Well, Dave was able to sort out his difficulties — he had the microphone turned off, of all things — and because he has a video camera, we were able to have a “one way video chat” — I could see him, but he not me. Here’s the result:

Audio quality seemed to degrade a little (as you might expect) when we went video. Video quality was much, much better than I ever saw with NetMeeting — not too much different than watching television on my iMac.

Dave was using a handheld video camera, and this proved the truth of what Steve Jobs said in his keynote: a camera has to be mounted on the top of your monitor, looking at your face, to be really effective as a videoconferencing device.

I had two “callers” take me up on my offer to iChat with audio. A reader from Calgary, who I’d never met (and, ironically, whose name I never remembered to ask for during our chat) dropped by, and we had a good conversation, me on my iMac and he on an iBook. Audio quality was slightly poorer than the earlier experiments, and seemed to get better and worse, presumably following the available bandwidth. It was odd (but not unpleasant) to talk to a real anonymous reader (he found this site from the sites drawer in NetNewsWire); for a moment I felt like Larry King.

Later, Dave phoned, or tried to. Something on his end with audio wasn’t working — I think he was trying to beam in with full video via camcorder — so he could hear me, but I couldn’t hear him. So I talked, and he typed. I felt like Helen Keller. Or like he was Helen Keller. Or something.

Apple released two new upgrades last week, one for their Safari web browser and the other for iChat, which gets renamed iChat AV because it has audio and video capabilities.

Safari has been in beta testing for a while now, and it’s maturing into a very capable browser. I use it by default almost all of the time. However I’m noticing an annoying couple of bugs that popped up in the 1.0 version that weren’t present in the betas. The first one is some sort of GIF image bug, associated with CSS, that causes a random image from one frame to replace the background image in another frame. The second one is more troublesome: I find Safari hangs when I POST to my own Apache server. I can’t figure this second one out, but it does appear to be local, somehow.

I’ve had a chance to use the audio capabilities of iChat AV a couple of times now, once with Steven, who was “up the road” physically, but 22 hops away Internet wise (with traffic from Aliant to ISN being routed through Montreal, New York, back to Montreal, to Halifax and then back to Charlottetown), and today with my mother, who is halfway across the country, but only 14 hops up the Internet. In both cases the audio was equal to or better than talking on the telephone. Installation and connection was dead simple; there are simply no settings, beyond adding someone as a buddy as one normally would.

My mother and I tried several times, when we were both still shackled to Microsoft Windows, to get NetMeeting to work properly, but it not only frequently crashed my Windows 2000 machine (and by crashed I mean “had to turn the power off to keep using the machine”), but also required a cumbersome settings dance that we never completely figured out.

If you want to try out iChat AV, just add me as a buddy and give me a call: my screen name is reinventedpei.

From Telecom Update:

The City of Calgary is now providing free Wi-Fi Internet access in four locations. The showcase sites, and participating commercial hotspots, are identified by a distinctive “Wireless City Hotspot” logo.

Further to the there’s nowhere decent to eat in Charlottetown, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Maid Marian’s restaurant in Sherwood (I thought it might be Parkdale, but then, well, you know with the name and all…).

Maid Marian’s is not a place to go for gourmet food. The food there will not change your life. It might not even make you feel better as a human being. But it is the place to go for inexpensive, well-prepared, grease-influenced food served by the most capable wait staff in the city.

If you are pressed for cash, and need a big fill-up at the beginning of the week, you can’t go wrong with “2 for 1 cheeseburger nights” on Monday and Tuesday. On Thursday the special is roast turkey, which is my personal favourite. Portions are large. Gravy is good. And you pay at the cash.

Catherine and I watched almost the entire first season of the BBC series Coupling tonight. It’s bloody brilliant, so to speak. Seinfeldesque (a compliment) with more sex.

You can rent it, after we return it on Thursday, from That’s Entertainment; it’s in the Independent Film section, not the boxed set, as it’s a single DVD.

Katharine Hepburn has died at 96.

The end of an era; truly a great actor.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m hear at Timothy’s. Front window is open. Temperature is perfect, with a nice breeze. I ordered a Wyman’s blueberry juice to drink (which earned me a “that’s an excellent choice for breakfast” from the server), along with one of Karin LaRonde’s “packed full of goodness” rice crispie bars. There is a German couple at the PC beside me; “that’s a small machine you have there,” the man says to me.

I watched bits of the first act of Saturday Night Live; the best skit was a commercial for a new TV series called Welcome Back Potter. It’s 20 years in the future, the area around Hogwarts has developed into a seedy slum, and Harry Potter, now scruffy looking, middle-aged, but still spectacled, comes back to the “old neighbourhood” as a teacher. It was very well done, and should receive some sort of award for “best play on words that I would have never thought of.”

Here’s a note I received from our old friend, and now famous filmmaker, Mikey Johnston:

It’s a funny thing when someone finally gets around to google searching their own name and finds articles like yours. Your readers may want to know that I could only put $2 down on the car and had to wait until my January student loan came in before paying off the $33 balance. I think car was crushed after performing its fence duties. By the way, my father is in the movie.

Here’s what the HotDocs film festival says about Mike’s film:

After graduating from Trent University, Mike Johnston found himself unemployed, crushed by his student loan and plagued by collection agencies. He decided to make a film about his student loan to pay it off. Begging and borrowing cameras, Johnston launched on a hilarious and horrifying ride through debt-ridden student life. Students working at the local pizzeria tally up their combined debt on the cash register – a total of $90,000 in one stop. In fact, Trent students have run up a combined debt of $54 million in the last four years, at interest rates of 12 per cent and up! But the absurdity doesn’t stop there. The university itself is wallowing deeper in debt as a strategy to get out of debt. With dogged determination and acidic deadpan irony, Johnston follows the money and takes politicians to task to expose the dangerous lunacy of the ‘new economics of education.’ Funny, insightful, essential viewing.

I’ve emailed Mike back to ask about the possibility of screening his film here in Charlottetown.