I am particularly proud of my last post “Slouching Towards the Cloud”, because I was finally able to put words to ideas that had been ticking around my head for many years. Hopefully, that post offered some insight to someone. For my part, I am just glad to have those voices out of my head.

The genesis of that post came as a genuine Out-of-the Heavens epiphany. The muses finally sang to me. They sang as I was chasing a two-year old around the Comfort Inn in Marina, California.

This particular Comfort Inn is a nice enough place to spend a Labor Day weekend (albeit in some need of better soundproofing on their windows.) It is your run-of-the mill tourist destination Two Star hotel. Clean, efficient and decidedly low tech. There was passable Wi-Fi in the rooms, and a single PC in the Lobby that served as the “Business Center” which is mostly used to print out driving directions to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. My guess is that no one else crowding the waffle maker included with the free breakfast was thinking about or even much aware of Cloud Computing that morning. There was nothing in the hotel to make anyone think about technology.

Except for that one thing. The Comfort Inn is so decidedly low-tech that the single IT rack it has sits in a room literally labeled “Linens”. The rack sat next to extra chairs and piles of clean bedsheets and pillow cases. This particular two-year old felt it was his mission to run up and down the hallway past this linen closet as fast as his stubby legs would carry him, pushing every button and pulling every door handle he could find. Compelled to follow after him, I could not help but notice the distinct whirring of computer fans in the darkened Linen closet.

So I stopped and peered in. There were only a few boxes in that rack. A few cable modems, a switch, maybe the video camera controller, and some powery looking things. I paused to determine what gear they had. And I wondered what tech this small business really needed on premise, and what it needed in the Cloud. And in wondering, that whole other post began to course its way through my head. I had a million questions, and the semblance of an answer, all demanding to be written down. The Muses screamed at me.

And then I had to run down the hall before the Two-year old toppled over an entire housekeeping cart worth of clean towels.