Re-emerging Online Life

My PhD is wrapping up and over the last few weeks I have been slowing re-integrating myself into a social life. A big part of this has involved moving work flows and processes typically relegated for my work PC, online. I am really happy with the current state of of this migration, so I thought I would capture exactly what has been migrated and/or reawakened, and my thoughts.

• Email and Calender: I have a gmail account, and have started forwarding all email to this single account. Previously I used outlook on my locked-down work machine that retrieved email from my work account and gmail, as well as managed my calender. The centralised web-based email has been great, I check it less often, have desktop notification, can access all accounts easily from home, and most importantly google is catching all the spam I used to have to delete manually on my work account. The calender is also extremely convenient, specifically home access, email notifications, and integration of third party sources.
• Instant Messaging: I excluded myself from IM whist studying the PhD. I have re-entered the arena, firstly with google talk which was functional and archived my messages in gmail (nice). I moved to Trillian for a while to get cross-platform capability (MSN and Jabber), and am now with Digsby. Digsby is by far the best solution (so far), integrating all platforms, as well as twitter, facebook, myspace, and handy notifications. I still use Adium on my mac at home (no Mac Digsby yet), and MSN support in Digsby does not work through my work proxy (although Digsby tech support assure me that this feature will be pushed out in the next release).
• Sharehouse Management: I have lived in sharehouse with three others since the start of my degree. I've always managed house finances and used a spreadsheet, firstly on my desktop, and later on google docs. I recently signed the house up with a free account on mysharehouse.com.au. So far, this webapp has been awesome. It facilitates easy bill, expense, and shared task management and automatically emails/SMS members when it's their turn or when they owe money. They require SMS credits to be purchased and have an occasional ad, although it is not clear how the site makes money. I'd also really love it if I could integrate the sharehouse calender with my google calender.
  
• Project Management: I am looking to collaborate with a team remotely, and have been seeking a lightweight project management web application. We went with basecamp, and so far at this early stage of collaborating on ideas and schedules it is meeting our needs. It's a bare bones tool, and it seems that it will meet our future needs nicely. Thankfully, this app does facilitate integration of the calender into google calender. Previously project management and brainstorming have been stuck in email and shared google docs, both poor excuses for this task.
  

There are still many tasks which are tied to my work PC, that could be moved to my laptop although I'd prefer to move into the cloud. Some items in this list maybe a little idealistic, which is good as they may motivate some budding innovator.

• Note Taking: I still take notes in word documents. I have tried google notebook, although I didn't really like the feel or flow (I could try again). I also use pen and paper for daily to-do's. I like the tactile acts of writing and crossing off, although this too could be moved to one of the many to-do list solutions.
• Music Management: My MP3's are all still stored on an external HDD. Further, I use winamp with a plug-in to manage music on my iPod, a device I use daily for podcasts. Collectively this solution sucks, and although winamp is faster than iTunes, it is really ugly and clunky. I want my music in the cloud, and I want to listen to it through a browser. I also want to manage my iPod and podcasts through a browser from any PC (iTunes online? podcast manager online?).
• Paper Archive: Over the last 4-5 years I have amassed a huge multi-gigabyte research paper archive. I basically store every paper (PDF/TXT/Word) I obtain (and sometimes read) either through the web or via correspondence (see my report on PhD practices for more information about this archive). The archive organisation is pretty haphazard, although I have found it invaluable for jump starting basic research. An ideal solution would be to automatically source bibliographic information of each paper and archive them as a list on citeULike or equivalent.
  
• Backups: I still archive my local files using winzip and or winrar and archive them on network drives, locally, and on external media (CD/DVD/HDD). I need to get around to backing up to the cloud. I know there is an emerging industry for this backed by services like AWS.
  

The state of software development, whether it is for research, a side project, or for a larger team project has been solved of a while with the use of off-site source control. I'm happy with this aspect of my desktop work flow, and use services such as sourceforge (and more recently google code) for open source projects and potentially many subscription-based services for private work. I also like the emerging trend of moving IDE's online as well, such as in Heroku and others.

That is about the extent of the big-ticket items, I'm sure there are many more less frequent tasks and work flows tied to my work desktop that I have left out.