By one form of reckoning, this is my third attempt at living 100% in the cloud. I made mention of a first and second attempt several years ago.

In reality, though, it’s consistent evolution of the same attempt. Within the past several months I moved the last couple holdout documents out of desktop apps into Google Drive. I have been noticing that most of my time on my laptop is spent using web apps in Chrome, or using a shell session for coding. I have had pretty good success experimenting with moving my development to EC2 instances, but the annual cost for a single instance was just a bit beyond my pain threshold ($120 – $180 per year).

Several things have come together to push me to take this to the extreme. First, I purchased both a Nexus 7 and an iPad Mini late last year. I am much happier with either/both of them than I was with my full-size iPad. The form factor is perfect for my needs.

Second, I ran across Digital Ocean, a new cloud service that offers Linux VM’s for a maximum of $5 per month which easily dips below my pain threshold at (33% – 50% of the cost of EC2).

Third, I have an upcoming business trip to Brazil, which got me thinking about traveling light again. If I could eliminate the need for my laptop and its accessories – even my svelte 13″ MacBook Air – I could shave nearly 4 pounds off my backpack weight.

So this week I began an experiment: for my business trip to Houston I have left my laptop at home. I’m doing everything on my iPad Mini and an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Assuming the next four days go well, I’ll try again next week. Assuming the next three weeks go well I’ll be taking the same approach for my trip to Recife, Brazil!