I know that some people among my family and friends consider me to be a technological guru. But it’s worth noting that my most recent technical degree is 27 years old and my technical professional employment ended seven years ago. In short, I am Out of the Loop.

That combined with my natural inertia has kept me tied to the old ways of Things Computing for a while. I mean, sure, I’ve had laptops for quite a while, and two years ago I switched to Gmail and bought a Blackberry.

The switch to gmail was eye-opening for me. Rather than my email being tied to a specific computer, it was “in the cloud” (as the current term goes). That is, wherever I could find a browser and the Internet I had my email. Not just access to send and receive email, but all the emails I had sent and received. Yes, this is true of Yahoo and AOL, but Gmail is cloud-email for adults. Their spam filters are spectacularly good and they provide all the tagging, searching, and sorting that even a power user such as myself demands.

Since I joined Cake Poker, I have been using Outlook for Cake email and Gmail for my personal email. It’s trivially easy to sync between my Blackberry and Outlook, so whatever my Outlook knew, my Blackberry knew, and vice versa. That goes for my contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes (the model number for the water filter in our vacation cabin, my Delta Airlines frequent flier number, etc).

But I use two computers: a laptop for travel and a hyper-powerful desktop at home, and it was a nuisance to make sure that I continually sync’d both computers to the Blackberry. Or if I sent an email from Outlook on the laptop, a copy of the sent email was on the laptop but not the desktop in my office. Note, of course, that if I used Gmail to send the email, I wouldn’t have that problem.

So I decided to switch my work email to a (separate) Gmail account. It turns out that Gmail is happy to let you have multiple accounts and there are tools such as the Gmail manager for Firefox that make it easy to manage them.

After that, I was headed down the slippery slope. Google has contact and calendar managers too and within a few days, I’d moved my Outlook calendar and contacts to Google. My only complaint is that Google doesn’t have a proper “Notes” manager. I spent a couple of hours transferring the Outlook Notes into Google docs and that was done. It seems like overkill to use a document sharing service to remember my biscuit recipe, but there it is, wherever the Internet is.

Furthermore, Google has a sweet little Blackberry app that auto-syncs the Blackberry to the Google stuff, without my even asking.

I have yet to make the complete jump and put all my important documents (professional and personal) in the cloud. I have bridged the gap by subscribing to a service that allows me access to my desktop over the Internet. It’s a one-year subscription – we’ll see what happens at the end of that year. I guess I’m not quite ready to say to Google, “Hey – here’s all my personal information, private documents, my will, copies of my family’s passports…” Maybe that’s false security – a bright hacker could surely find his way into my desktop anyway. I probably have bigger things to worry about than Google turning evil on me (and if they do, we have bigger concerns than their having my personal documents).

So now I’ve released this much into the cloud. It’s also freed me up to start thinking about replacing the Blackberry with the new Android X. And more and more, the particular computer I’m on won’t matter so much – everything that computer is supposed to store and remember for me will be floating out in the cloud.

And yes, I realize that this starts to take me toward that very scary place where I am gazing at Macs, like my friend Tommy Angelo.