Out in California

This morning I flew out to La-La land California for work. I flew US Airways and although we left a bit late we got in early. We flew into San Francisco, waited a bit to get my bag (SFO's baggage claim needs some work), picked up a rental car, and then drove down to the Sheraton in Sunnyvale. San Jose airport is closer to Sunnyvale but we couldn't get a direct flight from Philly. If I'm going to be stuck on a plane for close to six hours I don't want the extra hassle of changing planes at an intermediate stop.

I'm here along with another engineer to look over a streaming video system for possible use by my employer. Based on what we've seen so far in demos back home, it's looking good. We'll do some onsite evaluations tomorrow and Thursday, then fly home Friday.

My hotel room has high speed Internet access (for a fee) so I thought I'd have a one-way video iChat session with Judith, so the girls could see Daddy. No dice. Although we were able to do a voice chat without any problems, I couldn't get the video to work. My webcam is a Logitech USB model and I have a plugin for iChatAV to allow it to use such. But even though I could see a preview of the video on my screen, Judith could not. Out of the box, iChatAV only works with Firewire webcams, not USB webcams. Unfortunately, such webcams are few and far between, and expensive to boot. So, I think I'll bag the video chat idea until I get a new MacBook or MacBook Pro sometime next year; they come with a built-in webcam.