After this week’s Google/Microsoft column appeared in the New York Times, I got a message from an old friend, Rohit Khare, that sparked some thinking about our vulnerability as individuals when our data is held in the cloud — somebody else’s cloud. How do we save it, get it back, destroy it? Given the recent case of Facebook hanging-on to old user data essentially forever, this is not just a theoretical concern.
“’Cancellation on a whim’ is a key insight,” wrote Rohit. “After all, with desktop software you at least had the right to keep using what you wanted, as long as you kept the old hardware/software/OS running — I know of […]
A couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic. I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995. I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines. Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it. Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.
I had intended to write a post about Google’s Chrome Operating System, but then the New York Times called looking for an Op-Ed piece on exactly that so I gave it to them. 
Headed this week to the Grand Canyon in our old Winnebago RV (now minus mice, we think) Mary Alyce, the boys and I stopped outside Kingman, Arizona at this place, 
I have a mouse in my RV. Or as many correspondents have told me I have MICE in my RV, because the concept of a solitary mouse is beyond their considerable experience. This month my wife, three young sons and I (and of course the mice) are in California, mainly touring in our 1996 Winnebago. We tour, we fix, then tour some more. The old Winnie was never built for 107-degree desert temperatures and neither was I. So since we’re broken-down waiting (again) for the fixit man to come, I think this might be a good time to update my readers on a few old projects.
