Coincidence strikes in mysterious ways. Less then 10 days after kicking off our reality web life experiment I had a serious fumble to recover. Yesterday evening (6:15PM to be precise) my laptop died. No warning signs, no heads up, no reaction time. It just went from totally vivrant to totally dead in less then a split second. “No reaction at all” dead, in case you wondered. Ironic as can be, this really caught me off guard. I was stressed with time, had 2 important documents to review-edit-send off, a presentation to finish and practice, some urgent emails to read and write and a post to finish. This is what I call a real life web based curve ball. I took over my wife’s computer and got friendly with it for the first time.

So here goes:
• Emails were not a problem of course. Gmail and Outlook Web Access (my corporate email) worked flawlessly and I didn’t feel like I’m compromising anything. Well, Outlook is better then Outlook Web Access but Gmail is better then both.
• I used Zoho Writer to go over and revise a 60 page word document with embedded graphics, tables and diagrams. Worked like a charm. I then used Zoho Spreadsheets to edit one data table and produce the result as a graph. Worked well with hardly, however few hiccups. I’m still a fan of Google Spreadsheets, but Zoho is definitely right there as well.
• Then came the PowerPoint presentation….I tried using ThinkFree as it was the only online PowerPoint application I could find. Wasn’t fun. First of all, PPT files are heavy and require too much upload time. On top of that there is no comparison when it comes to ease of use, functional richness and performance. Sorry to say, but presentation editing is much better on the desktop unless I find a totally different alternative (even though I am not a big fan of PowerPoint presentations to begin with. I have always been a fan of well summarized documents instead)
• Luckily for me, all my important materials were accessible on the web somehow. From my corporate web mail account, through Gmail and my web based drive (expect a dedicated review on that subject in the near future). It did prompt me to consider a better structured approach to web based back up, which I certainly intend to deal with.

I got rid of the post I started and wrote this new one instead. Mission accomplished. Laptop was fixed this morning. All systems are go.