Polytropia

MM 7 — Day 4: Serene Seas, Grand-Mastering Google, and Fabulous Four-Wheeling Fun

Musings from 07 November 2007 on MacMania 7

Being the total opposite of a morning person, waking up in the middle of the night — say, around 6am — usually annoys me to no end. Not so today: noticing that it was getting light outside, I chose to go see what there was to see of the sea (sorry…), and was rewarded with a stunning sight.

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.

♦

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.

Share this: del.icio.us • Digg • reddit