NewMexiKen

A pleasant little techie tale from David Pogue.

I took last Thursday off from writing this column, and you took last Thursday off from reading it. But I have a Thanksgiving thought to share, even though it’s about something that happened two weeks ago.

I was in London at a computer conference. I was jet lagged, on the verge of a cold and — after nearly a week away — missing my wife and two young children.

Following a talk, I asked some stragglers in the auditorium if there was anywhere I could get online to check my e-mail.

A young man named Tim Haigh offered to show me to a coffee shop a few blocks away that had wireless Internet access. Tim and I paid our $8 for the hour, bought fizzy lemon sodas, popped open our PowerBooks and began to surf. As we chatted, he mentioned that he often sat in this very coffee shop and conducted video chats with a buddy in the States, using an Apple iSight.

The iSight is a compact, tubular, high-quality video camera, about the size of a Hostess Ho-Ho. It has a built-in microphone and lens cover. It has no power cord of its own; it connects to a Macintosh with a single FireWire cable. As long as you both have broadband Internet connections, you and another iSight (or camcorder) owner can conduct a videoconference.

The quality is excellent: smooth motion, full screen if you like and very little delay. It’s absolutely nothing like the crude, jerky, stuttering, massively delayed video you may have tried with cheap Web cams.

In any case, I perked right up when Tim mentioned his video chats, because I had an iSight, too, perched on my screen back home. I had no idea you could use it across the Atlantic.

Indeed you can, Tim said — in fact, he carries his iSight around with him.

“You mean you have it with you right now?” I exclaimed. “Can I borrow it?”

It was about 5:30 p.m., meaning that it was 12:30 p.m. at home. On the chance that my wife was at her computer, I fired off an e-mail to her, suggesting that we try out an intercontinental video call.

It took a few minutes for me to explain to her, by furious back-and-forth e-mail messages, how to open iChat and start up the video link. (Most of the time was spent with me, a color-blind husband, imploring her to click the “orange camcorder icon,” which turns out to be green.)

And then, suddenly, there it was: My wife Jennifer’s live image and her voice, transmitted in real time 3,500 miles across the globe — instantly, crystal clear and, by the way, free. I paraded around the coffee shop with my laptop and the iSight, showing her the local ambiance. (Jennifer, grinning: “Hey, buy me one of those chocolate croissants!”)

Maybe I was just overtired and sentimental, but it was an almost overwhelming experience.

She rounded up the kids. They didn’t seem to grasp the full scope of the technological miracle before them, which I found tremendously reassuring; I could see for myself that none of the traveling dad’s worst nightmares had come true.

We caught up for awhile; I told a silly bedtime story to the kids; we showed each other how it was dark out in England, but still bright at home. Finally, after about 20 minutes, we “hung up.”

There’s a lot of junk in technology, a lot of hassle and frustration, a lot of disappointment. But this moment was like a TV commercial. It was an emotional, powerful, simple, perfect example of how technology can change a moment, solve a problem, and despite the gulf of time and distance, bring you face to face with the people you love.

The Internet is changing everything.