This past week, While I’ve been enjoying the splendid weather and watching football in Berlin, my MacBook Pro has been having its second brain transplant in less than a month (thank goodness for the extended AppleCare warranty plan). Now I’ve just found that it won’t be fixed in time before I set off on two weeks of travelling to assorted weddings and baptisms across Europe, which I’ve sort of wrapped into a vacation.

The upshot: Some severely limited blogging on Ogle Earth, until around mid July.

The silver lining: I’m pulling out all the stops to move almost all my daily productivity rituals onto the cloud, so that a computer failure no longer cramps my style. My move to browser-based Gmail was painless. And now that Google Gears is around for Mac, I see no more reason to use Microsoft Excel and Word. But my switch to Google Reader, which I’ve been exploring today, will go a bit slower: I don’t want to downgrade my tools just because I’m moving to the cloud. But I’m almost there (with the big exception of photo editing).

A word of caution: I’ll be testing living off the cloud these coming weeks (by necessity), and depending on how it goes, I might find myself posting more often than I promised.