My first experience with telepresence.

[xiphias]

Originally, Lis and I had been planning on going down to Florida, to her parents' place for Pesach. My parents hadn't been planning on having a seder. But then things happened -- my parents' plans for the first seder fell through, my foster-sister mentioned that my niece and nephew would have a day off of school, and my mother's brothers mentioned that they really wouldn't mind spending the time with family. With my grandfather's death, my mother and her siblings have really needed each other recently. So Lis and I changed our plans, and stayed up here for the first seder.

Of course, my sister wouldn't be able to be there, right? While my foster sister and her family live in New England, only a few hours away from my parents, my birth sister lives in Florida, which is a bit more of a challenge. But Leila WANTED to be there, and my niece and nephew wanted to see her.

Skype provided the solution. We put Mom's laptop at a place at the end of the table, and Leila set her laptop up in her house, and she got her own food and seder stuff, and we did the seder together.

After the seder part of the seder, we carried the laptop downstairs, and my niece and nephew and sister and I all played Apples to Apples together. We had to hold her cards up to the laptop camera so she could know what she had -- and to not look at the little image at the bottom which shows what the camera is pointing at -- and she'd tell us which card to play by saying a number from one to five -- and it worked.

I got to play a card game with my niece and nephew who were next to me, and my sister, who is more than a thousand miles away.

Letters are great. Telephones are great. Email, texting/IM/GTalk, wonderful. But this? Amazing.

Nowhere NEAR as good as actually being together, but so much better than not. Emotionally, it really means something.

Comments

[trinker.livejournal.com]

YAY!

[ron_newman]

Apples to Apples together

Were both laptops Macs, by any chance?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

My mother's, which is the one we were using, was, but I don't know whether Leila's is. I suspect so, though.

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

That's great!

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

How cool!

[plantmom.livejournal.com]

This is very sweet, and cool at the same time. I'm not a big fan of technology for its own sake, but when it's used to bring people together in this way, it rocks.
A coworker of mine had expressed, ever since I met her almost three years ago, a complete dislike of computers. Then her husband was deployed to a carrier somewhere near Afghanistan. She fell in love with Skype as a means to keep in touch with him. Lovely.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful, and so very, very your wonderful family.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Skype is awesome. We've been using it to play with our old role-playing group, half of whom are now over 1000 miles away. I hadn't thought of having dinner with people who weren't there, probably because I've only had a laptop with a camera for two weeks, but it sounds like a great idea.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

We've started doing teleprescense meetings at work. Half my group is in Billerica, MA, the other half is in Hyderabad, India. Both offices are special rooms so that it is like we are each at half of a full size meeting table. It has made the meetings more interesting, no more goofing off during them when the other side can't see us :)

[sproutntad.livejournal.com]

Unfortunetly, No. Mine is not a Mac -- but I should get a Mac Just to play Apples to Apples - or next time I can skype via my iphone!! That would work too :)

[sproutntad.livejournal.com]

It was so great to see everyone and spend time with the family. It was so much fun to have sedar with my family. Sometimes it felt like I was watching a movie of my family - other times it felt like I was right there. Then we did dishes together, played Apples to Apples -- awesome that it worked!! After that, my sister took a picture of a crossword puzzle and texted it to me and then we did the crossword puzzle together over skype :) All in all I spent 5 hours on skype hanging out with my family. All day yesterday my fiance kept saying - Are you happy? Did you have fun? I haven't been that happy and had that much fun in a while! (the bottle of wine I drank helped too) He's joking that we are going to put a big screen computer screen in our kitchen wall, so we can skype all the time!! :) And yes, emotionally, it really does mean something :)

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

I love how technology can bring people together! Having Skype and webcams would've meant so much to my mom (maybe my dad too?) when they first moved to the US and couldn't afford to even call home except for very special occasions like the birth of a child because international phone calls were expensive back then.