In Cloud Cuckoo Land

John Markoff's hard disc died; he tried doing without it:

What I discovered was that - with the caveat of a necessary network connection - life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google’s Gmail and and the search engine company’s Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data

Interestingly, I had not one but three of my computers die within the space of a few weeks. Like Markoff, I am obsessive about backing up data, so I didn't lose anything important - other than the ability to access local files.

So I'm now largely living La Vida Online: Firefox as my computing environment, accessing Gmail, Writely (as I still prefer to call it), plus a few other online sites for storing various kinds of files and links. It works pretty well, and even when I get some new systems up and running, I'm aiming at prolonging my stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land.