Farsight

Mark Morford’s last column was basically a sales pitch for the Apple iSight, the camera that interfaces seamlessly with iChat to enable videoconferencing for the rest of us. I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment.
For Mother’s Day this year, as I made my move across the country, I got my Mom an iSight for her iBook. (Perhaps iShould have said iGot it.) I figured it would help in my absence, but it wasn’t until last week when it really came in handy — it was the annual end-of-September family vacation at the Outer Banks, where my mother lives. So, in one fell swoop I got to videconference with my mom, stepfather, two aunts, brother, sister-in-law, and nieces/nephew. Not the most efficient conference, with all of us holding up photos to the camera — and my niece holding up items like her toothbrush for my approval — but it was nice, it was inexpensive, and dammit, it was twenty-first century. And most amazing of all, it was within the limited technical expertise of my mother to plug in the camera.
This is the technology we were promised back in the 1960s when the Bell System demonstrated the Picture Phone. But this is in color. And doesn’t require that you hold a receiver to your ear.
I mean really… the things that people don’t think about when they invent new things — add video to a regular phone call and you just see a person holding a phone receiver to their ear. Weird.