Video chat.

Today was mostly an inside, working day. We did have a long (45 min?) video chat with my parents over iChat (Mac). It was my mother's birthday.
It's surprising, really, how quickly everyone can adapt to the experience: the "okay" sound and the fairly poor video - and just engage in the conversation. The greatest distraction, I have come to believe, is the small window on the video which shows YOU (the image you are sending). We need to get that turned off.
It's an amazing technology, I guess, considering how long it took to get here. I was promised videophones at the GE attraction at Disneyland in 1963. Now there are several competing avenues for free (for now) communications over the net. Most of them work most of the time. None of them work all the time. My cousins Roland and Vivienne in Italy use Skype, which works beautifully for sound, but Skype does not offer video for their Mac version. We use (or TRY to use) iChat for everyone else here in the States, but it often fails to work beyond text messaging, especially when PCs are involved.