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MacMania photo gallery: Bound for Baja

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[ Photos and captions by Derrick Story .]

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MacMania: Baja, fire drills, & sleepy speakers

Live, from somewhere off the coast of Baja California, it’s Mac Mania 4, the latest installment in the ongoing series of cruises (co-produced by Geek Cruises and Macworld) featuring a floating cavalcade of Mac experts, Mac users, and stimulating Mac talk.

We left port in San Diego on Saturday afternoon, passing by the island of Coronado on the way out into the Pacific Ocean. Saturday evening brought the traditional bon voyage party in the Crow’s nest, where the hundred-plus cruisers and their families mingled with technology stars such as Steve Wozniak, Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Bob LeVitus, Bruce Fraser, Deke McClelland, Derrick Story, and Macworld’s own Christopher Breen.

Undeterred by a shipwide middle-of-the-night wake-up call (apparently a fire alarm went off in the ship’s incinerator room at four in the morning!), cruisers and speakers alike woke up early to start a full day of classes on Sunday.

Ihnatko wowed his audience with a day-long look into just about everything you’d ever wanted to know about Tiger—not bad for a guy who was just getting to sleep when the alarm went off, and who basically spoke for an entire day straight on not a minute’s sleep. Granted, he had to get up and pace at the end in order to keep himself awake—I’ve heard of students falling asleep in class before, but teachers? —but he made it through with aplomb, then promptly returned to his cabin and crashed. By dinnertime he was his old self again.

In other shipboard sessions, LeVitus chipped in a half-day on power user productivity in Tiger. Meanwhile, resident Photoshop gods Fraser and McClelland each gave day-long sessions to remarkably large crowds. And Apple’s resident AppleScript maven Sal Soghoian gave cruisers a three-hour crash course on using Automator.

But the late afternoon’s entertainment was of a bit less cerebral sort. In numerous lounges and bars throughout the ms Oosterdam , throngs of cruisegoers gathered to watch Super Bowl XL. I have to admit it was a bit surreal to be watching the Super Bowl while bobbing in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico. What made it weirder was that the ship’s feed was from ESPN Deportes, the Spanish-language edition of that cable channel—although fortunately for we non-Spanish speakers, the audio feed was of the English-language variety.

Football, Mac stuff, and did I mention all the ice cream you can eat? Truly we live in a time of miracles.

The father of invention

When traveling for business I try to pack more than enough gear for the job at hand—computer, spare battery, camera, cables, backup disk, USB keydrive, iPod… whatever the job calls for. Though I was sure I’d done the usual thorough job of packing prior to jetting to San Diego for the departure of Holland-America’s luxury liner, the Oosterdam, and its accompanying MacMania 4 cruise to the Mexican Riviera, I neglected to include what two-thirds of my traveling party believe is our most essential piece of gear.

A night light.

You see, I’m accompanied by my wife and child and yes, I forgot to pack the night light that my four-year-old daughter relies on for a solid (and secure) night’s sleep. Dad was in the doghouse.

Oh sure, I could have discretely asked around the ship to see if some other instructor or luminary had a solution. Leo Laporte is here with his mother Mary and maybe she never broke the habit of carrying a light and binky for her darling boy. Andy Ihnatko, who unfailingly packs a bizarre collection of hardware in his bandolier, was another possibility. And I’m sure Woz would have been happy to fashion a suitable night light out of parts scavenged from the on-board casino. But I’m on a Geek Cruise, dagnabbit, and if I couldn’t solve this little problem on my own, I deserved to be stripped of my Mariner’s Badge and meal card.

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Life below decks

As I wing my way from one major Macintosh event—MacMania 3.5, Baltic Blast—to another—Macworld Expo, Boston—I’ve decided that the appropriate way to wrap up my experience is by reporting what transpired on my last night aboard our cruise ship, Holland-America’s Westerdam . Saturday night was special not only because it was the last time I’d have the opportunity to dine with my most companionable table companions, Leo Laporte, Ben Long, and photography instructor Bill Durrence and his wife Barbara, but also because it proved to be my opportunity to gain some insight into what goes on below decks. It’s like this:

While finishing off a day with Ben in the Ocean Bar, one of the ship’s guest entertainers, Gary Arbuthnot, approached and asked if I had some connection with the Macintosh as I looked very much like the guy who appears in video form on Macworld’s CD. After acknowledging that the guy on the CD and the guy sipping a refreshing cocktail were one and the same, I asked Gary if he’d be willing to put me in touch with some of the ship’s musicians. Having earned my keep for a number of years as an entertainer I was anxious to learn what it was like to take your show on the road—or the sea, as the case may be. He agreed to make the arrangements.

After Gary put in a bit of spade work with the guys who make up the show band—the band that provides the music for the entertainers who hop on and off the boat at various ports—we set up a meeting for the last night of the cruise. I’m grateful that we did.

As we gathered in the third-deck Ocean Bar I had two issues in mind—how the band uses technology to perform their jobs and, perhaps more importantly, how they manage to remain sane during those long months at sea. As it turns out, the first directly affects the second.

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Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and home

The final stops of the MacMania 3.5 cruise ping-ponged us across the Baltic sea, from north to south, before returning us to where we began to make our goodbyes.

We’ve truly been blessed with good weather on this trip. With a single exception (see below), every single day on this cruise has been sunny and warm, with high temperatures in the 70s and even 80s. From now on when I hear people talk about how cold Scandanavia gets in the winter, I’m not sure if I’ll really be able to believe them. Maybe this is how the Scandanavians keep all the good warm weather to themselves? It’ll probably take a winter trip to this region to convince me that it’s not all midnight sunsets and warm breezes. I hardly expected a tropical vacation when I signed up to cruise the Baltic, but that’s what we all got.

As we docked in Stockholm I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Our Rick Steves guide book raves about the city, but I knew nothing about it and had essentially no expectations. Boy, was I impressed. On a sunny day, with the water glinting as you cross one of Stockholm’s dozens of bridges, Sweden can’t be beat.

The city is built on numerous islands, connected by bridges. We started at the cruise dock, walked onto the main island housing the city center (including a royal palace and numerous narrow streeets—be sure to check out the final MacMania 3.5 photo gallery for pictures), then eventually made our way through the high-rent district of town and onto an island that houses an amusement park, an open-air museum, and a 17th-century sunken Swedish warship.

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Photo gallery: Stockholm and beyond

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Flushed with excitement

One has to make a number of adjustments to live on-board the giant floating hotel that is the MS Westerdam. These adjustments are not in any way difficult, or even an inconvenience, really. Sure, the Internet access might sometimes be slower than dial-up, and night doesn’t start rolling in until about 11 p.m. But “slow internet” still seems pretty impressive given our location, and the lack of dark means I don’t have to waste PowerBook battery life on keyboard lighting during those 3 a.m. WarCraft sessions. As such, the process of acclimating to shipboard life is simple enough and nothing to be afraid of.

Until you enter the bathroom.

Every cabin on-board is equipped with a well-appointed bathroom that includes a perfectly harmless-looking toilet. At first glance, this toilet appears to sport the same user-friendly interface as the toilet you probably have in your home: bowl, flush control, toilet paper dispenser, magazines. However, posted above the device is a rather stern warning sign:

Rather than the traditional siphon-jet flush mechanism of a typical land-based toilet, shipboard toilets use a vacuum design. Press the flush button and—after a completely silent, extremely suspenseful pause—the contents of the toilet bowl will seemingly be instantaneously sucked down the toilet drain.

Personally, as a child I never wrestled with a fear of going down the drain, but apparently the suction in these toilets is strong enough that I might need to re-visit this belief. As near as I can tell, the “don’t sit while flushing” warning stems from the concern that if you sit on the toilet while hitting the flush button, your posterior might create a strong enough seal that the vacuum created inside the bowl could actually disembowel you.

As disgusting as this might be, it’s hard not to be impressed with this device, and even harder not to think “Wow, my cabin comes complete with a really strong vacuum pump, built right into the wall!” And, this being a Geek Cruise and all, I would be remiss in my geekly duties if I didn’t consider the possibilities of a potential new hobby: toilet hacking.

For example: fit the top of the bowl with some kind of tight-fitting “skirt” and a hose and I could turn my cabin’s toilet into a fairly powerful vacuum cleaner. Similarly, I have to imagine that glass blowing gear can be had at any of these quaint medieval villages we’re visiting. When combined with my complementary vacuum pump, I could make my own light bulbs.

The possibilities seem endless, and toilet hacking might provide a great diversion at 2 a.m., while waiting for the sun to set. If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

What I learned on my summer vacation

We’re in the home stretch of MacMania 3.5, anchored just off Visby, the quaint and colorful medieval village on Sweden’s Gotland island. As I placed those shirts I’ve deigned clean enough to avoid offense on an open deck into their respective Thursday, Friday, and Saturday piles, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to reflect on what I’ve learned while aboard the Westerdam.

Sure, as part of the faculty, my job is to impart knowledge rather than absorb it but, unbeknownst to my “students,” I’m gaining nearly as much information on this trip as I’m giving. With that in mind, allow me to pass along a few helpful tips I’ve picked up over the past week.

Tip 1: The hand disinfectant, which is available from dispensers scattered throughout the ship, is a darned fine screen cleaner. Boasting a goodly percentage of ethyl alcohol per dose, the disinfectant quickly evaporates after you’ve wiped it across your PowerBook’s dirty screen.

Tip 1a: If you need to test potentially disastrous monitor cleaning techniques, find a friendly (though, possibly, gullible) Australian with a Toshiba laptop. Should the technique prove to do more harm than good, suggest that more vigorous rubbing will put things right and then quietly slip from the room.

Tip 2: Should iPhoto report a phantom device in its Source list—a digital camera that’s not connected, for example—launch Image Capture and see if the device appears there as well. If so, toss Image Capture’s preferences file as the structure underlying Image Capture tells iPhoto which cameras and media readers are attached to your Mac. You can find the com.apple.ImageCaptureApp.plist file by following this path: youruserfolder/Library/Preferences/.

Tip 3: Never, ever loan your PowerBook’s power adapter to someone without first getting their cabin number. Providing your cabin number to them only helps them learn which part of the ship to avoid.

Tip 4: Do things the easy way. Geeky though it may be to set up a computer-to-computer network in order to pass, from one PowerBook to another, the priceless shot of the street vendors outside the Hermitage, dropping that picture onto a USB keydrive and sharing it around the circle of your new fast friends is likely to get the job done more quickly.

Tip 4a: Always carry a USB key drive.

Tip 5: Carry as flexible media reader as you can. While my PC Card reader is very convenient for pulling images from my camera’s Compact Flash Type 1 media, it does me no good when someone using a different media format wants to share a load of their pictures with me. Ben Long’s Vantec 11-in-1 media reader, which reads just about any flavor of media format you can throw at it, has been a big hit among the faculty and attendees.

Tip 6: Europeans seem far more likely than Americans to carry music players that don’t bear the Apple brand. Although I’ve seen a fair share of white headphones, the majority of them appear to be attached to small MP3 players. While the landscape is hardly devoid of iPods, I’m seeing other brands here more often than I do around the streets of San Francisco.

Photo gallery: St. Petersburg

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From Russia to Finland

When we awoke on Sunday morning, we had left the European Union behind and entered a country that most of us couldn’t have dreamed of visiting even ten years ago: Russia. Nowadays St. Petersburg, which sits at the mouth of the Neva river and the Baltic Sea, is a popular port of call for cruise ships. We were one of at least four (at my count) ships docked at St. Petersburg when we arrived.

Perhaps to make those countless stories about Russians waiting in eternally long lines hit home, every entrance and exit from our ship onto Russian soil required waiting in a line, usually a pretty long one. Clearly this was a different country than any I’ve visited before, a point hammered home by the Cyrillic writing on the signs and the still-clear signs of 70 years of Communist rule. (To see all the photos that go with this blog entry, visit Mac Mania 3.5 photo gallery 3.

Still, St. Petersburg is full of dramatic sights. As a city on several rivers, there are lots of waterways spanned by lots of bridges, and it seems that there’s a canal around every corner. Shiny gold onion domes top Russian Orthodox churches. And hordes of capitalists at every turn, trying to make money off of busloads of western tourists.

Different cruise groups took different tours of St. Petersburg. (Without a tour, you would have to spend the time and money to seek a Russian tourist visa, which brave Macworld contributor Ben Long did.) Ours took a tour of the city before entering the Hermitage, a building that would be among the world’s finest based solely on its own merits — but one which also happens to contain one of the finest art collections in the world. Built for the Czars and Czarinas as their Winter Palace, the Hermitage is decorated in gold leaf, with spectacular painted archways meticulously copied from the Vatican and immaculate doors, ceilings, and walls.

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