Today, it was Sal Soghoian’s turn to lift that proverbial curtain somewhat by telling us about “The Early Days at Apple,” and more specifically, about his early days at the company. The problem with such talks obviously is that it is difficult to gauge what is being told on-the-record, and what part of it should not be published, even if only in a humble blog post such as this one.

So, I will just write about how Sal got to work for Apple, and leave it at that. But that one paragraph should suffice to give you an indication of just how interesting this session was.

In the nineties, Sal worked as a bar manager in the Pocono Mountains, and his first Mac was a machine that had been repossessed by one of his friends from a drug dealer that owed this friend some money. When he got into working with layout software on that Macintosh, Sal decided that that business would probably provide him with better living than life as a bar manager. Having started to dig into AppleScript in ‘92, he eventually joined Apple on 13 January 1997, and has stayed with them since.

♦

Ten fantastic cruise days are behind us and, as with every great vacation, the moment has come to wonder how time could fly so fast and how many new sights and sounds you have taken in, and to muse about the many new friendships you have found.

And as if it, too, wanted to say goodbye, the sun is also back after those few gray days.

So, what better way to round off the cruise is there than to celebrate this gorgeous — and our final — Caribbean sunset by joining with a few good friends at the aft Pool Bar, sharing cruise stories, a few beers, and many a hearty laugh before tomorrow’s farewells.

It’s been a grand ride. Thanks for coming along.

1. Expanded Open/Save File dialog Similar to the windows in the Finder, the standard Open/Save File dialogs in Leopard feature a sidebar and three different views (icons, list, columns). Additionally, the Open File dialog also has a new “Media” section in that sidebar for accessing photos in your iPhoto or Aperture libraries, etc.

Here’s Sal’s recipe for quickly creating a photo browser that is available system-wide: create an Automator workflow and add the “Ask for Photos” action. Save it as a plug-in for the Script Menu, naming it “Photo Browser”. By launching this workflow from the Script Menu in the menu bar, you can now access, and search for, all the photos in your iPhoto and Aperture libraries without having to launch either application first.

2. Multiple Partition Dismounts When unmounting (aka “ejecting”) a volume from a hard drive that contains multiple volumes, OS X will now ask whether you would like to eject just the selected volume, or all volumes on that drive.

3. Text to Image To convert text or special characters into an image with a transparent background, choose Print in the respective application (TextEdit, for example), and select “Open PDF in Preview” from the PDF menu, which will create a PDF file of the phrase or character(s) and open it in the Preview application.

In Preview, crop the text as needed by selecting (part of) it with the selection tool and choosing Crop from the Tools menu, and save the PDF as a PNG image file, after which Preview will reload the fresh PNG file.

Click on the Select button in Preview’s toolbar, and a menu should pop up. From this menu, choose “Instant Alpha” and click — and hold down the mouse button — in the area you would like to make transparent. With the mouse button pressed, move the cursor to adjust the sensitivity of the “Instant Alpha” tool. As soon as you let go of the mouse button, that area is now transparent. Don’t forget to also make transparent the areas inside characters, e.g., inside a “D”, etc.

Save the file, et voilà: an image of the text with a transparent background, ready to be used as a sub-title on a photo, a caption for a photo greeting card, etc.

4. One-click User Switching Switching to another account on your Mac is as easy as a single click with the help of the Account Switcher applet.

5. Automatic screen sharing You can remote-control another machine by selecting it in the Shared section in the sidebar of a Finder window, clicking the Share Screen button and logging in. To automatically share another machine, run the “Create Screensharing Link” application (sorry, can’t find the link right now [no pun intended — really!]), create a link on the Desktop and add it to your startup items.

6. Browse Full Screen Place the “Browse Full Screen” AppleScript in the Finder window’s toolbar: click it to maximize the window to full-screen, switch to Cover Flow view, and hide the Dock. Click it again to restore the original window settings. Note that your file selection will be preserved when toggling back and forth between both views.

7. Fast Folder Access The icons for special folders like Applications, Documents, Movies, etc., make it difficult to differentiate between them, what with their subtle new gray-scale design in Leopard vs. the colorful icons in previous versions of Mac OS X. Resort to the Quick Folder widget for a menu of all of those special folders. (Alas, I could not find this widget, but a subset of those special folders is also listed in the Finder’s Go menu.)

8. Hierarchical Replacement for Stacks From the system-wide Scripts Menu, select “Open Scripts Folder” > “Open User Scripts Folder”, and inside that folder, create a new folder “Shortcuts…”. Place aliases to applications etc. in this new folder, so they show up in the Scripts Menu.

9. Automator 2.0 New features in Automator 2.0 include variables, loops, about 50 to 60 new actions, and also an action recorder (welcome back!).

Here’s an idea for a fun screensaver for a party (required Automator actions listed in order with required settings in parentheses):

• Ask for Text (set question to “Enter your name”)
• Set Value of Variable (new variable “Name”)
• Take Video Snapshot (Save as: “Name” variable; Where: new folder “Party” on the Desktop)
• Start Screen Saver
• Loop (Loop automatically; stop after 100 minutes)

Save the workflow as an application to the Desktop. Open the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences, select the “Party” folder via “Choose Folder…” and close the prefs.

Before your party kicks off, place the computer near the door to your house or party hall, launch the workflow, and now, whenever a new guest comes in, make them touch the keyboard, have them enter their name, and add a photo via the Mac’s built-in iSight camera. As a result, you’ll have a cool animated display of every guest’s photo and their names. Makes for great introductions when you have invited guests who haven’t met each other yet.

Another Automator hint: if you often switch your Mac’s startup volume, create a new workflow, and start the Action Recorder by clicking on Automator’s record button. Then, open the Startup Volume preferences panel, select a drive, and click restart. Save the workflow as a self-running application, calling it “Restart from [volume name]” or somesuch, and place it on your Desktop. Once you have created worflows for every startup volume you use, you simply double-click on the respective workflow application whenever you want to change the startup volume, instead of diving into the preferences.

10. Auto-Conversing iChat Create an AppleScript that sends out text messages along these lines:

“Hey there. Just a moment. Will be with you in a sec!”
[short’ish delay]
“Sorry, just got a phone call from The Boss. This might take a while.”
[longer delay]
“Oh man, totally forgot about the marketing meeting. Gotta run. Talk to you soon.”

In iChat’s Alerts preferences, define to run this AppleScript when a Text Invitation comes in. (Think “Eliza’s Evil Twin”.)

♦

After Randal Schwartz presented “Amazingly Cool Utilities” on our first cruise day, I had a little chat with him about Quicksilver, and if it wouldn’t be a neat idea to introduce this eclectic geek utility to the more experienced Mac-heads on our cruise.

So, I nagged him and Neil Bauman long enough to eventually give me the opportunity to teach that introduction myself (nibbling away a chunk from today’s Ingenious Bar session. Sorry, Sal!). So, with Randal as my co, who contributed the occasional insight and tip, I presented a 45 minute overview and intro to Quicksilver with some 25..30 people in attendance.

While there was at least one specimen of the infamous almost-falling-asleep-guy (well, this was right after lunch…), most people in the audience paid close attention to what we demonstrated, and they came up with a bunch of very thoughtful and interesting questions. Of those questions, the most unexpected and amusing one was asked right after I got started: “So, who are you?!” Come to think of it, I guess with Mac luminaries like Jason Snell and David Pogue on board, I shouldn’t really consider that question “unexpected”…

Giving this talk was great fun, and it was especially rewarding that a few of my “students” came up to me afterwards, asking for additional info, and some requesting more entry-level explanations of why they should start using Quicksilver on their Macs. I’m sure this session found a few new friends for this great utility.

♦

Rough seas were still with us all through the day — even in the pool.

But so were the gorgeous dramatic skies.

♦

Ever heard the songs “Don’t cry for my Cupertino”, “The Girl I met by Email”, or “I wrote the Code”? No? Well, make sure you attend one of David Pogue’s spoof song “concerts” if you get the chance, like we did tonight in “Timeout with David Pogue.” Hilarious. (Some of his songs are available on David’s website.)

♦

Tonight will be our farewell dinner (already? we’ve got another full day and night to go! sheesh), so bring on those cheesy songs and that whacky sparkler-spiked Baked Alaska desert already, will ya!

Hence I have canceled the final excursion on this cruise, just like I did last time. That excursion would have been a promising visit to a sloth sanctuary, but I feel as though I need to hit the emergency break now. You know, it’s just what you do when you realize that you are approaching a corner at speeds that would only allow for straight-ahead motion.

Instead of going ashore, I have spent an idle day to muse on all the events of the recent days, and to get in shape for the classes still awaiting us during the two sea days on our way back from Costa Rica back to Fort Lauderdale.

On a side note, we have had pretty rough seas ever since leaving Colon. Combined with the grayish skies, today’s weather reminded me of what we are used to from the North Sea during this time of year: strong winds and cool, very “agitated” waters with rolling waves. That stark contrast of familiar sights and sounds — sea, air, skies — vs. unfamiliar ones — vegetation and buildings of Costa Rica — made for yet another (very welcome and enjoyable) surreal moment.

To be frank, seeing a bit of Costa Rica and those unusual creatures would have been interesting, but it was the right decision to remain on board and waste away the day, as it did wonders for recharging my batteries. And that renewed energy came in quite handy for tonight’s party in the Crow’s Nest.

♦

Following that party, we were treated to “an evening with Richard Dreyfus.”

The award-winning actor was our very own Geek Cruise celebrity guest, who said that he came on the cruise because it combined two of his passions: the Macintosh and Shakespeare, and he expressly admitted to being a “crazy nuts-o Apple geek.”

Another of his hobbies is studying history, which, as he phrased it, is the “story of the haves against the have-nots.” In his speech tonight, he made a passionate case for teaching civics and clear thinking in schools.

According to Mr Dreyfus, a major problem of our times is that, in many of our communications and especially the news media, images have largely replaced text. And these images — “primitive, which text is not”, says Dreyfus — are now immediately available all around the world. What’s more, time has been removed from decision making, that is, there is no more rumination, contemplation, thoughtfulness, or thinking things through, before taking a decision that may have wide-ranging consequences.

Relating to the example of the attacks on the World Trade Center Twin Towers, he said: “We see the towers fall, and we react, and if we don’t react, we are called cowards or worse.”

This problem is exacerbated by computer industry, which has “become addicted to speed and can never be fast enough,” while it has done relatively nothing to help rumination and thinking things through, “even though we need those values now more than ever.”

Pointing out his own love for his Mac laptop several times, he hopes for the computer industry to leverage people’s love and passion for such products to enhance their ability to think clearly and to comprehend, stressing again the importance of teaching such abilities as well as the topic of civics to children so they can grasp these concepts at an early age.

To support his endeavors in this area, Richard Dreyfus plans to create a website called Common Senselessness. Let’s hope it’ll go online soon.

When I woke up next, we were already inside the locks, so I got dressed, grabbed my camera, and went out on deck to watch this spectacle.

Pulled along by diesel locomotives, the MS Volendam traversed through all three steps of the Gatun Locks and into Gatun lake. In front and in back of us, other ships made it through the locks, as well, and to take in the sights of these huge vessels from this close — stunning!

Just as stunning was the green color of the lush vegetation surrounding Gatun lake. This being my first trip to the rain forest and my first trip to South America in general, I was amazed by how warm and soft tropical rain was that accompanied us all the time during our maneuver through the locks. And which did not prevent any of my fellow-passengers from getting up, getting out, and getting all excited about the whole thing, as well.

After we made it through the locks, the ship anchored in Gatun Lake next to some other “parked” ships, and we were taken ashare by tender boats — which made for a fun roller-coaster-like experience — to board the buses that would take us on today’s excursions.

♦

Never having seen the rain forest before, my choice for today’s excursion was clear as soon as I saw the words “45-minute treetop gondola ride” in the brochure, and I was delighted to have my newly-found-on-this-cruise friends Chris and Jill, as well Jonathan (a “fellow-Aruba-Jeep-tour-survivor”) share this experience with me.

That gondola ride would take place at the Gamboa Rain Forest Resort, and a “short” ride in a minibus would take us there. This ride turned into a little adventure in its own right: the lush vegetation, the reddish-brown soil, the decrepit lumber trucks on the road, the “typical” Latin American scenes, houses, people. So new and exotic were these sights and sounds that I felt like a kid in a toy store, taking it all in with wide-open eyes and mouth agape. And due to a few roadwork sites on our route, as well as heavy overall traffic, I had ample time to do so.

All during the ride, our guide gave us lots and lots and lots of information on Panama by handing out countless info sheets, showing local animals, fruits, vegetables, flowers, foods, etc. — you name ‘em, those sheets listed ‘em.

Eventually, we arrived at Gamboa which felt as though it was located right in the middle rain forest nowhere. Once we all safely disembarked our little Toyota bus, we got in line for the gondola ride, and having the Pogues directly behind us in the queue added some serious entertainment value.

When I prepared for this excursion, I had decided to leave my camera on the ship, because, first, Chris did bring his high-end SLR, and him being a pro photographer, I’d be able to get the finest photographic memories from him anyway; and second, I often have this urge to take as many photos as I can to make sure I don’t miss anything. Which has the annoying drawback that, just as often, I am not really enough “in the moment,” bothered with taking pictures instead of really letting myself become immersed in the actual experience.

Turns out, I made the right choice, since Jill had also brought an SLR, and I gladly helped her find some interesting motives to capture (while selfishly offloading to her the burden of actually photographing them).

Back to the gondolas: they looked like gondolas from a kids’ ride on the fairgrounds, felt like a kids’s ride on the fairgrounds, and provided the exact same feeling of safety as — a kids’ ride on the fairgrounds. But, man, was this some awesome ride!

Slowly “flying” through the dense foliage of the rain forest canopy towards the peak of a hill, most everyone fell silent with awe, gazing at the trees and brushes and breathing in the humid, even tangy air.

And this ride was even topped by what expected us at the top of the hill: an observation tower whose peak cleared the tree tops, so we could gaze out over the forest and part of the Panama Canal. This was, so far, easily the most moving sight of the whole cruise. And it reminded me of a quote by Albert Einstein:

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

And pause, we did; and stand rapt in awe, we did; and so alive we were, and our eyes so open!

When we returned down the hill, it felt as if we had experienced something big, transcendental. Something that cannot be put into words, so I won’t even attempt it.

During the ride back, it was pretty quiet on the bus. But the sights were just as interesting and exotic as when we came in, so, although I was drained, I couldn’t help stare outside the window and observe all the details of this strange, exciting, different world.

As scheduled, our ship had already left Gatun Lake, going back through the Gatun Locks, and was now docked in Colón. Our departure was late by about 30 minutes, because a landslide had delayed the return of the bus of another excursion. How “exciting” that must have been.

♦

Two-thirds of the cruise are now behind us, and tomorrow’s stop at Puerto Limon in Costa Rica will be the last one before two consecutive sea days that will take us back to Fort Lauderdale. The excursion I have booked will leave at 6:30am tomorrow morning (read: “middle of the night for a geek”). Well, at least we will all gain one hour tonight, as we are moving into yet another new time zone, setting our clocks back one more hour.

Still, I will skip “fine dining” tonight and meet Jill at the bar for a snack, a few brewskies, and for basking in the “sustain” (for you non-musicians out there, feel free to substitute “afterglow”) of this fabulous day.

♦

With most of today’s classes covering iLife, iWork, Lightroom, Aperture, and Photoshop, I decided to skip ‘em all and make it an enjoyably slow day. I did, however, opt to to follow David Pogue’s “Inside Leopard, pt. 2″ session. Same concept as last night’s, same entertaining jokes, and more “do try this at home”-style tips.

But also a little anecdote about how even the attention to detail usually demonstrated by Apple’s developers can’t prevent the odd little mishap. In the Services menu (found under the application menu, e.g., Finder > Services), there is a submenu titled Preview with two items, Open images and Slideshow. David had noticed that, no matter what you do, these two menu items are always disabled.

So, having pretty good access to the powers that be in Cupertino, David asked one of the OS X engineers about why those two menu items were never available. The surprising answer: that submenu was not supposed to be in the Services menu in the released OS. Makes you wonder how many future versions of OS X will, nevertheless, tag along that menu…

It’s true that many experienced Mac users will already have trodden some of the ground that David covers in his presentations, but the way The Pogueman does his thing, and those little anecdotes like the one above that originate from the connections David has, make for some entertaining Mac geekery.

♦

Tonight, we’ll have to set our clocks back as we will be entering another time zone on our way to the the undisputed highlight of this cruise, the Panama Canal. And what sweeter way to be informed about this than via a little greeting card that is accompanied by a piece of chocolate.

And also in time to see another spectacular cloud formation in the sky.

♦

Today’s shore excursion started quite a bit earlier than I had planned: instead of 1:00pm, the “African Heritage” tour departed from the pier at 8:30am, as I was informed last night. The excursion brochure listed both times, and I am sure they were combined into one. We were barely enough people to fill every seat of our minibus — there don’t seem to be too many people eager to learn about the gloomy history of the slave trade while on a cruise in the Caribbean. And a gloomy topic it was, indeed, as witnessed by the exhibits at the Kura Hulanda museum.

Once a neglected and decaying neighborhood of the Otrabanda part of Willemstad, a Dutch entrepreneur started investing in, and rebuilding the area in 1995. Today, dozens of houses in this part of town have been restored to splendid condition, and the cheerful colors, gorgeous architectural details and numerous works of art make for an amazing site, deservedly earning it place Unesco World Heritage Site status.

The central hub of the Kura Hulanda neighborhood, which means “Dutch Courtyard”¹, is a resort hotel and a museum. This museum not only tells the history of the Western Passage slave trade, but also puts into focus the diverse cultural heritage of peoples of the Western Africa, who were abducted to serve as “human resources” in the worst possible sense of that phrase.

The inner courtyard inside the museum grounds is graced by a sculpture of Mother Africa, showing her face when viewed head-on (no pun intended…), and the outline of the African continent when viewed from the side. Just a few steps away from this piece of art, the museum confronts its visitors with the barbaric cruelty that was at the core of the slave trade.

The exhibits encompass old etches, photographs, and documents, as well as original “tools of the trade” like chains, shackles, and whips. The part of the museum I found most disturbing — if you can actually sort such a place’s exhibits by “disturbingness” — was a recreation of the lower decks of a slave ship that you could climb down into, and which demonstrated how their “masters” viewed the black people they had kidnapped: as wares which would have to be stowed away in as little room as possible to maximize the profit of each ship’s load. Never mind that a not-so-small percentage of the product did not make it to the destination in usable condition…

After leaving this section of the museum we went over to some other buildings that housed innumerable art and crafts objects from the Western African nations, and the richness and variety of these objects is a great source of inspiration and admiration. I wish we would have had a bit more time to browse this collection, as you don’t often get a chance to see such a large collection of African artifacts in one place.

The second major destination on this tour was a former plantation-turned-special-education-school called Groot Santa Martha. On our way there, we stopped by a little slave hut, which looked rather idyllic, reminding me a bit of those cozy cottages found in English villages.

And yet, the thought that the former inhabitants were bereft of most every personal freedom we take for granted nowadays, made for an odd contrast between what one saw, and the image in front of one’s inner eye of what it must have been like for those who lived in it a few centuries ago. And yet, it was lightyears away from the miserable “lodgings” we had seen at the Kura Hulanda earlier.

After a quick stop, we continued on our way to Groot Santa Martha. Here’s an excerpt from their info brochure:

In 1696 the Groot Santa Martha Plantation was already famous for its cattle, sugar mill, indigo, distillery and fresh-water wells. Dividivi pods were also exported and in 1797 there was still one working sugar mill.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the sale of fruit and cattle for slaughter turned a handsome profit, while Santa Martha also produced 90% of the island’s salt which was then shipped to the United States and the Netherlands.

The heavy work in and around the landhouse and in the saltpans was done by slaves who lived in huts on the land. At that time, the plantation consisted of 554 hectares, now reduced to only 17 hectares.

Today there is still an orchard, nursery garden, vegetable and herbs garden, and a farm with cows, goats, sheep and horses. In all these departments handicapped people work under supervision.

The plantation’s gorgeous, serene location is embedded in lush green surroundings and close to a saltwater lake, nicely setting off the cheerfully bright-yellow main houses. In some of the buildings on the site, mentally handicapped people were being trained in arts and crafts, e.g., in a furniture restoration workshop, with the aim to prepare them for an independent life once they have completed their education here.

The way the place was presented to us, however, felt somehow awkward and inappropriate, as our group was led to some of the buildings and allowed to freely look around. Although the director of the place, who led us around and explained each building’s purpose and the overall concept behind the Santa Martha foundation, assured us that “meeting” other people this way was part of the training they provided to their students, I couldn’t help but compare the image of watching these people and taking photos of them, to images from circus freak shows from the early 20th century.

And I was glad to find out that I wasn’t the only one who had reservations about this, as I talked to another person from our group, who also shied away from entering every building and basically disrespecting the students’ privacy, and he shared the exact same feelings about this visit.

It’s not that I object to visiting places like Santa Martha per se — far from it. But, generally speaking, if the expression on another person’s face indicates to me that they feel uncomfortable when observed in tactless touron² fashion, I respectfully retreat and leave them alone. Grabbing your camera and taking a close-up shot of that person instead, should not be an option in these situations.

During the drive back to the ship, our guide provided us with some insights into what life on Curaçao is like today, bringing our thoughts back into our modern times: how the housing market develops, what the school system is like, how the island is debating independence from the Netherlands, and many more interesting tidbits.

Before being taken back to the pier, we took a little detour to the Tula memorial. In 1795, a slave named Tula organized a revolt against a plantation owner, and even though the revolt was violently put to an end and Tula executed, he is still revered as a hero, and that reverence is also expressed in the monument which shows Tula breaking the chains of two other slaves with a hammer and chisel.

In a way, today’s excursion was the opposite of yesterday’s fun off-road ride: more serious, deeper, and thought-provoking, and I returned to my cabin tired, mellow, and even a bit emotional. But that’s exactly what makes an excursion worthwhile.

Being shown a close-up of such a disgraceful phenomenon in our “civilized” nations’ history is not a carefree ride, but it can, and should, give us pause to reflect on which values define us as human and humane beings — both through confronting us with events and actions that we don’t want to ever occur again, but also through inspiring and empowering stories like that of the slave Tula who was brave enough to put his own life at stake to stand up against his and his fellow-men’s oppressors.

♦

The Volendam left Curaçao at 6 in the evening, so there was only time for one class today: part one of David Pogue’s two-part mini-series “Inside Mac OS X ‘Leopard’” in the ship’s Wajang Theater, promising to cover all 300 of the new features found in this release of the OS. Well, that didn’t “quite” work out as promised, but, given David’s entertaining presentation style, it was well worth attending despite the “somewhat” less comprehensive coverage.

David’s first topic — after pointing out the “halucinogenic box” that Leopard ships in — was Time Machine. When asked who could rightfully claim to have a complete backup of all the files on their Mac “right now,” only three people in the room raised their hands (thanks to SuperDuper! and a bus-powered Iomega FireWire drive, I could rightfully claim membership in this exclusive club). Which, according to David, was in line with what Apple claimed, namely that only 4% of their user base have a system in place that creates automatic, regular, and complete backups.

To demonstrate the importance of backups, Pogue used the one example that I think is guaranteed to work every time: pictures of your family, especially of your kids. The very idea of losing any photos that document moments in peoples’ lives that they can never ever re-live or re-create usually gets even those to consider implementing a reliable backup system who never cared about backups before. Which makes it all the more surprising that David himself admitted to not backing up!

Despite having three kids, a massive supply of cool camera gear (and not just way-cool review loaners, either, I’m sure), and, thus, tons of media files portraying his children, he says he has not backed up by making backup copies on DVDs, or somesuch. Why not? Because he just does not have enough time to do so. Or, rather, did not have enough time, because, with Time Machine, backing up becomes a no-brainer.

Other topics covered in this session was slightly less important, yet useful faire, including Spaces, QuickLook, Cover Flow, etc. Watching David showing off these new-to-Leopard features was especially fun to me, because I have not yet installed my own copy of Leopard, which I had received just a few days before leaving for the cruise, and now my “Me Want!”-levels are at a new high.

To round off this session, David presented five of his ten “Dave’s Faves:” 1. The “Mosaic”-style photo screen saver; 2. Data detectors in Mail.app; 3. searching for menu commands via the search box in an application’s Help menu. With addressing data detectors for adding events to iCal and addresses to the Address Book, as well as using the Help menu search to also find bookmarks in Safari’s history, that does make five faves total.

The other five will be covered in the second part of “Inside Leopard” tomorrow night. For now, though, I’ll focus my thoughts away from the feature menu Apple has created for their latest Big Cat to the menu that lists what’s for dinner tonight. Aye!

Sunrise was just a few minutes away, and a dramatic cloud constellation hovering above the vastness of the sea provided a gigantic canvas for the sun to paint on. Being this close to the equator, the sun rose quickly, and you could literally see it move up onto the sky, creating countless shades of purple and orange on the towering clouds.

As you might expect, I did take a number of photos, but — luckily — realized in time that trying to “can” this kind of vista into a digicam photo just doesn’t work: while it may be helpful to relive this moment in your mind after returning back home, a two-dimensional representation of a small excerpt of this majestic scene simply cannot replace experiencing that moment right then and there. There is nothing worse than going through your vacation photos back home and wonder “Umh, when was that? Did I really see this?!”

So, I put the camera away, just stood there on my verandah, and immersed myself in the moving beauty of the moment. Eventually, though, my True Self™ requested its due, and I got back into the cabin for a few more moments of sweet sleep.

♦

Thanks to that genius invention called Alarm Clock, the night did finally end at around 8am, because this was the first day featuring an early-morning class I did not want to miss: David Pogue’s talk on “Extreme Googling.”

To be totally frank, I daresay that this session was off to a rather dull start, and that’s not just due to the fact that David was a bit late(, because he thought that this class was scheduled for a different day). It was also because the class started out with some pretty average, i.e., definitely un-extreme, Google fare, like using the asterisk wildcard, enclosing your search term in quotation marks to find multi-word phrases, or removing hits from the search result by prepending a word, or more, in the search term with a minus character.

It got much more interesting — and fun — when David started presenting some lesser known features offered by the Google site. Here’s a rundown of those features, and what you need to type into Google’s search box to access ‘em:

• Look up a word’s definition and find related phrases: “define:[word]”
• See a concise weather forecast: “weather [place name or zip code]”
• Check out movie listings: “showtimes [place name or zip code]” (Click the top-most link in the search results)
• Type in a partial address, and the top-most result is the full address and a small map view of that address
• Type in an equation to calculate the result. Also works for converting units via “[unit 1] in [unit 2]”, e.g., “teaspoons in a gallon”
• See the product assigned to a bar code: type in the number found on the barcode label and click on “Look up UPC number” on the results page
• Get airline flight information: type in the airline name and flight number, e.g., “united 22″
• Find out more about a book by typing in the name of that book. Google Book Search shows the cover image, lists a table of contents, most popular pages, and much more.

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We’re on the beautiful island of Aruba today, one of the Netherlands Antilles. When I saw they were offering an off-road excursion for this port of call, I immediately put a checkmark next to it. However, when we — that is, fellow-cruisers Tara and Jonathan, and yours truly — arrived at the parking lot with the off-road vehicles, I was not so sure anymore whether that was such a good choice.

Those Jeep Wranglers looked pretty with their yellow paint job and decent off-road tires. But a closer look revealed a state of maintenance that would give the average German MOT official an instant heart attack: wheels were mounted to the Jeeps in mix-and-match fashion, some tire flanks showed “ghastly tire wounds,” engine warning lights came on, at least one vehicle lacked the lap belt for the passenger seat, etc.

Well, after a short briefing, and having signed an all-out waiver that would surely protect the operator from liability suits even if they actively blew one of the vehicles up during our excursion, we took off anyway, with four people sharing one vehicle.

Starting out on a few miles’ worth of pavement, and progressing gently via a two-track onto some more serious dirt roads with deep ruts and pleasantly steep inclines, we spent almost 4.5 hours chugging along.

Switching drivers every now and then, we could clearly confirm that, yes, female drivers are the maddest. Well, OK, that is, if their name begins with “T” and there’s a deep water hole right in front of the vehicle. Oh. My. Gosh. (Or is that “Gush”?).

During the tour, some sightseeing was thrown in, too, including the now-collapsed Natural Bridge, a little church just by the shore line, the California light house, and there was even a thirty-minute break at a gorgeous beach, which we reached just in time to catch the sunset.

Driving the last few miles back to the Jeep depot, enjoying the warm gentle evening breeze in our open-top Wrangler, we had that satisfying feeling of having spent a grand day out. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just me who thought that Aruba is exactly the kind of island where you wish you’d miss the boat.

I love sea days: from wherever on the ship you look out, you see only water. Lots of it. Combine that with balmy warmth outside, a nice breeze, and the gentle noise of the waves from the ship’s cutting through the sea, and it’s the perfect atmosphere to really wind down.

Of course, it’s also during sea days that most of the MacMania seminars take place, so you have to make a conscious choice between relaxing idle time or learning cool new things about the Mac. Making that choice is surprisingly simple, though: if you’re already familiar with the topic, and the class expressly targets an entry-level audience, or if the topic just doesn’t interest you, you’ve got some more spare time on your hands.

Today’s classes pretty squarely fell into the former category, so I opted to scrap ‘em all, except for one.

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As a less formal kind of “class,” this cruise features “Ingenious Bar” sessions. Modeled after the “Genius Bars” found in Apple Stores, they’re an opportunity for us to ask the MacMania speaker luminaries for advice on all things Mac.

The one I joined today was manned by Apple’s Sal Soghoian and Macworld’s Jason Snell, and quickly turned into a pretty deep discussion about how technology could be used to teach Civics to young people, which topic was brought up by Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss, who is with us on this cruise.

Richard explained that he has since left showbiz to focus on just that: teaching civics to kids and teens, and raising awareness for its importance. He will present this project during “An evening with Richard Dreyfuss” next Saturday, and I am excited to find out more about this. Should make for an interesting blog post, too!

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Yeay for towel animals!

The cabin stewards sometimes craft animals from towels during turn-down service. On this cruise, they even use stick-on eyes!

Well, to be frank, the infrastructure on the island reminded me of good old Disneyland: the harbor entry a bit too “natural,” the Pirate’s Cove village (which consisted mainly of a bar, restrooms, and a few shops) a bit too “idyllic,” and the shops too commercial.

However, as soon as you look beyond this stage façade, what you’ll see is, indeed, a gorgeous tropical island with silky-smooth sand beaches, crystal-clear turquoise water, lush vegetation, and colorful birds singing their heart out. And all of this comes with a topping of balmy sunshine generously sprinkled with a cool breeze. Just the perfect surroundings to try out some water sports.

Let’s ignore banal swimming, and I can safely claim that, before heading out to Half Moon Cay, my experience with water sports was zero. Never sailed, never dived, never snorkeled, although I always wanted to. So I grabbed the opportunity that was offered by the “Eco Lagoon Kayak Adventure” shore excursion.

After a short ride on the bed of a truck — nothing says “eco adventure” like fresh Diesel fumes! –, we reached Bone Fish Lagoon, were greeted by our friendly guide, put on floatation vests, and got into our kayaks. With three twin kayaks and two singles manned by us vacationers, we headed out onto the lagoon at a relaxed pace. And, man, I loved every single frickin’ minute of it: I just could not get enough of the serenity on the water (once I stopped cussing and whining to myself about getting all wet inside the boat, that is…).

Having endured far too many excessively verbose and vocal tour guides on other trips, it was a welcome change that our guide on this tour just kept quietly paddling along, providing only a few choice morsels of information about the flora in the lake area. Luckily, all my fellow-kayakers seemed to be in the same mood, so there wasn’t any annoying chatter during the whole excursion, either, and even when we returned to shore after what seemed to be a far-too-short hour out on the lake, that silence and quiet among the group remained. It was awesome.

The only thing I did not like about this outing was that it was really way too short — I could have stayed out on that lagoon lake for hours –, but that’s probably a common criticism you can apply to all of the shore excursions offered on an average cruise, if not to any package holiday: it’s that “been there, done that, got the t-shirt” approach to traveling.

Instead of getting a chance of truly immersing yourself in the foreign surroundings, you (get) rush(ed) through a few “key areas of interested” as selected by whoever organizes the tour, take a few photos to prove you’ve actually been there, and still have that nagging feeling of not having actually experienced anything. If you want real immersion, you need to re-visit on your own and bring lots more time.¹

Then again, you’ll probably get the best out of such organized excursions if you take them exactly for what they are, i.e., appetizers, and not full meals. Use them to check out new things you haven’t done before or to visit places you’ve never been to, and if something, or some place, appeals to you, consider going back to it, bringing lots more time. In that sense, this kayak experience was such a great “appetizer” that I’ll add this type of sport to my list of activities I would like to do more of in the future, maybe even back at home.

Again, this excursion was great, but instead of repeating this fact over and over again, let me just cut over to the first of the MacMania seminars.

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Perl wizard Randal Schwartz has been InSight Cruises’s CEO Neil Baumann’s sidekick since the inception of the company, and as such, he has an amazing 39 cruises under his belt. It’s only fair that he is awarded the honor of giving the inaugural class of this MacMania 7 cruise.

In a class entitled “Amazingly Cool Utilities,” you can expect an alpha-geek like Randal to present tons of apps that are worth trying out, and, man, did he ever. Instead of actually demoing any software, though, he just went through an extensive list of software tools and utilities, sorted into categories like Audio, Network, System, and a few others.

Having been familiar with most of Randal’s suggestions already, I just jotted down a few that really sparked my interest. They are:

• the Audio Units plug-in generator “SonicBirth,”
• the software planetarium “OSXPlanet,”
• the, well, uuuhhh, “sleep helper”(?) “Pzizz,”
• the game “Lumen,”
• the space fly-through simulator “Celestia,”
• and screensavers “Skyrocket,” “HotelGadget,” and “LiquidMac.”

Sorry I haven’t included any links here, but that’s just because I haven’t yet checked these apps out myself, so Your Milage May Vary™. However, considering that we’re paying $100 for 250 minutes of Internet access (and, at 40 Cents a minute, that is the bargain deal of the bunch), I’d rather spend those precious drops of the Digital Ages’s life blood on more important things like checking email and keeping up with news feeds, and leave downloads for when I get back home (Yikes! I should remember not to remind myself of home while on this cruise).

Update: The slides for this presentation are now available on ourmedia.org. Thanks, Randal!

If you’ve read my coverage of last July’s MacMania 4.5, you may recall the story that fellow-cruiser Erik Pitti and me were asked if we were virgins. Let’s just sum this whole embarrassing incident up by saying that that was in reference to us both being on our very first-ever cruise.

As with every premier(e), there are a few things to learn before you can fully enjoy your cruise, and the embarkation process is part of it, as is the life boat safety drill. Sounds menacing at first, but after you’ve been through this once, it’s a minor item to check off on your cruise to-do list, so I’ll spare you any further first impressions, as I’ve written about those quite extensively already.

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Moved into the cabin, got more-than-was-necessary annoyed by the noisy airco, grabbed some food on the not-quite-as-spectacularly-posh-as-the-name-suggests Lido deck, greeted my cabin steward, unpacked, went through the safety drill, called home quickly to give ‘em the all-thumbs-up, and waited for cast off.

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5:00 pm. Let the voyage begin! Sail away, Cap’n!

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Apparently, this cruise is the biggest one for Geek Cruises/InSight Cruises, yet: each of the two seminar tracks — called “MacMania 7” and “Shakespeare at Sea“, respectively — has some 120 participants. That’s quite a crowd, and so the Bon Voyage parties have been split up, as well. While the Shakespeare’ians enjoyed theirs in the Crow’s Nest, us MacManiacs have congregated on the after Lido deck. Interesting crowd, this, and some of the luminary speakers like Macworld’s Jason Snell, the NY Times’s David Pogue, and Derrick Story have joined in the fun, as well.

Looks like this will be a fun cruise.