You never really know when you will use your iPhone to make a real difference. I had one of those unique opportunities this weekend.

Last week, I received a call from a friend from university days to ask if I would consider performing some music at her father’s memorial service. Her father was a very talented musician with a long history of success in our region. I had known him for 30 years myself and had many wonderful memories of performing and working on music projects together.  Of course, I was honoured to be asked to play at the service. As we exchanged emails to organize the details, it also became clear that my friend was not going to make here from Scotland for the service due to the volcanic ash in the air that shut down travel in the European air space.

Technology to the rescue. I offered to set up a skype session so that she could at least see the service in real time. First we complete a pretest session to check out things out and get an idea of laptop to speaker distances. Since the church did not have an Internet access, I used my iPhone in tethering mode to establish a connection a few minutes before the service. I was able to sit at the front of the church and pan the laptop to point it at the 2 speaker locations. I used a second iPhone to video the whole service for them. The video turned out great – one take for the 1.5 hour service. The video file was 2.25 GB in size.

We are going to connect this week and try a direct file transfer using a Skype connection. Hopefully this will work well.

Everything turned out great. I was delighted to perform at the service, and glad I could lend a helping hand  given the travel challenges.

~ Mark