Communication and Comfort

Having overcome the jet lag and taken over my new office it is time to set up for the research I'll be making here in locative media. There are still some restrictions, as I don't yet have an Internet connection working for me in the office and so I've been Googling and diddling with gadgets at home. Here my Telecom NZ ADSL connection is giving me a wonderful 1500 kb/s download and a scorching 130 kb/s upload. Even getting an e-mail to whoosh off into cyberspace from my MacBook or iPhone can take 10 seconds or more :-(

Despite the speed restriction I've been able to access many local services and dig lots of information that's really facilitated setting up here, moving about on public transport and even preparing my garbage properly for collection according to the prevailing methods and regulations. There doesn't really appear to be anything (I've needed) that doesn't have a decent web site to explain the local or national expectations and norms.

So, as I write this, it's exactly one week since I staggered through the front door here suitably sweaty and weary with my excess luggage after the 17000+ kilometre, 34 hour haul from Finland.

Thanks to Apple's iChat I've had the family at home joining me today, exploring the house and eating together at my breakfast table (a rather late breakfast for them though). With my limited bandwidth I was a bit dubious whether video-conferencing would work here but some short experiments proved that it is totally usable, although iChat being far superior to Skype, in both quality of sound and picture. It's a great comfort to be able to share a relatively natural communication interface with loved ones, especially when the distance between us is so great and possibilities to 'pop over' during the next 5 months are pretty limited. We made a latency test with Tarja in iChat, repeating numbers to each other as quickly as we could, and the perceived speed was amazing (and without any feedback problems). I couldn't help remembering the annual (and extremely expensive) phone calls between our family in UK and my granny in Tasmania when I was a kid in the early 1960s. My only communication with the Australian side of the family was always frustratingly punctuated with silences, or both ends speaking over each other, due to the 2 seconds of so it took for the speech to reach the receiver on the other side of the world. The only way to handle the latency was to use the 'over' command, as used by shortwave radio enthusiasts. "Happy Christmas Grandma! Over."

Additionally, although the iChat setup has been the major improvement to the quality of life here, I also discovered that the components of the TV system included a relatively high quality Harman Kardon powered speaker unit with a hefty sub-woffer box hidden away under all the cables. This has now been transformed into my home stereo system with the addition of the 'retro' iPod I inherited as couple of years ago from our Topi. Oh, the comforts of modern life! What would we do without them?