High-tech Rooster

Yesterday was Chinese New Year. This year is the year of the Rooster. Over here in the US was just like any other day. Well, it fell on Ash Wednesday, actually. The traditional New Year greetings was done the high-tech way over the Internet across 14 time-zones. My mom and I "cammed" for a little while and then we all got into this 4-way conferencing using Skype among my brother, my sister, my parents and I, from four separate addresses in two different continents. It was the first year we greeted each other online instead of over a long distance phone call. If only we could receive "ang pow" (red envelope filled with cash given to children and singles) as an attachment from e-mail, it would have been even cooler. The best part was: my tech-savvy brother taped the whole conferencing as his Podcast show, so the rest of the world will have the opportunity to subscribe to it. Who would have thought that today, we are living in a sci-fi world, having audio-visual communication across the oceans in real time, which costs us almost next to nothing compared to just 15 years ago, when air mail took two weeks to arrive, and making international phone call was a luxury. We are living in an amazing era.