every month to clear my trash when I've already hired a personal maid who's doing that same exact job?
Sometimes your questions may have answers, and sometimes the answers can be uncomfortable. But at most times, you end up making things a lot better for yourself.
Like, the other day I asked myself this important question - "Why am I still carrying a bag to work every day?"
As some of you may know, I'm actually a very "anti-laptop" person. Maybe I'm old-school, but I still feel more comfortable (and productive) working on a desktop than a laptop. And so I always have a desktop with my own configuration set up for me whenever I move from one office to the other. The beauty of having a desktop is, I don't have to carry around a laptop everywhere I go. Instead I carry around my 2TB hard-disk, syncing my files whenever I work on my office or home PC. And it dawned upon me that that was actually a really stupid process since I now have broadband at home.
I mean, it's been, how many, 2-3 years since we started using cloud services? I use the cloud to sync my contact numbers and important photos and other files from my phone. That way it is extremely easy to access them again from my PC or another phone in case I lose my device. I facepalmed myself for not doing the same with my work files as well.
And so, last week, I spent a few hours cleaning up my dropbox account and deleting/rearranging old files in order to set it up in such a way that all my current work files are in the cloud. Any changes I make from office gets reflected back at home too, and vice-versa. I no longer had to carry any portable storage device, ergo any bag to work, and trust me, it is such a great feeling of freedom to waltz in and out of office empty-handed :)
Likewise, if I have any presentation to showcase to my team or for a client pitch, again, it's just a matter of accessing that file from my phone via a projector. Things are much more seamless and efficient with the cloud, especially since we can easily share or make changes from our mobile devices as well.
The other day, I was about to leave for home when it suddenly started pouring like crazy. Nobody could move or hail a cab in the heavy rain, so I simply accessed my cloud service and stopped the rain from there. After that it was quite easy finding a cab, as it all depended on downloading the right cab and driver from the cloud to my phone :P
Jokes aside, It is fascinating how technology has made life so much easier for us. And even though my dropbox account has a default 10 GB limit for free users, I'm sure this will increase as time comes by, after all, remember when emails first came out and we had to keep deleting our inbox/outbox due to storage limitations, but now, who does that? Likewise, I'm sure the same is going to happen in the cloud sector, especially as the demand for space grows every day along with new breakthroughs being made in data compression technology every quarter (who else watches "Silicon Valley" on TV?). We live in great times, and here's to greater times ahead. Cheers.
To end this short post, here's a picture of Cloud. From Final Fantasy :P
