You think it's like this...

I woke up Tuesday morning with two very important pieces of information in my head. First, that I forgot to send an email at work that I definitely should have done, and second, that my throat felt like it was on fire and my whole body ached.

In these moments, you do what's best for yourself: you call in sick, you do what work you can from the confines of home, and you spend the rest of the day asleep. My problem was a bit more complicated: the email that I'd forgotten to send yesterday necessitated an Excel file attachment. Even if I were able to retrieve an old version of the file from my webmail, I couldn't save it on the iPad and re-send. I was stuck, and I dragged myself into work at 7:30AM to send one email before going home to sleep off sickness.

Cloud computing, in theory, is truly a dream. In practice, it's a bit of a nightmare for the layman. I've "grown up" with the idea of cloud music services: I was an early adopter of Rhapsody, and I've always loved the idea of my music library being able to sync to multiple devices. When Apple acquired the online streaming site / "music library on the web" service Lala, I got immediately excited at what this could mean for the consumer who can only understand digital music through the framework of iTunes. (This "consumer" makes up about 90% of people who buy music at all these days.) It seems likely to me that people are only going to latch onto the concept if it's made palatable through what they already know.

Now, I'm faced with the problem of being the consumer who can only understand digital files through the concept of saving on a drive. What counts as the "iTunes of cloud computing storage"? I couldn't even tell you the answer to this. My goals involve creating word processing documents, spreadsheet, and the occasional slide presentation; I want to save them and I want to send them to others.

To Google "cloud computing solutions" is to cry little tiny tears of technological hopelessness. It falls under "it's not fun, don't do it." Instead, I know this solution won't be immediate and I'm going to have to do some trial and error research. MobileMe. Evernote. Various Google Docs hacks. And the continued repetition of a question that seems likely to haunt the rest of my days...

"Is there an app for that?"