Status-Q

The trick with all of these services should be that many people back up a lot of the same stuff. The same DLLs, the same MP3 files, the same application binaries. An intelligent client should be able to checksum the stuff on your local disk and only upload it if it's not already stored on the service by somebody else, in which case it should just upload a pointer. Likewise, many files are very similar, and some intelligent differencing should mean that only patches need to be uploaded.

Your PC will soon just be a cache of your online world...

Thought for the day from The Dilbert Blog:

Cambridge-London-Toronto-San Francisco-Seattle-London-Cambridge. Lots of interesting meetings with lots of interesting people, but it wasn't helped by my catching a bug on the flight out, so that many of the meetings were conducted in a haze of jetlag, 'flu, and 'flu-combatting drugs, with me sitting as far from the other participants as reasonably possible.

I was kept alive by Hap & CD, who welcomed me into their Seattle home despite my ailments, and administered TLC at every turn. I told them I felt like an elderly Powerbook, whose battery wasn't too good, and after it ran down to zero during the day I had to go back to them to get it charged up. By that time, though, my lid was pretty much shut! Don't think I was a very inspiring guest, but I was a very grateful one.

Now I'm on the train back home from the airport, blogging to keep awake. I have a couple of days to unpack and repack before heading to Johannesburg on Wednesday where I'll be installing a couple more Ndiyo systems...

Am reading the Scoble/Israel book, Naked Conversations: "How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers", and wondering whether the Ndiyo news announcements should be more like a blog and less like a series of informal press releases....

There's a first time for everything. I found myself needing some dental treatment at short notice, and after arriving at the surgery, I was shown into the treatment room and told that the dentist would just be a few minutes.

Well, you're never alone with a Blackberry, and so it was that yesterday I sent my first email from a dentist's chair...

A very nicely done spoof.

Some pretty amazing images from China.

I was in Toronto at the weekend, meeting up with the good folks from DirectLeap. It was exceedingly cold on Sat night when I arrived, as I had expected at this time of the year, but on Sunday the sun shone, and all was bright and clear, and we sat outside enjoying the weather.

Fame at last! Bill T has quoted part of my 'Gizmo, Skype and the Garden' post in his BBC article.

I was at John's a couple of nights ago, and we both happened to check our Blackberrys at the same time. Tom, John's son, laughed and grabbed a camera...