Latest Posts in Mac Mania
Going on a glacier safari
After departing Juneau at 9 p.m.—well before the local sunset— we MacMania VI cruisers awoke the next day heading for the entrance to Yakutat Bay, the home of Hubbard Glacier. But before the requisite sight-seeing, I had a course to teach.
Well, actually, it was more like being on a game show with 10 hosts and just one contestant—it was a Q&A session, where attendees can ask the speakers any Mac-related question, and we do our best to answer. Typically there will be five or six speakers on stage, so there’s a chance you don’t have to personally answer every question. No such luck this time around, though, as circumstances meant that the sole question-taker was yours truly.
Overall, I think I handled every question (excluding a couple about the use of ODBC Administrator and Directory Access in the Utilities folder—two apps I’ve rarely launched), but I did get one stumper: “When using Safari to browse a site that has a login form, the first time you complete the form, a dialog appears offering three form-related options. You can tell Safari to never remember what you use for this site, to not make a decision now, or to save the user name and password. If I tell Safari ‘never remember,’ how do I then save the user name and password in the future if I change my mind?”
Safari is not my main browser, and I couldn’t come up with the answer off the top of my head (nor could anyone else in the session). Afterwards, I did a bit of experimenting, and found the answer, which lives in Safari’s Preferences, on the AutoFill tab. Click on Edit next to User Names and Passwords, and you’ll see a list of all the sites for which Safari has memorized your login information. Look closely at the list, though, and you’ll see that it also lists sites for which you’ve told Safari not to save your login information. Each of these sites will have Passwords Never Saved in the User Name column. To restore the options dialog the next time you load a given site, highlight the relevant entry in the AutoFill list and click Remove, then click Done. The next time you fill in the user name and password information for that site, you’ll again see the prompt asking how you’d like Safari to remember (or not) the information.
Juneau, you know
We’re all back on board the ship now after spending the day exploring Juneau and the surrounding area. For those who don’t know, Juneau is unique among American mainland capital cities: you can only reach it via airplane or boat. That’s right, there are no roads that lead to Juneau.
Despite that, there are plenty of cars here for the 31,000 year-round residents, along with a Home Depot, Wal-Mart (opening soon!), and a McDonald’s. Keep in mind that everything these stores sell must arrive in the same manner—either via the air or the water. According to our tour guide, when the McDonald’s opened in the late 1980s, it set a franchise record for opening day hamburger sales, and the drive-through line was two miles long.
Juneau sits right up against two mountains—Mt. Juneau (3,576 feet) and Mt. Roberts (3,819 feet). Neither is particularly tall by Rocky Mountain standards, but as they both start at sea level directly behind Juneau, they are visually impressive. The shot below shows Juneau nestled up against the foot of Mt. Juneau.
After docking, one of the first things you notice is the tram—a sightseer’s dream, the tram lifts visitors up to the 1,800 foot level on Mt. Roberts, from where one would probably have a wonderful view of the valley. I say “probably” because of one of my hard and fast rules: unless I’m wearing ski boots and carrying a set of skis, I simply do not get in trams, gondolas, ski lifts, or any other such conveyance. At a ski area, I have no qualms about such things, strangely enough. Outside that environment, though, I have no desire at all to go for a ride! Here’s a shot of the tram and its destination.
My wife and I had separate shore excursions planned for today. I spent a relatively tame day with my mother, step-father, and daughter, visiting the Mendenhall Glacier visitor’s center and viewing area, and dining at an outdoor salmon bake. My wife, on the other hand, headed out in a helicopter, landed well up on the Mendenhall Glacier, then had a try at guiding a team of sled dogs around on the ice and snow. Needless to say, some of her pictures were much more interesting than mine. Unfortunately, due to the slow upload speed, sharing her movies will have to wait. I did, however, grab a few still frames from her video clips.
I thought the port of Seattle was busy when we left on Saturday. However, Seattle’s got nothing on Juneau! Today there were four cruise ships in port (our guide told us that they will occasionally have as many as seven in one day), quite a few small pleasure craft, and lots and lots of float plane activity—in the afternoon, they were taking off right between our ship and another one docked in the middle of the bay. In between all of that, there was the constant whup-whup-whup of the passing helicopters, and the occasional low-flying jet, inbound to Juneau’s airport. Due to the high nearby peaks and twists and turns in the valley, the jets wind up flying quite low and making a relatively sharp turn to align with the runway for landing. (You can get a sense for what’s involved by looking at this page from Google Maps; the airport is at upper left, and the main part of the town is at the lower right.)
We’ve now departed Juneau for an overnight cruise to the Hubbard Glacier, where we’ll spend the day watching and waiting for chunks of ice to fall off the 40-story-tall front end of the glacier (a process known as calving), which creates spectacular aural and visual effects (or so I’ve been told).
Cruising with Leopard
It’s early as I type this—very early, given that we slipped into another time zone last night—and we're now headed up the channel towards Juneau, with a targeted arrival about five hours from now. Sometime during the night, the ship moved from the open ocean into the channel, and the difference is striking: there are no waves here, and the ride is now perfectly smooth. Looking out the windows up on the Lido Deck, it’s like sitting on some strange, huge, magical carpet—we’re moving forward, yet there are no engine sounds, and there’s no sense of motion whatsoever. The only giveaway that we’re actually moving is the small wake being generated by the bow of the ship.
The approach to Juneau is made up a wide valley, ringed by snow-capped mountains, as you can see below.
As you can see, there’s a low cloud cover, and it’s chilly outside—the high is only expected to reach the mid-40°F range today. It’ll probably be a lot cooler later today, when we’re up on the Mendenhall Glacier for our shore excursion. More on that trip this evening.
As for the classes, I mentioned my Tiger-versus-Leopard session in my last dispatch, and the problem I faced comparing OS X 10.4 to a version that won’t be released until October. How to get around that problem? With hard-hitting slides like this:
In all seriousness, I tried to be as informative as I could about Leopard, dwelling on the new features— Time Machine, Spaces —and enhancements to existing features— Spotlight, iChat, and others—that have already been publicly unveiled.
Breezing to Juneau
As I write this, the MacMania VI cruise is located off the coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands heading toward Juneau, which we’ll have reached long after this dispatch is posted. According to this large map I’m looking at just outside the MS Oosterdam ’s Internet café, the outside temperature and the ocean temperature are basically identical (48°F), and the wind is described as a “strong breeze.”
Now, in case you’re not familiar with nautical language, there’s a strong history of misstating the truth—“Honest, I swear, that fish I caught was at least three feet long!” In this case, a “strong breeze” in nautical lingo is not what you might be thinking of (pleasant kite flying weather, for example).
Strong breeze is actually an official name from the Beaufort Wind Scale, which goes from Force 0 (Calm, under 1 knot of wind speed) up to Force 12 (Hurricane, over 64 knots of wind speed). Strong breeze is the term for a Force 6 wind, which is blowing at between 22 and 27 knots—that’s 25 to 31 mph. Add in 25 mph of forward boat speed, and the effective wind on deck is right around 50 mph (depending on the angle of the wind, of course). And that, by way of a long-winded explanation, is why there are very few people walking about on the deck outside this window: put together 48°F temperatures and 50 mph of wind, and it’s really, really cold out there!
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The Geek Cruise sessions started Sunday morning, with Joe Schorr, Apple’s Aperture product manager, kicking things off with his 3.5-hour Introduction to Aperture course. I was going to sit in and try to learn some stuff, but when I saw how full the room was, I decided it was best to leave the space for other attendees. To ensure that every attendee would be able to participate in the Aperture courses on this cruise, Neil Bauman (Insight Cruises’ president) and Joe Schorr did something pretty cool: Every attendee received their very own fully-licensed copy of Aperture at Saturday’s kick-off function. This is a product that sells for $200, and every Geek Cruiser is going home with their very own copy. I’m not sure who originated the idea or what it took to make it happen, but it’s a great one.
There are now 50-plus people, including my step-father, sitting down and learning about a program that they otherwise probably wouldn’t have bothered with. From Apple’s perspective, this is a good thing, because at least some of those folks will probably choose to buy the next version when it’s released. And from a Geek Cruiser’s perspective, it’s a great thing, because you're receiving a $200 program for free.
My sessions started Sunday night, with an evening discussion on Tiger versus Leopard. A few months ago, when I was putting together this session, it was going to be very interesting. I was planning on showing Tiger and Leopard side by side, demonstrating key changes in both the system itself and its bundled applications. With Leopard arriving a month or two before our sail date, I figured the timing would be perfect. Then, as you all know, Apple delayed Leopard until October. Uh oh—no side-by-side comparisons involving Leopard on this cruise!
Instead, I focused my talk on the publicly-known features of Leopard, along with some idle speculation on what I hope the infamous “missing features” (which Steve Jobs alluded to during last year’s WWDC Leopard demo ) just might be. (New Finder, anyone?).
MacMania VI sails from Seattle
As some of you may recall, I spent a week last fall on MacMania V, a Geek Cruise through the western Caribbean. This time, I’m writing to you from MacMania VI, headed north to Alaska from Seattle. Joining me this time, as before, is my wife Marian. But this time, we also chose to bring our eldest child, Kylie (who turns four in a month). I also managed to talk my mother and her husband into joining us, so that we’d have plenty of help watching Kylie—and so that they might get a bit of Mac education out of it as well!
As we live but a few hours south in Portland, getting to the cruise was much simpler than flying across the country to Florida—we just piled everyone (and a large collection of luggage) into the family hauler around 9:30 a.m. Saturday, and headed north on I-5 to Seattle. Arrival and boarding were very smooth. We were able to park directly next to the terminal, and from there, it only took about 20 minutes to get the necessary paperwork out of the way and board the ship.
We spent the next few hours exploring our home for the week, the MS Oosterdam . This is a large vessel; bigger than the Veendham that we used for the western Caribbean cruise. Thankfully, our stateroom is located almost directly in the middle of the ship—though that just means that everything is equally far away, and pretty much nothing is close.
Playlist on the high seas
A couple weeks ago, Rob Griffiths and I spent a week aboard the MS Veendam as part of MacMania V —a combination of a Mac conference and A Western Caribbean cruise. We taught classes on a variety of topics, such as maintaining your Mac, finding cool and affordable software, and using iWork. But the class that will likely stand out for me—in terms of how fun it was to “teach”—was one that had little to do with the Mac itself; that session was called “iPod Add-Ons: The Best of Playlist.”
In the hopes of preparing a fun diversion from all the “let us teach you stuff” classes, I prepared a presentation on many of our favorite iPod accessories. How fun could that possibly be? Very, as it turns out—especially when you bribe the attendees. You see, I had door prizes. Boy, did I have door prizes.
Thinking that a giveaway would be fun, before the cruise I e-mailed the manufacturers of some of the accessories I was covering and asked if they’d be interested in donating a sample or two that I could give away to attendees. I expected to get a few responses; instead, I was overwhelmed by the generosity of these vendors. (To be clear, I asked about products I had already chosen to cover; none of the products I included in the presentation were there because we got samples to give away.)
By the time we set sail, I had a veritable cornucopia of iPod-related booty. (Needless to say, the ship’s porters weren’t too happy with me when I boarded the ship with my suitcases plus a palette of boxes. But I tipped well.)
All ashore
Early Saturday morning, when the MS Veendam docked in Tampa, the MacMania V cruise officially came to an end—as did one of the more interesting work weeks of my career. As I look back on the past seven days, I find many fond memories, from the scuba diving to the incredible assortment of dinner entrees to the sights in each port of call. But beyond that, by far, the best memories come from the interaction with fellow Mac users. Whether it was in sessions, at meal time, or just during an impromptu conversation elsewhere on the ship, there were stories to be told, backgrounds to be learned, and knowledge to be shared—and not just from the speakers to the attendees. Mac users are a diverse group, and the attendees at MacMania V covered a wide range of ages, backgrounds, and Mac experience levels. The chance to discuss Macs, Macworld , and technology in general with this small group for a full week was truly special, and I think all of us are leaving with a better perspective on our fellow Mac users than we had going in.
My interaction with Mac users is typically entirely virtual—from exchanges in the various online forums to e-mail to the occasional iChat, all I usually “see” of other Mac users is their text on my screen. But for the last seven days, the speakers and attendees all had the chance to put faces to names, to learn just why so many people love their Macs, and to just generally have a blast working in a most unexpected environment. Sure, there are some challenges to interacting aboard a cruise ship—three of my four sessions were interrupted by several-minute-long announcements from “Money Man Mark” about the upcoming bingo sessions—but those challenges are offset by the encapsulated nature of the experience. Although cruise ships are large, most of their area is reserved for staterooms and the ship’s operations. That leaves a handful of public gathering places, in which you were almost guaranteed of meeting another MacMania attendee, regardless of the hour of day or night. And every evening, all 60 of us were seated together (at a number of tables) for dinner, leading to even more conversation.
The shore excursions, too, were often a chance to interact with MacMania attendees. I think nearly every speaker I spoke with had at least one or more attendees on their shore excursions. That was true even in my case, as one of the other divers with my wife and I on both scuba diving days was a MacMania attendee (and there were only four people on the boat on the second dive day). No other conference I have attended has offered this much interaction between speakers and attendees outside of the conference proper.
I also found the sessions themselves to be more fun than those I’ve given at past Macworld Expos. For the last couple of years, my Expo presentations have been to crowds that numbered in the 300 to 400 range. With a crowd of that size, there’s basically no personal interaction—you can’t make eye contact with everyone, and you can’t take questions during the slides, as things would quickly get out of hand. After the presentation, there’s one of me and maybe 30 to 40 people who come up to ask a couple questions or just say hello. In that environment, I just don’t have much time to talk to everyone, thank them for attending, or help them out with a detailed reply to their questions.
But during a MacMania cruise, there are many fewer people in the classroom. My first sessions on Monday (one solo and one with Dan Frakes) probably averaged 25 to 30 people, allowing us to actually take questions and interact with the attendees. The Friday sessions were an even better example of what’s possible with smaller classes. My Intro to iWork group was about 20, and I was able to ask everyone about their relative interest in Keynote versus Pages (the two iWork applications) before I began. When most people expressed an interest in Pages, I was able to modify my talk to spend more of the time available talking about that word processing and page-layout application. By comparison, trying to take an audience survey with 400 people in the crowd would be a basically impossible task. With a smaller class, it was also possible to take and answer questions as they came up, which makes things more relevant for attendees than the standard “please save your questions for the end” announcement I use with larger crowds.
My final session, an intro the world of open source apps on OS X, was by far my smallest—a grand total of five people attended. Granted, the topic was amongst the “geekier” of the week, but this might also have been my favorite session of the trip. It was much more like a small group project than a presentation, and I had lots of time to handle every question that came up, as well as to make sure that everyone understood each step of the process (as I was actually installing and using a number of programs during the talk).
Going into this week, I really didn’t have any idea what to expect. I was also somewhat skeptical that a cruise ship would make a good learning environment. Looking back now that it’s over, I can see the skepticism was misplaced. If anything, a cruise ship is a nearly-ideal learning environment. The combination of small class sizes and lots of time (both in and out of sessions) for interaction between students and attendees is tough to beat. Top it all off with the fact that you’re on a cruise ship, visiting some interesting destinations with lots of shipboard activities, and you’ve got a winning combination. (The fact that you’re on a cruise ship also means you can bring along your non-Mac-fanatic spouse or significant other for the week—while you’re involved with classes on the two sea days, he/she can take part in the shipboard activities, relax by the pool, visit the gym, etc.)
In case it’s not obvious, I had a terrific time on my first MacMania cruise. I’m looking forward to doing this again in the spring, when I’ll be participating in the MacMania VI Alaskan cruise (and talking about the hopefully released by then OS X 10.5, amongst other topics). I’m sure I’ll meet another diverse, interesting group of Mac users, have some fun shore excursions (no diving, of course!), and generate another set of wonderful memories.
Even if you think you’re “not the cruising kind,” you might be pleasantly surprised by what you get out of a week with a bunch of fellow Mac maniacs. I know I was, and I can’t wait to do it again.
My week on a Geek Cruise
One of the most frequent questions I got before leaving for MacMania V was, “What’s a MacMania cruise like?” Given that this was my first, I couldn’t answer. But now that the cruise is almost over and I’ve spent a week enjoying the Caribbean and teaching classes, I can tell you that I’ve had a great time. If the idea of a cruise itself appeals to you, I highly recommend coming on a MacMania cruise, and for two reasons. First, as I mentioned in a blog entry earlier this week, there’s a lot of free time while the ship is sailing between ports, and the classes are both fun and informative. But just as fun is sailing with a group of people who share a common interest — one of the best parts of this cruise has been spending time with other Mac users and their families. In addition to classes, we eat meals together, go on shore excursions together, and just plain hang out together, and I think all of the attendees would tell you that they’ve met and gotten to know a bunch of really cool people. Having “cruised” this way, I can’t imagine going on a cruise without being part of a group.
Classes have been a lot of fun. As I mentioned earlier this week, on Monday Rob Griffiths and I presented our “Cool (and Affordable) Software” session, where we covered nearly 50 of our favorite affordable apps and utilities, many of which long-time readers would recognize as past Mac Gems and past MacOSXHints.com “picks of the week.”
Photo gallery: Ashore in Guatemala, Mexico
Photo Gallery - Mac Mania 5 Gallery 3
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Guatemala, Mexico, and Mac horror stories
Greetings again from the MS Veendam . As I write this, we’ve just completed our port day in the area of Costa Maya, Mexico. My wife and I went diving again, and yes, that means we have more fish pictures. However, I’ll spare you the underwater camera work today (well, maybe just one image in the gallery ), and instead talk about what went on yesterday, last night, and today in general.
Yesterday we were in Santo Tomas de Castillo, Guatemala. The ship docked at a very busy commercial dock, as you can see in the latest image gallery. While it was kind of fun to watch all the frenetic dock activity, the Guatemala dock is clearly a commercial operation first, and a cruise ship drop-off point second. After diving on Tuesday, we chose to take it easy in Guatemala, and decided to just spend the day relaxing at a local beach resort. Overall, while I had a pleasant afternoon, it was definitely not the highlight of the trip. Perhaps I should have known things might be a bit tough when I spotted this sign after getting off the ship.
(We had chosen the “no luch” — or lunch, for that matter — option.) The Amatique Bay resort featured a number of pools and water slides, bike and walking trails, paddle boats, a restaurant, and that staple of all great resorts, a “floating” bar within one of the pools. They also had some animals on exhibit—a number of turtles in one, and five iguanas in another (we also saw several wild iguanas up in the trees). There’s a photo of one of the captive iguanas in the gallery.
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