Do you video phone?

July 9, 2005 · Filed Under Technology and Gadgets · Comment

Mobile video phones were the latest and greatest must-have gadget here for the last two years or so. However, there are one or two signs that people are tiring of these miracles of modern technology. This could, in part, be down to the fact that the video call system does not work particularly well. This is possibly because financial pressures led to the release on the market of mobile video phone devices that were not quite up to the task, although having said this, one of the first operators into the video phone market here was ‘Three’, which is part of the huge Hutchinson Telcom group, and their phones do work quite well, even if they do not function everywhere.

Another reason for the dwindling enthusiasm is possibly that people appear to be growing out of the need to see others. I mean, is it really necessary? Most of the people you call are people you see regularly or they may be people you don’t know and may not want to show your ugly mug to. We have one of these video phone things, as do our son’s Italian grandparents, and it is nice for them to see our little one, without having to make a trip up here to see him. I can sort of understand this type of use, but it is a rather small niche market. One of our friends, who had a video phone, part exed it for a non-video mobile, partly because the thing did not work well and partly because she just was not using the video function.

I shall not be jumping on this band wagon for a long while, although I may consider getting a video phone for my parents in the UK so they can see my son more regularly, but then again with a fastish www connection and a good little webcam you can do the same thing - at a fraction of the cost and without having to squint at a two inch square screen.

I’m not 100% sure, but I have a feeling that mobile video phones may well fade away quite shortly. Once the fixed system becomes VOIP, everyone will be video phoning from their PC’s, if they really want to that is.

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Tags: Italian, mobile phone, use, video calls, video phone

A little get-together

July 9, 2005 · Filed Under Italy, Me, Milan · Comment

One of our neighbours, a lady who hails from the Trentino area of Italy and speaks Italian with a Germanic accent, thought that it would be a good idea to try to get everyone on the ground and first floors of our appartment block together for a summer get together. She hoped that others who live in our 4 storey block may also be interested in participating and to this end my other half produced a little poster to stick down in the entrance hall.

In the end there were nine of us, ten if you include our little son. There were the two girls who live next to us, the lady opposite, the guy on the second floor and the family who lives on the ground floor - wife, husband, plus son. The afternoon before we stuck a few balloons around the courtyard and took out some chairs and tables. We had all been asked to make or bring something and we kicked off with some garlicy pasta which was made by the lady from Trentino, this was followed by sausages and meatballs, provided by those below us, a ‘frittata’ - a type of omletty thing made with courgettes, eggs, bread, milk and cubes of smoked bacon and after this came the raw ham and melon, which may sound horrible, but is actually very tasty - if you get a good melon. All of this was washed down with lashings of nice read wine. Good stuff. For pudding, I provided a large quantity of ice cream - chocolate, melon, peach, and several other flavours and this also went down well. To round things off, the guy above us filled our glasses with some very good ’spumante’ - the Italian equivalent of champagne (and much better than the French stuff in my humble opinion) and then we had a few glasses of some Limoncello - a lemon liqueur and a little rum - both provided by this blogger.

The whole thing was very good fun and it was great to get to know some of the others who live in the appartment block. We laughed, we joked, all whilst eating and drinking. What more could you ask?

I took a few photos, which I may get round to posting here and printed them off this morning and stuck them downstairs in the entrance, in the hope that next year’s bash will involve a few more residents. Even if it doesn’t, we shall do the same thing again with the same people and we will have a great time. It would be nice to think that it may become something of an informal tradition here.

My thanks to Anita, who really was the driving force behind the idea - although she was never pushy and is just one of those wonderful down to earth people that this world needs a few more of.

As a footnote, I wander if the likes of Bin Laden and his cronies have ever got together with a group of normal people. I doubt it, for if they had, they may well have never decided to incite a war in which ‘normal’ people become the victims.

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