Okay the "biggie" to Marissa and I on getting married and then being apart for so long was finally resolved today. We both didn't know how we could deal with being married and having to be apart for 6mo-2yrs.
I bought her a Compaq Laptop here at the resale shop in Houston (where Compaq's headquarters is), had a phone installed in her home in Davao (took 6 weeks), got her and ISP (more expensive than here in the states) and lastly purchased her a web camera.
Of Course we used ICQ to tell us when the other was online and we have been chatting using mIRC or one of its clones for 8 months now. ICQ really did us a favor though with the new release ICQ2000b which has a webphone function. It works great! Very clear when Marissa has a good ISP connection.
We tried Netmeeting and Eyeball for video but we couldn't get either to work properly. Today though we got PalTalk and it worked great! We can see each other and hear each other better than i had expected. No its not the same as being there but it really does help.
Now some of you might say this is really costing you. Actually I was spending $250-300/mo on phone calls. The phone and ISP in davao is costing me $80/mo. That saves me at least $170/mo. The laptop cost me $1040 loaded with options. I break even in less than 6 months. Okay so we hope that with the new laws she will be here by then. Well the laptop will allow here to communicate with her family and give them the ability to surf the web and do homework and so on. Her brother wants to major in computer science in college so Marissa will leave it for him and his brothers. Plus it is a write off on my taxes to show that i have provided more than half of her living expenses.
I guess this is working out as well as hoped and once again I am finding that "murphy's laws" no longer have that hold on me.
Bear
