Sept 20 - SeaTac, WA. I turned in the Buick this AM and was a little sorry to see it go. After a week I have become accustomed to it's little quirks and enjoyed driving it a lot. Tonight is the Cruise Specialists dinner and party. Tomorrow they take us to the ship. It's been a challenge to redistribute Diana's heavy items to all my bags but it seems to have worked out. I'm glad my large bag was not this heavy for all the hotel stops we made coming north. The hotel and ship people will handle it until it gets to our cabin so I'm off the hook for that.
The party and dinner were very nice. Lots of CSI and HAL officers and employees were there to mix and mingle. I don't usually look forward to embarkation day but since CSI is taking care of all the details, this one should be easy. The only cruising event that's less fun than embarkation day is disembarkation day. All the hassles of embarkation with out the pleasure of looking forward to the cruise. I'm telling you, sometimes my ability to find the dark lining in the silver cloud amazes even me.
Internet Users Note: From now on I'll be on the ship's satellite system, not exactly the least expensive ISP you'll ever encounter, but it makes up for it by being very slow as well. Yikes, the double whammy. I prepay a large package of minutes that holds the cost down a little but if I paid the same price at home my monthly Internet bill would be at least $1,000 instead of the $35 Charter charges for very high speed. The only thing worse than paying a high price for shipboard Internet is if it were free. The bandwidth is only so wide and when everyone is online the system is much slower than the old 56k dial-up.
I only go online late at night and early in the morning when I can get most of the speed for myself. And that turns out to be a bit slower than DSL and a whole lot slower than cable. What happens is, the first person online gets all the speed available. When the second person logs on the speed is cut in half and so on until the 300th person gets on and you are getting only 1/300 of the maximum speed. If it slows down that much when it's a bit expensive, imagine how slow it would be if all the knuckleheads on board were online all the time if it was free. Frankly, it would be unusable. Princess experimented with free Internet and they found that kids in the Internet Lounge were texting other kids in the Internet lounge and everyone was complaining about how slow it was.
In every post-cruise evaluation I write I comment that the Internet should never be free I don't care how many Mariner days someone has. I like to use it and would really prefer that it be useable.
This is your first example of my italics rants. A fairly mild one but you get the drift of how they can go. It was provoked when I heard some knot heads lobbying HAL employees to make the Internet free. I guess if you don't really understand the technology you can ask for stupid stuff. Just look what some people are asking our government to provide. They forget that to give something to someone the government first has to take it away from someone who earned it. If a private citizen does that they call it fraud, embezzlement or theft. The government calls it 'taxes'.
Ah, I feel better. Don't you?
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