MicroSoft Skydrive, where I keep my original Treepad writing files, has been acting rather wonky today, as I load up and synchronize with another PC, a notebook PC, that I will be carrying with me for the next three weeks as I head off to the southern California desert.

I've trusted Bill Gates & Company to do the right thing and treat me right, by helping ease the problem of me drifting from one place to another, and always having my writing database at my finger tips and not worrying about it becoming corrupted or suddenly inaccessible.

I hesitated when first buying into this idea of storing my ideas in the clouds. Working in high-tech for so many years, I have been taught to trust the solutions to my computing problems that have been worked out by other big fish in the information technology world that can gulp air and stay under water longer than me.

This little cloud of mine seems to have leaked some water vapor or become ruptured on a nearby mountain top, or simply become all dried up and is about to evaporate in this unusual summer heat. I back-up like crazy though, because I want to keep all my writings for posterity, and not just for future data miners who can summon forth a magic way to make a buck from my efforts.

Skydrive was missing a few turns and intersections in the sky today. I can't explain why the database I have on one PC doesn't appear identical on the other PC. I take this distasteful lesson in thoughtful stride and think to myself that maybe I would be more free, and happy, if I began to dump the thunderstorms of technology, and come back to the ways I knew to be true before the glitzy digital world made such a huge claim on my life.