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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.

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.

Because the images both these cameras produce are large, I’ve chosen not to upload the full-size versions of any of these pictures. Instead, I scaled each to 800 pixels wide, which leads to more reasonable file sizes, yet provides enough detail to see how each picture looked. You can see the larger versions (in a new window) by clicking on each thumbnail below—or command-click each one to open it in a new tab for easy tab-flipping comparisons: In the first row, the first two images are directly comparable, while the third image is the large zoom lens at max (200mm) zoom. In the second row, all three images are comparable. Note that I have done color, contrast, or level correction on any of these images. Except for the JPEG compression necessary to make them small enough for web downloading, they are as they came from the camera. Also keep in mind that the original versions of these pictures are larger, so you could see even more detail. But at a casual glance, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of difference between the image quality from the two cameras.

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:

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:

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:

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?”

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.

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.

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!