I keep hearing more and more these days about cloud computing, a rather vaporous term that is hard to get a solid grip on.

As best I can tell computing has arrived at such an advanced, cheap and reliable state that we no longer need to worry about it.  We can throw our computers and software away and just plug in for computing like electricity in our wall sockets.

Thank God computing has finally arrived at this celestial state of reliability.

Except for the other day when my Outlook Contacts program suddenly lost its ability to search when I wanted to look up someone’s phone number … as in CONTACT SOMEONE!

Perhaps I mistakenly plugged into one of those real dark cumulonimbus thunderstorm clouds or something.  After all, it certainly couldn’t be the shoddy software development of MillySoft (not the real company name) who developed MS Outlook Contacts.

Moving (quickly) on to another cloud benefit, there is also the reduced cost as applications are shared across many users.  Just plug in and pay for what you need.

Hey, the cost could come down so much it’s just too cheap to meter … hmmm … where have I heard that term before … oh, right, that was what they were saying about nuclear energy in the 50’s — so they may need to work on that one.

Anyhow, yet another promise of cloud computing occurs when more people need to use a certain business critical application, like Outlook, PowerPoint,  Facebook or on-line Pokerand viola, another copy floats into existence just in time.

I think this cloud-floating-software thing is done by harnessing the evaporation point of warm tropical ocean seawater or something – which logically means even more cloud software will magically appear as global warming quits pussyfooting around and really gets underway.  This is a climate change benefit not widely reported in the mainstream media (go figure).

Also seldom reported is the psychic-artificial-intelligence component I always experience in our cloud at work (some people think that I am in a cloud at work but those people are what I like to call “wrong”).

It is uncanny that every time I’m five minutes away from a serious deadline and putting in the final critical points of my PowerPoint presentation, the cloud shifts me to a slower version of PowerPoint, actually a crawling version, so I always come close to blowing my deadline.

Apparently the cloud has an abundance of the crawling versions.

Anyhow, that said, there you have it on cloud computing.  While the term is a bit vaporous and unclear, it holds out great promise for all of humanity. Hopefully I’ve clarified the term and enlightened you on the subject.

Key points to remember are, 1) an abundance of applications with more on the way due to global warming, 2) a reduction in cost to the point of “too cheap to meter,” and 3) by far the most important point – TOTAL COMPUTING RELIABILITY! …

… must sign off quickly now, my cloud Word processor has mysteriously started typing … choeo%90jad aod0q390wfwpfw oeflf … #$@%& (that’s me) … s%kfdi*94 d 40()84jksdgjek..so.eejf,w.tk[rg;grftrkpgopeekkwepgor[hpk …