I was out of luck.

The line out of the Starbucks was so long I didn’t even bother to stop for a chai latte, and instead I started walking up and down the aisles, stepping over teenagers without school and past their parents who were either sick of being stuck at home with them, or were trying to work. The children’s section was filled with adults, sprawled out around low, brightly colored tables with laptops and iPads (and sometimes both).

The first free outlet I found was outside the actual store in the mall. As I sat down on the floor in front of the pillar and outlet a mattress salesman emerged from his store to warn me that the outlet did not work—he’d been watching people sit down, plug-in, and then leave disappointed all morning. I should have known it was too good to be true. My laptop had some battery power left, however, and I was able to get onto the WiFi so I stayed put… until I realized that the hundreds of people who had the same idea I did were bogging down the connection.

Simply trying to open an email was a minutes-long process. I headed back into the store and plunked down in front of a bunch of Star Trek novels. Getting closer to the source of the WiFi didn’t help. Despite the spotty cell service (thanks to multiple towers down across the state) it was easier and quicker to send emails on my iPhone than it was from my computer.

Eventually I gave up. Tuesday I woke up with a renewed sense of purpose—even though I was still camping out on a floor in front of a fireplace. My friend had gotten his power back during the night and I was hopeful that meant he had cable and internet as well. No dice.

So I went and sat in line for gas before heading to check on my grandmother again. On my way to her house I saw that her community had power back in the town center, and that stoplights were working closer and closer to her house. She still didn’t have electricity but I was able to grab a bagel and some counterspace (and an outlet!) at the downtown Starbucks and get back to work.

As I watched my fellow refugees, and heard their tales of woe I got to thinking about the perils of working in the cloud. One woman could not log on to her office’s secure network over the very un-secure public network at Starbucks. I watched one guy pace back and forth in the parking lot on a very long cell phone call—which I later found out was a conference call.

Meanwhile, I slogged through the emails that I hadn’t gotten through the day before. I started downloading EContent boards, making a list of author corrections, and building a folder of documents to edit offline. I knew access to the cloud infrastructure I’ve built to be able to do my job from anywhere at any time was, well, not guaranteed. Eventually, the Starbucks crew would kick me out and I’d have to work the old fashioned way.

Somewhere during that time my grandmother got power back—but my house was still dark, and cold. So I spent the night there, reading boards and inputting corrections at the dinner table. And I was even able to send the files back to the ITI staff in Medford, NJ via Dropbox thanks to her internet connection.

About 98% of the time I am immeasurably grateful for the convenience of cloud computing. It allows me to work from home, which allows me to live near my friends and family rather than near an office. But when the power and internet fail, and the cell towers go down I hardly know what to do with myself—and clearly many of my neighbors don’t either.

“Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. “His intuition has been phenomenal over the years.”

Jobs’ death, while dreaded by Apple’s legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could “no longer meet (his) duties and expectations.”

Facebook is, after all, a free tool that we have no obligation to use, but makes life more convenient in myriad ways. What right do we even have to complain?  But then the #NewFacebook jumped from my digital life to my real life. On Saturday I was moving into a new house after many, many delays. My family mysteriously disappeared with a variety of excuses, while my friend, Melissa, and I continued to hunt through boxes in search of my utensils. Suddenly I heard banging on my door and horns honking outside. When I went to see what the hub-bub was about I found my friends and family bearing ice cream cake, food, gifts, and lots of booze.

This was all made possible by Facebook.

About a month ago I’d been planning a party myself–complete with a Facebook invite–for my housewarming/30th birthday. When my closing got pushed back, I had to postpone indefinitely. That was when my best-friend, Allison, sprung into action. She called my mother and started sorting through my Facebook friends, creating an “event” where she hashed out the details of a party that kept getting pushed back and then pushed back some more. She did this with people that, in many cases, she’d never even met or barely knew. At one point she panicked, wondering if I could see the “Theresa’s Surprise 30th Birthday Party” event and instead changed the name to “Very Important.”

Apparently, a lot of Facebook messages were exchanged about the party. So there were plenty of people at my party talking about how the new layout confused them and they had to wonder “How do I unsubscribe to this conversation?” That was mostly the guys–the ladies didn’t mind all the planning.

As confused as many of them seemed to be by the changes, that wasn’t really the point. Allison managed to orchestrate a (complete and utter) surprise, and track down people she would not have otherwise had easy access to all because of Facebook. Instead of having to send out invitations and form a phone tree every time the party was postponed, she just sent out another Facebook message. It’s this convenience that keeps us all using the social media site to end all social media sites.

Timeline or no Timeline, Facebook is really about communicating easily and efficiently with just about everyone you know. That’s why we stick around.

A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the consequences were real enough.

EContent has taken on the trolls before. (Here’s my take, and here was our intern’s post.) Now, more than ever, I believe that in a free and open society, anonymity on the web is not only dead, but detrimental. Part of having the freedom of speech is having the courage to stand behind what you’re saying, and if you’re going to call your neighbor “a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS” for all the world to see, you should at least have to attach your own name to the insults. This is why I welcome further site integration with social media sites. If we all had to sign in with our Facebook or Twitter accounts, and own what we say, we might be more likely to think about what we say.

Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication, or NFC.

This all seems like deja vu. For as long as rumors of Google Wallet have abounded, I’ve been skeptical. Surely there are early-adopters out there ready to put their financial info into this “lockable” wallet. I, however, keep having visions of lost phones dancing through my head. Even if it’s lockable, it’s probably still hackable (just ask Scarlett Johansson how secure her phone is). And what if I lose my phone while out at the mall — and I’ve obviously stopped carrying my regular wallet, otherwise what would be the point? I’d be without a phone to call anyone, and I’d be penniless.

For now wallet is only on Nexus S 4G by Google, so whether or not to go-walletless isn’t a decision this iPhone user has to make just yet. It does look like the Home Depot near my house accepts it, though, so maybe I’ll head over there and see if anyone else is taking up Google on this new payment option.

Over at The Guardian Lloyd Shepherd writes:

According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I’ll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.

Shepherd goes on to discuss ebooks and their purveyors — namely Barnes & Noble and Amazon:

If you’re an independent bookseller, Amazon must look like a cold, relentless stealth bomber casting its shadow over the pavement outside. But to the publisher and the writer, don’t things in Amazonia look rather different?

The Economist had a different take on it all, though:

Book publishing resembles the newspaper business in the late 1990s, or music in the early 2000s. Although revenues are fairly stable, and the traditional route is still the only way to launch a blockbuster, the climate is changing. Some of the publishers’ functions—packaging books and promoting them to shops—are becoming obsolete. Algorithms and online recommendations threaten to replace them as arbiters of quality. The tide of self-published books threatens to swamp their products. As bookshops close, they lose a crucial showcase. And they face, as the record companies did, a near-monopoly controlling digital distribution: Amazon’s grip over the e-book market is much like Apple’s control of music downloads.

So how are we to make sense of all of this? My advice: embrace change.

Is the book industry dying? No, quite the opposite. Instead there is a huge sea change afoot. Control is shifting, and the days of editors in the ivory towers of Manhattan are not long for this world. Instead, authors and readers are assuming control. Authors who have not found acceptance through traditional means, can turn to the ever-expanding list of available self-publishing tools — letting readers decide for themselves whether something is worth reading. Perhaps more importantly, it allows those same readers to speak up when a book is sub-par. Previously, bad books just ended up half-read on the bookshelves of buyers.

The truth is, acquiring editors in large publishing houses are basically flying blind. There is no real market research or data to back up any of their decisions — from the purchase to the cover art, it’s all just up to their expertise, and their whims. For every blockbuster an editor brings in, there are probably a half-dozen mid-list books and a few flops. They spend more time in meetings than they do editing, and it shows.

Digital publishing and the sale of ebooks through sites like Amazon — which collects lots of data about its shoppers — gives publishers a huge advantage. Sure, learning how to turn a profit from digital publishing entails restructuring clunky, redundant workflows and business models, but like I said, it’s time to embrace change. Rather than the death of books, publishers would be wise to look at this time in their history as the rebirth of books.

It’s pretty clear that many authors are already doing just that.

A game called Tea Party Zombies Must Die is making headlines with violence and shock value. In 2008 we had a young, tech-savvy candidate pitted against one who could barely get his email, but this time around everyone is on the social media bandwagon. From Twitter to Facebook, it’s hard to imagine a presidential campaign (or any serious marketing effort) that doesn’t include a social arm.

While it’s hard to imagine something as silly (and strange) as a video game about zombified Sarah Palin will make much of a difference in the race, it will be interesting to see how digital technology plays into this election.