Great flood of 2008

As you have probably already heard, we had a little bit of water come down in our area last Saturday.  Luckily, we were all ok, and nobody else had any series injuries.  We were really blessed to be able to get out ok.  We live on the ground floor of an apartment building and the whole place was flooded.  We had 21 inches of water in our apartment and some of our stuff was ruined.  Both of our vehicles were under water and one of them is totalled.  It was a very interesting weekend and the whole area has a lot of cleanup ahead of them.  The storms last weekend were some of the worst storms that I have ever seen and hope that I will never have to see any like them again.  I thank God that everybody is safe, and that we had great friends and family pull together and help us get our belongings out of our apartment.  Everything still has to be cleaned but things are coming together.  I have put up some pictures that you can find on Flickr by clicking the link on the right.  If you’ve been affected by the storms or know somebody who has please post your story, I’d be interested in hearing them.

Filed under: Family, Life, Nature , apartment, flood, indiana, rain, storms, terre haute, water

The future of personal computing

As you’ve probably heard or read, technology is starting to make its move towards a more virtual world.  From avatars, simulated lives, social networking, etc on the personal computing side of things, to the virtualization of servers and applications, as well as the drastic growth of many datacenters for businesses.  Many are calling this new breed of computing “Cloud Computing.”

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is a term that is used to describe the way that users interact with applications and services.  This is done when the application or service is stored and ran from another location.  This means that much of the resources needed to run the application is found on a device other than your computer.  This allows you to be able to use your computer’s resources for other purposes, and relieves the strain on many slower personal computers.

What is the future of Cloud Computing?

Of course, we can never fully tell which direction technology is going to go, but we can just about be sure that it will continue towards the virtualization of many of the applications that are used by businesses and consumers.  There are many software developers that are engaging in this trend, just to name a few are Microsoft and Google.  These companies see enough of a future with this type of computing to be spending a lot of resources to develop more applications to serve their customers.  Google recently had a developers conference and discussed their future plans and demoed some of the apps and services that they are releasing in the future.  By using these services businesses, as well as consumers, will be able to take their computing to a whole new level.  By putting their applications in data centers, they are making their work more mobile and ultimately more productive.

I find that this trend is very unique in its aims to move things away from the personal computing side and move them to data centers and this definitely is not without its problems, but as it continues to move, we will see more media-rich applications and, on average, applications that are designed better and more reliable.

Filed under: Technology , Cloud Computing, DataCenters, Google, Microsoft, Personal Computing, Servers, Technology, Virtualization