Boston Calling St. Louis: Granddads Chat with Zander and Moms 


We finally got our AV Chat connection to work, and is it sweet! 

Early in January I told you about video chatting with Tony in England trying to get our daughter's video connection to work. Next I reported on how Stephen and I are using AV Chat from our respective offices. Today Stephanie called. "Are you sitting at your computer? We bought a new iMac, and the chat seems to be working!" Still groggy from rousing from my nap, I fumbled around and got AV Chat up and running. I entered Dawn's AIM ID in the Buddy list, Steph initiated the chat, and ZOINGGGG, there the little guy was!!

If you want to see a complete collage of our chat, click on the image to the left or go to this web location. I made this by capturing about 16 screen shots from AV Chat and batch processing them into a collage using Fireworks.

Well, to make a long story short, I was really impressed and pleased with this whole way of communicating. I mean, here we were, Stephen and I in front of the iMac G3 on the third floor, and they were on their third floor with the new iMac with the Intel chip. At first, it seemed kind of awkward. For one thing, we'd never done it before, and didn't have clear expectations. For another, this is NOT AT ALL like a phone call. It's more like a visit on our collective third floors. It's amazing the depth that the video component adds. After a while we were just hangin' out, talking about whatever. Dawn even went and changed Zander's diaper.

We could be critical. The size is small, 250 x 305. The color under natural light leaves something to be desired. It's hard or darn near impossible to get five individuals all on the screen at one time. But it was so much FUN. Dawn held up Zander's little feet and new shoes. Polo—their male Italian greyhound—got into the act and started licking Stephanie's face. And Zander was really into it. Too interested to smile. Finally, he got tired and hungry, and we regretfully said goodbye.

I almost felt like we had had a little teletransportation trip to Boston. We're doing this often! 

Posted: Sun - February 19, 2006 at 04:38 PM          

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