Life at Thirty-thousand

What a great time we live in where we can be soaring through the air at 30,000 feet and have access to the Internet at acceptable speeds. Though as I sit here, writing this blog post and enjoying the view I have to ask myself why in the world we can have zippy Internet connections whilst traveling at several hundreds of kilometers an hour but we have to suffer through sub-dial up speeds while cruising along at twenty knots on the ship.

On a little bit of a tangent here, people often ask me what good to do in insert-port-name-here. While I can tell you about the big sights to see in just about any of the major port towns, I'm not particularly a good choice for a travel guide; nor, I might add, is any other crew member on a ship. Why is this you might ask? Since we stop in these beautiful and exotic places so often, you'd expect us to know all the hidden gems it has to offer. Well the truth is that we do know all of the hidden gems. So long as you meant the great little restaurants, the really nice non-touristy beaches and the fast Internet hideouts.

Having managed to purchase "premium" economy seats on both my flights for the relatively low price of $50, I am left to contemplate this from the comfort of an exit row.

Happy Ship Holidays

Thi time of year is always associated with family, vacations, gift giving (and recieving) and usually not with work. Unless, that is, you work in the service industry as I do; specifically the entertainment industry. This year was a lot of work, yes, but it was also a pretty decent Christmas given the circumstances... not being home, not being with family et cetera. 

When you work on a ship you tend to bond as a defacto family at times like these. You may not know the other people all that well, you may not even know if they celebrate Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukka or Festivus, but they are the closest thing you have to family at the time and vice versa. I'm thankful for the friends around me and although I'll likely see them again down the road somewhere, I'll miss them when I leave in a week.

1Password and a New Path

There are a few applications that have become so ingrained in my workflow that I consider them to be essentials. One such application is 1Password by Agile Bits, however I've recently run into some trouble with it. You see the program is a password manager which integrates with your browser (Safari, Firefox and Chrome) via an extension. The trouble is that the extension is not able to connect to the application anymore for some reason - I've not tried with Chrome but it seems to be the same with both Safari and Firefox. Let's hope the next release solves the problem; it's annoying to have to work around this issue.

On a related but more social note, I'm trying out a new application for my phone called "Path". The idea seems to be similar to Facebook and Foursquare but the UI is much cleaner and more user friendly. It's also designed to be much more reserved for your inner circle. The designers have limited you to 150 friends for this purpose which, if I remember correctly, is based on a magical number. This number is supposedly the maximum number of people that the average person is really friends with and thinks of often. My circle is significantly smaller than that but I've always been a little more introverted than most others!

¿Frog Senior?

Once again I find myself in San Juan, this time sitting in Senior Frogs by the pier surrounded by intoxicated passengers of an affiliated cruise line and karaoke songs that are reminiscient of Hellen Keller playing on a "My First Keyboard".  However, the internet is reasonably fast and the food, while overpriced, is not terrible.

Christmas is fast approaching and for me, as most of you know, that generally means more work which is great if you happen to be paid by the hour but it's not so much so if you are paid by the day (or salaried). As my hours go up I see my value dropping and it's not a great feeling. On those days you just have to remind yourself that there are days where you're worth quite a bit. 

As a little gift to myself I've revamped my office a little - it's the small things in life that you have to look forward to right?! It's times like this that all it takes is a little recharge... a day or two with a light workload or some time ashore that makes all the difference!

San Juan

Just a quick post to say hello from San Juan. With about a month left in my contract out here I can definitely say I am looking forward to the week off before I join the Westerdam for a month. The question is, where to go on my vacation following the Westerdam? I was contemplating Toronto for a couple of days... Then again, there's ALWAYS Vegas... Up in the air!