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Mac Mania
Cruising toward home
As I write this, we are on the penultimate day of the MacMania 8 Mediterranean cruise - five countries and eight ports of call in ten days.
This was my first MacMania Cruise and my first time on a cruise ship so I had little information to go on as to how this would all come together - and, for the most part, it has gone about as well as can be expected.
The toughest job on board the Costa Atlantica isn’t that of Captain Fenza or the ship’s Cruise Director - that title goes to the organizer of MacMania 8, Neil Bauman of InSight Cruises.
At sea at last!
Macs at sea!
Going on your first cruise is exciting, fun, scary, challenging, frustrating, aggravating… And sometimes, all of that within moments of each other.
We boarded the ship (and what a ship it is - almost 300 meters or 320 yards long, 86 thousand tons with 900 crew members, 12 decks and a top speed of 22 knots or more than 25 mph and built in Helsinki, Finland in 2000) on Wednesday. According to several MacMania veterans, the boarding process on this particular ship took much longer (4 hours) and was much more disorganized than previous cruises on the Holland America line.
(Add to that the seeming European inability to stand in line and not push, shove and butt their way in front of you makes patience and calm an exercise that would make Buddha kick a puppy…)
Mac Mania 8: The journey begins
The author and an Italian beverage.
And so the “Trip of a Lifetime” Mac Mania 8 cruise, co-produced by InSight Cruises and Macworld, begins with a (much-delayed at JFK) flight into Rome’s Fiumicino Airport bright and early in the morning.
This particular cruise is in a part of the world I’ve always wanted to visit so when my wife (Lesa Snider King, author of the Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual) asked if I wanted to go with her as she teaches Photoshop classes on the cruise, I jumped at the chance.
The cruise, which begins on Wednesday, is a ten-day, five-country, eight-stop extravaganza through the cradle of civilization. Along with the on-board classes and activities, we will be visiting the ruins of Pompeii, the Great Pyramids at Giza, and—my most anticipated stop—the island of Santorini in Greece.
Curacao, canals, and converting video
Hello again from the Caribbean! This is the second of two reports from MacMania 7, the latest installment in a series of Mac conferences that take place aboard a cruise ship on the move between various exotic ports of call.
In my previous dispatch, we had already visited Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas and Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles. Since then we’ve logged well over 1,000 nautical miles and visited even more ports, and onboard we’ve spent a lot of time talking about Macs and talking with our fellow Mac users.
On Wednesday our destination was another Dutch possession, the island of Curaçao. The island seems to be much wetter than Aruba, and it was definitely a warm and humid day. Our visit to Curaçao coincided with my daughter’s sixth birthday, so we splurged on a visit to the Curaçao Dolphin Academy so that we could all spend some time in close proximity to the dolphins. Suffice it to say that they are much, much bigger in person than you might expect from seeing them on TV.
Thursday was our second “sea day,” in which we make no stops in ports and instead spend much of the time in class sessions scattered throughout meeting rooms on one of the ship’s main levels. Apple’s Janet Hill spent the day in two marathon sessions—all morning on iLife, and all afternoon covering iWork. Derrick Story, our resident photography expert, was also working incredibly hard on Thursday in three sessions covering Apple’s Aperture, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, and ways of integrating Photoshop into the workflow of users of Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto.
Leopard looms off Aruba
Hello from the Caribbean! Yes, it’s that time of year, when Macworld editors write about what's going on at the latest MacMania cruise —where dozens of Mac users (but not you) are mixing a fantastic, exotic vacation with the latest and greatest Mac info from a team of expert speakers.
This installment, MacMania 7, is a 10-day cruise in the Caribbean aboard the MS Volendam with the highlight of the trip being a passage into the Panama Canal. I say into and not through there because this isn’t one of those two-week, start in San Diego, end in Florida type itineraries. Instead, we depart and return to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But in between those two stops, not only do we pass into Gatun Lake in the center of the Panama Canal, but we visit numerous Caribbean destinations.
Being mindful of the fact that the calendar is slouching toward the holidays, I have to point out that it seems to be 80 degrees and sunny everywhere we go. Today I met a guy from Chicago who pointed out that temperatures were in the 40s when he left home—good timing.
Cruising for cameras
Many years ago—back when “digital camera” meant your images had the date and time stamped on them in that lovely LED font —I owned a 35mm single-lens reflex film camera. While I loved the picture quality, I grew tired of the work involved in setting up the camera to get those great shots. I also didn’t like lugging around all the gear—spare lenses and film, primarily. So at some point in time, I migrated to a “consumer” 35mm camera that had only a couple of modes to choose between and no lenses to swap.
When digital cameras came out, I stayed with the same “consumer” type cameras, preferring the small and light pocket digital cameras over their full-sized cousins. As of late, my camera of choice has been the Canon PowerShot SD400 ( ). It’s so small and light, it goes nearly everywhere with me, and it takes what I thought were decent pictures. However, the small digital cameras are generally limited to a 3x optical zoom, and I’ve often found myself wanting a better zoom. I also enjoy landscape photography, and wanted something that would let me get some better macro shots of the flowers in our garden. Because of these issues, I’ve been mulling over returning to the SLR world for a few months, but hadn’t actually done much about finding out which camera I’d like to buy.
Then something very lucky happened: Ken Smith of Glazer’s Camera arranged to bring a bunch of rental camera gear on the recent Mac Mania / Aperture Geek Cruise. Even better, Ken was making the equipment available to the Geek Cruisers for free , and he brought a lot of really nice stuff. As much as I was tempted to request the $4,500 EOS-1D Mark III, I figured my actual budget was going to be substantially lower than that when I did my post-cruise shopping.
Homeward bound
As I write this, it’s early Saturday morning, and we’re just slipping back into our berth at the Seattle docks. After cruising more than 2,000 nautical miles during seven days, including stops at three Alaskan cities, one Canadian city, and one very large glacier, Mac Mania VI has come to an end. And before I go any further, I need to clarify something about this voyage—this is actually a “dual track” Geek Cruise; it’s not just MacMania cruise, but an Aperture cruise as well. Attendees could choose from either the Aperture or MacMania tracks, or mix and match as they see fit. This is the first time Geek Cruises has tried an Aperture track, and all indications are that it was successful. Every Aperture class I sat in on, including Sal Soghoian’s advanced talk Friday on using Automator with Aperture, were well attended. Things have gone so well, in fact, that Geek Cruises has announced that Aperture Aura 2 will be setting sail in Spring 2008—from Venice, Italy no less! With three Aperture team members as confirmed participants, this should be an amazing experience for those looking to get the most out of Aperture.
I spent most of Friday in conference sessions. First I learned about some of the ways you can publish your Aperture images to the Web, and then I spent a few hours listening to Sal (as well as Ben Long and Joe Schorr) talk about using Automator with Aperture. Shortly thereafter, we arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, for an evening excursion (6 p.m. arrival, midnight departure).
Victoria is located at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and has a very strong British heritage. If you’ve never visited, Victoria is an amazing city, with a mix of old British tradition and modern urban living. My wife and I chose to skip the shore excursion, and just spent a couple hours wandering around the waterfront, downtown area, and surrounding neighborhoods (our daughter went to Butchart Gardens with my mother and her husband). During our walk, we saw some wonderful older homes in the various neighborhoods, along with many amazing waterfront properties, including this mechanized-looking condo building:
Ketchikan, if you can
We saw something new on this MacMania voyage Thursday—sun! While the weather this trip has never really been bad (except for some strong winds), we’ve been accompanied by a constant gray background. Not only does this make the scenery less interesting, it makes it really hard to get nice outdoor photos—a flat gray backdrop may be good for portraits, but it’s not the most visually stunning thing to see behind a mountain range.
According to a Ketchikan local, the town averages more than 300 cloudy days a year, so we were quite lucky to have only partly-cloudy blue skies. Our stay here, unfortunately, was brief—we arrived at 7:00 a.m. and pushed away from the dock right around 1:00 p.m. for the long trek down to Victoria, British Columbia. With only six hours in Ketchikan, there wasn’t a lot of time to do much exploring. We took our daughter to the Lumberjack Show, which she found entertaining, though she had trouble understanding why these two men were attempting to run on a log floating in a pond:
I also spent some time out on the ship’s deck earlier in the morning, as it seemed we were docked right alongside Ketchikan’s float plane departure path. I snapped this picture as one flew by:
A cool dive in a dry suit
After an all-night run down from Hubbard Glacier, the MS Oosterdam arrived in Sitka for the latest stop in the MacMania VI cruise.
Like Juneau, Sitka is only accessible via boat or air, and has only around 9,000 year-round residents (which makes it Alaska’s fourth- or fifth-largest city, depending on who’s doing the counting). With only 40 total miles of roadway (just over half of it paved), car theft isn’t much of an issue around here, unless there’s a ferry at the docks.
The town itself is located in a bay ringed by mountains which provide some dramatic scenery:
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