MacMania Cruise, May 26–June 1

Geek Cruises in conjunction with the publishers of MacWorld magazine sponsored the first MacMania cruise in 2002. I had thought that if I ever took a cruise, I'd want to do the Inside Passage trip in Alaska. So when I got information on this trip, it seemed a rather obvious thing for me to do. The time on the ship featured classes, seminars and such taught by authors whose articles and books I regularly read. There were also special evenings entertainments such as a magic and music show by David Pogue and a reading by actor John de Lancie, who had suggested the idea for a Mac-themed cruise. Our group was small in comparison to the 2200 passengers (I think) on the Volendam, but we hogged a lot of the resources of meeting rooms and auditoriums. Some participants were accompanied by family members who were just along for the cruise. We did not have any planned activities while the ship was in port, so we and the speakers and their families were free to see and do what the ports of call had to offer. They assigned our whole group to the 8 pm seating for dinner, and assigned members of the group to the tables near the stern. My table was next to the large windows.

I decided to buy my first digital camera to take on the cruise. I saw a review that ranked a 3.5 mega-pixel Casio camera as highly as much more expensive digital cameras of its day. Casio was trying to break into a higher-end tier, and this model was their shot at it. It included a lens made by Canon. By the time I was shopping for it, Casio seemed to be abandoning the experiment, and they were offering some deals that were just pre-closeout, I guess. Besides a discount price, I got a free IBM disk drive. Memory was very expensive, so they could make tiny disk drives that fit the memory card slot and have much more capacity. My IBM drive had a whopping (for its day) 340 MB drive. It also came with a 16 MB regular card (or whatever was standard in that day). I was quite pleased with the pictures the camera could take.

In preparing these web pages, I discovered that I had been very cautious about preserving room on the little hard drive, especially since I didn't have a laptop along or any other way to store the pictures during the trip. I took most of the pictures at just 960 x 1280 pixel resolution. Still that gave me plenty to work with for posting to the web. Some of the nicest pictures from Glacier Bay were made at the camera's full resolution. I have a print of one of the glacier pictures that is framed and hangs in my hallway. It looks great even though it is printed on 13" x 19" paper.

Below are links to pictures from the trip. If you want to look at a small sample, I'd suggest that the Glacier Bay and Skagway excursion pictures are the most scenic.

Also you can see scans I made of the pictures I bought that include me with the speakers and with the group at the MacMania page.