My day started innocently enough. I went and had my monthly facial at Beauty on the Hills in Drury. It was bliss. After this, getting on the motorway, I realised time wasn’t on my side. I had to get over to Constellation Drive to collect my new computer monitor, but needed to stop at an ASB branch to withdraw $100 towards the cost of it. My original plan was to go to Botany Town Centre first and get the money there. But with time ticking, Sylvia Park seemed awesome. I got to the counter at the ASB and they told me that I can’t physically withdraw money from my Accelerator savings account, after some begging, they agreed to put my empty cheque account into OD to let me get the money, on the pro-visor that I transferred the money electronically from my savings account to the cheque account before leaving the store. Yay for iPhone’s Safari browser and boo for the Vodafone 3G reception inside Sylvia Park. But by the time I got back to my car, I had made the transfer required to keep my bank happy for another day.

Now I had to get over to Constellation Drive. Where possible, I will never drive any further north than Newmarket. This is where I whipped out the TomTom app and punched in the address. Bingo. It got it slightly wrong, so I used some gut instinct and it got me close to where I needed to be. I used google maps satellite view to figure out that I had to drive around the back of a building to find where I needed to be. Got the monitor. Its awesome. Review to follow.

Now I needed to get to a Rebel Sports store to buy more sneakers for sneaking. I punched in “rebel sports” into the Yellow Pages app and it told me the nearest one was Wairau Road and showed me a map. Awesome! I knew how to get there from Constellation so off I went.

With shoes in hand and a monitor in my boot, I needed to go to the loo. I plugged “public toilet” into Zenbu and it gave me a few options, but none suitable. Fortunately there are petrol stations on the way from Wairau Road to the Motorway. And homeward bound I went.

I conclude that had I not had the iPhone today, I would be lost. I would be still at ASB pleading with the lady at the counter, or lost somewhere on the North Shore. I’m not sure which is worse. But one thing is for sure, I am pleased to be home, even if the wallet is feeling a little lighter.

Like most people, I carry around a USB flash drive which has my personal files I take between the office and home, a few pictures etc. It’s the convenience of it all really. Lately I had thoughts of using Windows Home Server just to access my files from wherever I might be, but this looks like the next logical step in my data portability wrangle. I’ve had panic attacks when I can’t find my flash drive. It has my household budgets for the next two months at least on it, the same kind of panic attack when you have to go a day without a cellphone. You know what I mean.

But as I delve deeper into this, it’s part of the phenomenon called Cloud Computing – which has industry leaders like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on its bandwagon. Basically, it’s a virtualisation of services, most well known being Facebook, Flickr and Chrome.

With Microsoft Office Live Workspace, you have 5GB of personal storage space. That’s slightly larger than your average flash drive size. They tout that you don’t need Office installed on your PC and you can access your files from the poolside (Effects of Chlorine on Laptops?) It’s your virtual file cabinet, create workspaces and store and collaborate on school work or personal files. To share files, all you need is an email address and Workspace ensures that you are all collaborating on the most current document, so you don’t risk jeopardizing your project with out of date files or missed emails.

Office Live Workspace

If using a web browser isn’t your thing, and you have Office installed on your PC, I recommend getting the Live Update so that you can access your Workspace from your native Office applications without having to launch a browser. Installing this update can be a small drama. Last night on my Acer Laptop running Vista Home Premium and over a wireless lan connection, it took me about 30 minutes to get there as Vista requires an additional update before it can install the Live Update for Workspace.

How do I rate Office Live Workspace? I think the concept is fantastic, but overall, I haven’t gone head first into this service yet, but I don’t think it will be long before the other average internet users will catch on to this either. Personally, it will take me a while to get everything on my Workspace that I like, but don’t feel limited. You can put PDF files and images on there too. Sayonara Flash Drive.

But in this day and age of computing, we are not limited to Microsoft Products and as I mentioned earlier, the other major player in the dark skies of Cloud Computing is Google. I would hazard a guess and say that everyone knows Google, has considered having a Gmail address at some stage. But Google offers other services too. They have Blogger, Google Apps, Latitude, Docs, Sites, Calendar and Picasa. Of course, whichever cloud you choose to follow to, there is plenty written comparing Microsoft’s Cloud to the Google Cloud. Maybe I will look at Google over the Easter Weekend when I don’t have much planned.