There’s a fucking definition and a practice I’ve put too much faith in. I’ve been a Google fan(boy) for a long, long time. The first time I ever heard the name “Google” it was 1999 while working as a video editor and producer for a small production company. Ironically, I heard about this magnificent new search engine through a print publication - it was a promotional info-zine type deal for videographers that I had signed up for at some booth somewhere, which I received quarterly at aforementioned job. Up until that point I was performing web searches on my Compaq Presario, with its awesome AMD K6 processor and 256 MB of RAM, via Altavista… with the occasional meandering search on Excite, HotBot, or Lycos (never did like Infoseek). Google blew them all away, and I’ve carried the torch ever since.
This isn’t an anti-Google rant necessarily, but fuck all if I didn’t have a brick-upside-the-head moment today that made me question my Google habit. See, I’ve gone and bought into the whole “Cloud Computing” idea. Actually, I’d say that I’ve gone and sold the farm on it. I manage all of my email, contacts, documents, photos, bookmarks, calendars, notes… shit, Google has my entire life on their servers! I’d never really (really) thought much about it until today. I’ve been using Google Notebook a lot more recently to manage things like to-do lists and whatnot, because it’s so easy to access via computer or cell phone. Well, Google Notebook does this annoying thing where it files all of your Google Bookmarks in Notebook under “Unfiled Bookmarks”. You can’t delete this notebook or ask the Notebook application to stop fucking indexing your bookmarks.
Well, I don’t know what I did, but when I went to access my Google Bookmarks via the Google Toolbar in Firefox today, they were all gone. A quick search (via same toolbar) revealed that this is not such an uncommon problem, but it was a big problem for me, because I had stopped bookmarking directly in Firefox some time ago and managed all of my bookmarks through Google’s service. The only way for me to get them all back was to go through my “Unfiled Bookmarks” in Google Notebook and re-tag everything, export them, and then import them back into Google bookmarks. 200+ bookmarks later and I’m a bit pissed.
Needless to say, this has given me a big wake up call that a Cloud Computing nirvana is not here yet, and I need to be a lot more diligent in maintaining my personal data personally. Jesus, to think if I had done the same thing with my personal photos as with my bookmarks…
