I'm lucky enough to spend most of my time as a work-at-home-dad, but on occasion work threatens to cut off the faucet if I don't make an appearance for at least a few days. That doesn't mean I can't stay connected to my family, even spending dinner time together.
In what I would consider a pretty healthy dose of geekery I spent my time this evening munching nachos at El Metate Mexican Restaurant with my wife Jess and young son, BigC, joining in via iChat some 200 miles away. In between frequent spouts of 'daaDAA' followed by pointing and waving I got to see one of his first successful experiences with using a fork. An attempt at sharing lasagna with me resulted in a poked eye. With dinner over Jess flopped her laptop over to get a long shot of the living room. She picked up BigC and plopped him down on his feet at the other end of the room. In 3 seconds flat my screen was full of baby face, one of his best walk/runs yet.
Video Setup This kind of interaction would be trivial over an open WiFi connection, fire up iChat or Skype, connect and say hello. Unfortunately El Metate isn't up on the free WiFi bandwagon. I used my Android based phone over 3G, USB cord, PDA Net software, Mac and iChat. PDA Net allows you to share whatever data connection you have at the time with a laptop, and 3G speeds are perfectly acceptable for decent video chat.
There are a few other solutions, like Apple's Facetime and phones with front facing cameras like the Evo 4G. Unfortunately Facetime is WiFi only for now and can only be used with other iOS devices. It also shares the same problem with the Evo 4G, in that even with large screens it's still tiny. Plus propping up a phone to get the same 'I'm there' feeling as from a laptop is tough.
There are many ways to stay connected on the road, but live video is hard to beat.
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