Geek Cruise 2004
For each of the past three years, Wintellect has teamed with Geek Cruises to produce a conference-on-a-cruise-ship entitled “.NET Nirvana.” The 2004 cruise left Ft. Lauderdale on Sunday, Dec. 5 and spent a week cruising the eastern Caribbean. In addition to getting wet in some of the world’s best dive spots, hanging out by the pool, and eating way too much food, we managed to cram our brains with 20 one-and-a-half-hour conference sessions on .NET programming. The speakers this year were myself, Brent Rector (formerly of Wintellect and now with Microsoft), and SQL Server guru Peter DeBetta. The attendees came from a variety of companies and included a large contingent from Georgia Tech.
Here’s a day-by-day account of our activities for those of you interested in knowing what a Geek Cruise is like. It’s an awesome way to learn and get face time with the speakers. It’s also a trip that you won’t soon forget. If you’re thinking that your boss would never sign off on such a trip, visit GeekCruises.com’s Convincing the Boss page. In addition to providing tips for convincing the boss, it features a downloadable 6-page brochure extolling the virtues of sending employees on a Geek Cruise that can mysteriously show up on your boss’s desk. Geek Cruises leaves no stone unturned in ensuring an unparalleled—and friction-free—conference experience.
Enjoy the “clog” (cruise log), and we hope to see you on a Geek Cruise soon!
Jeff Prosise
Scuba Geek
Sunday, Dec. 5
After arriving in Ft. Lauderdale last night, at noon today we left the hotel and caught a shuttle to the cruise ship docks. In about an hour we were on board ms Oosterdam—one of the newest and largest ship’s in Holland America’s fleet—and enjoying a buffet lunch in the cafeteria on the ship’s Lido deck. I was delighted to find that the cafeteria puts out fresh sushi rolls every day. Better still, the average passenger on this boat seems to be about 82 years old, so there should be little competition for the sushi.
Shortly before the ship left port at 4:00 p.m., we assembled on deck for the required lifeboat drill. Everyone had to congregate at his or her assigned lifeboat station with a bright orange life vest on. Geek cruiser Dave Webster looked like a big Cheeto. A life vest increases your girth fourfold, so there was lots of bumping and “excuse mes” as we tried to navigate around one another.
The Geek Cruise formally began with an early evening cocktail reception in the ship’s Crow’s Nest lounge. We had a magnificent view of the ocean as we steamed toward the Bahamas. Captain Neil, the founder of Geek Cruises, hosted the reception and welcomed everyone aboard. Each speaker took a moment to describe the sessions he would be presenting this week, in between munching on shrimp and fritters and other goodies. Many of the geeks brought spouses and significant others with them, and about a dozen of them are scuba divers. I can’t wait to strap on the scuba gear. Brent Rector is a newly certified diver and will be accompanying us on some of the dives. The Caribbean has a lot of reef sharks, but I don’t worry about sharks when Brent’s around. I don’t have to outswim the sharks. I just have to outswim Brent.
Monday, Dec. 6
Early this morning, the ship docked in Nassau, Bahamas. We spent a few hours ashore and then headed back to the boat for a noon departure. At left is a photo of the Oosterdam in port in Nassau.
The conference portion of the Geek Cruise began this afternoon. This year’s cruise features 2-1/2 days of classes organized into two tracks with 10 sessions each. This afternoon I taught classes on extending ASP.NET and hack-proofing ASP.NET Web apps. Peter DeBetta led classes on SQL Server Reporting Services and advanced data manipulation in T-SQL. Brent Rector led a session on geek sunbathing and mixing tropical drinks.
The ship’s entertainment calendar includes an American Idol-like singing contest dubbed “Oosterdam Superstar.” Wintellect’s Peter DeBetta, pictured here crooning “Stray Cut Strut,” tried out in a public audition held in the ship’s disco. He made the cut and will be singing in the competition later this week.
The cruise ship has satellite Internet access for 40 cents per minute. It took me 30 minutes to download e-mail tonight because of all the spam. That’s a good argument for filtering spam on the server rather than the client.
Tuesday, Dec. 7
Today’s a full day at sea as we steam toward St. Maarten. As is the custom on Geek Cruises, a day at sea means a full day of sessions. I led classes on ASP.NET data binding and building high-performance ASP.NET apps. Peter DeBetta did a couple of hard-hitting sessions on SQL Server, while Brent Rector led sessions on the .NET type system, the garbage collector, what’s new in .NET 2.0, and generics—a new feature of Whidbey that lets you build type-agnostic classes similar to those you build with C++ templates.
The highlight of my day was meeting someone who is a legend in our industry: Peter Norton (of Norton Utilities fame). He’s on the ship this week. He’s not part of the Geek Cruise, but he’d fit right in with this crowd. Peter and I worked together—sort of—years ago at PC Magazine. I never met him there because he left about the time I started. Plus, we were both contributing editors, which means we didn’t live and work in New York. Captain Neil tipped me off that Mr. Norton was on the boat, and I called his suite to invite him to attend a session or two. He was gracious enough to invite me up for a reception he was hosting. We hung out for a few minutes and then I ducked out because I didn’t want to take time away from his other guests.
Another highlight of the day was participating in a photo shoot for London’s Financial Times. That publication sent a reporter and a photographer on the cruise to do a story on Geek Cruises. One of the shots had us geeks lounging on the deck with our laptops. Jeffrey Richter gets to travel to great places like Sneedville, Tennessee, and I get stuck doing cruises in the Caribbean. Life’s not fair!
Wednesday, Dec. 8
We awoke this morning to find the ship anchored off the coast of St. Maarten, a sparkling Caribbean island that’s half Dutch and half French. We moored near Philipsburg on the Dutch side and rode tenders (lifeboats) to shore. The beach in downtown Philipsburg is amazing. This is definitely a place I’d like to visit again.
Once ashore, most of the geeks dispersed for shopping and sightseeing, but a few of us hopped a dive boat and spent the morning diving a local site known as Fish Bowl. We spotted some large rays, a few lobster, and three reef sharks. The water temperature was a perfect 80 degrees, with air temperatures reaching about 85. I LOVE the Caribbean!
Our dive master showed us the spot where six years ago, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship ran aground in Philipsburg. An article on the incident says “the captain returned the ship to Great Bay outside Philipsburg, bringing it into shallow water and landing it on sand.” The divemaster’s account of the incident was slightly more dramatic. After realizing that the ship was taking on water, the captain purposely drove the ship onto the beach. It remained there a few weeks undergoing repairs, then was dragged back out into the ocean. Here are some photos of the ship being repaired.
After the dive, my wife and I strolled through Philipsburg and stopped for lunch at Taloula Mango’s. That’s me in the open air on the second floor of the restaurant. A local band played rock tunes on the beach just outside the restaurant. Did I mention that I love the Caribbean?
We returned to the ship in time for an all-you-can-eat barbecue on the Lido deck. The barbecue’s not great, but it’s plentiful. In other words, it makes up in quantity what it lacks in quality.
Thursday, Dec. 9
The ship’s in port today in Roadtown, Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Nine of us geeks spent the morning diving the wreck of the Rhone, a 19th-century British mail steamer that went down off Salt Island in an October 1867 hurricane. The Rhone was featured in the 1970s movie “The Deep” starring Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset. The ship exploded when water breached the hull and hit the boilers. Today it lies in two pieces in 80 feet of water. It’s one of the better wreck dives in the Caribbean. Much of the ship is still intact, including the drive shaft (though steam-driven, the Rhone was one of the first propeller-driven ships), portions of the hull, pieces of the ship’s marble dance floor, and the “lucky porthole”—a brass porthole that lies intact on the bottom. Our first dive went to 80 feet and covered the aft portion of the ship. After a short surface interval, we submerged again and dove what remains of the front of the boat, which ranges from 30 to 80 feet in depth.
Below is Brent Rector climbing aboard the dive boat after the first dive. We thought he was grinning from ear to ear because he had encountered Jacqueline Bisset—a stated goal before he entered the water. Turns out he was simply happy to be alive. He cheated death by surfacing with a mere 200 psi of air. You like to have at least 500 psi in reserve, but Brent always lives life on the edge. It was Brent who coined the phrase “a pound of air remaining is a pound of air wasted.”
Nine of the 11 divers on this trip were Geek Cruisers. I snapped this photo of our group before we reboarded the Oosterdam. That’s my wife on the far right. The gentleman third from the right wasn’t part of the Geek Cruise. I announced “if you’re a geek, come over here for a group picture,” and he showed up. Not sure what that says about his self-esteem.
During dinner Thursday evening, Captain Neil warned us that a storm packing gale-force winds lay ahead, and that we should expect 30-foot waves. To prevent sea sickness, he dispensed a sedative named Sea Calm. Because the drug lasts for 24 hours, few geeks were able to stay awake during class the following day. I’m used to having people cutting Zs in my classes, but for Peter and Brent, it was something new.
After warning us about the rough seas ahead, Neil suggested that we retire to our rooms early and borrow a DVD from the ship’s library. Seeing that my wife was frightened by the coming weather, I suggested we rent “The Perfect Storm.” Failing to anticipate the quickness of her right hand, I was the first in our group to reach dreamland.
On its way out of Tortola this evening, the ship made an unscheduled stop at St. Thomas to drop off a passenger experiencing medical problems. Our first thought was that Brent’s dive hadn’t turned out so well after all, but we later learned that someone had suffered a heart attack. No geeks had heart attacks—proof that a soft-drink-and-pizza diet is pretty healthy after all.
Friday, Dec. 10
Turns out the gale warning was a false alarm. If we had 30-foot seas last night, none of us knew it. Perhaps we slept right through them.
Today features another full day of sessions as the boat heads home. I taught four sessions on ASP.NET 2.0, while Peter and Brent taught two sessions each on Yukon (SQL Server 2005), XAML, and WinFX. In addition to providing content on existing technologies, we strive to provide sessions on future technologies as well. Keeping up is hard to do in the technology industry, so we like to give cruisers an edge by showing them what to expect in the next couple of years from Microsoft. Next year we might offer a couple of DOS classes.
Tonight was formal dinner night on the ship. Most nights we dress pretty casual for dinner, but on formal night a jacket and tie is required. Brent wore a tux. I never get tired of seeing Brent in a tux; it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Saturday, Dec. 11
The ship was scheduled to spend the day at Half Moon Cay, Holland America’s private island in the Carribean. We spent a day here on the first .NET Nirvana in 2002 and it was among my favorite days on the cruise with plenty of time for snorkeling, scuba diving, horseback riding, and just laying on the beach. Here’s a photo I snapped during our 2002 visit to the island.
Unfortunately, the day didn’t come off as planned. We anchored a few hundred yards offshore, but the seas were too rough us to disembark. Disappointing, but otherwise the cruise has gone off without a hitch, so one can’t feel too sorry for oneself. We found plenty of ways to amuse ourselves on the boat. Peter and I played golf in the ship’s golf simulator, which is probably as close as I’ll ever get to St. Andrews. It’s entertaining playing golf in the middle of the ocean, but funner still stepping off the golf course and enjoying a heaping pile of sushi.
Sunday, Dec. 12
We awoke this morning to find the ship docked in Ft. Lauderdale. At 8:30 a.m., we began disembarkation procedures, and by 9:30, my wife and I were sitting in the airport waiting to board our flight home. Other geeks had dispersed to other gates to begin their journeys home, too. I’ll miss being rocked to sleep by the waves and hanging out by the pool with the other geeks. But then again, there’s always next year!
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