Hmph. Simon is feeling ill. Simon is also having his theatre fall apart around him, and has a new electrical tech who, while bright, has just arrived from the engine room with no handover period and has no clue about theatre. He'll ask me "how do I do this?", and I'll say "*I* don't know, you're the electrician!!!". Yes, this is the guy who's supposed to be fixing my moving lights, the same person who when he hung one yesterday didn't know that he had to set a DMX address on it....... not his fault, but still a problem.
Meanwhile one of my hazers has been awaiting spare parts for a month now, and knowing P&O may be in that state for a year or more. Meanwhile the spare isn't working properly and is spitting cold haze fluid all over the staeg (this is slippery stuff...), so the manufacturer has recommend we return it to them under warrenty. But I can't do that until the first one is working again, or my shows look crap.
Meanwhile the ship has run out of lamps (ie bulbs) for most of the stage lighting equipment on the ship (some of which were ordered in September dueing my last contract and still haven't arrived), so every time a bulb blows it gets darker........
ARRRRGH.
-Simon, still feeling ill, and thus not wanting to deal with this, and in general not having a good day.
posted by Simon Friday, November 28, 2003
Tortola
Grr. After I got back to the ship havign written my last post somebody told me that there is an Office World a couple of miles out of town, which I could have walked to and which would have had all my practical computing needs.... but it was too late by then. I'll have to find a floppy drive somewhere else. (at present I *could* do some of my work in my cabin rather than hunched over the PM's computer int he control room, but I can't transfer it!)
Just finished reading Lords and Ladies, and decided that it's easily the best Discworld book I've read so far. Also, due to what happened to be on the ship's kids' film channel yesterday, I've realised how similar are the attitudes of Pratchett's witches and Mary Poppins =8-) I like it!
We're in with Ocean Villiage today, so I've just been trying to arrange to meet somebody this afternoon when I finish in port manning by shouting from the promenade deck!!!
posted by Simon Thursday, November 27, 2003
Phillipsberg, St. Maarten
This place is depressing. It sums up all that's bad about Carribean ports.
Everybody was saying to me "St. Maarten is where to go for electronics, they have anything you can want, all at really good prices".
Turns out that it's the same old story that I encountered in Gibralter, Hong Kong, Singapore..... : St. Maarten is cheap if you want to buy what everybody else wants to buy at the moment. So at present that's digital cameras (and I was very tempted by a digital SLR - there are good prices here, basically you change the pounds sign to US$.). But they don't sell anything else.
On the photographic side I wanted a plain, ordinary, 58mm red filter for use with black & white film. The response? If I was lucky I got told they didn't have any, but most places I got "Is that a UV filter or a polarising filter sir?"
On teh computers side, I wanted a USB floppy drive for my laptop. A very simple item. They had DVD-*+_-everythign writers galore, at good prices, but could anybody sell me a plain floppy disk drive? Oh no. Or a USB extension cable? Not unless I also want an 8-port hub.
I think I'll have to buy from the US and pay up to $20 shipping to get it out to Barbados.
Otherwise, well, there are plenty of bars and casinos here. And that's about it. THere are four cruise ships in today and I don't think many days go by without any. THere are a few local supermarkets where I at least managed to buy some biscuits, and there are some big mountains in the background, but that's about it. Even the Rough Guide has just three pages on the dutch half of this island, saying it's basically beaches and duty-free shopping.
On the plus side, there is a cheap internet cafe with special offers for crew.
posted by Simon Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Trivial, uninteresting detail: Since we're staying in one time zone most of the time at present, I've changed the time zone setting on Blogger (the system I use to write this) so that the time stamps (or at least the day, which I think is all that shows) reflects the local time in Barbados rather than GMT. If anyone actually cares about that, I'll be amazed....
posted by Simon Saturday, November 22, 2003
Grenada
A good day. I got woken up early and rather alarmed by being bleeped from the Bridge - the only conceivable reasons for this would be (1) I've forgotten that I should be In-Port-Manning and haven't put my card in; or (2) the theatre's on fire. Turned out it was a wrong number, they were trying to get one of the seamen. So I went back to bed...
I spent this morning feeling productive, which is quite rare at present, and got lots of chores done. THen I managed to get ashore for an hour on the beach (this is the first time I've spent on the beach this contract - three weeks without a beach in the Carribean is a long time, even for me), which was nice. I can't say much about Grenada except that it has a nice beach near the port with very warm water. I didn't have time to explore the town or, of course, the rest of the island (there's a tendancy when cruising to think of these places as just the town that we dock in and forget that there's a sizable island with, in some cases, a population of 100,000 or so on it).
THis evening we were due to sail at 1800 but this got postponed to 2100 in order to land somebody from the medical centre. This would have meant we were departing during a show, with all the associated noise and vibration from the anchor windlasses just above the theatre and the bow thrusters just below, so the Captain kindly decided to wait another 40 mins until we'd finished. Which meant I got rather surprised by being phoned by the Bridge mid-way through the show, asking to be notified when we'd finished. THere's a small sense of power in phoning the Bridge to report this and hearing the thrusters start up about 20 secs later! Anyway, it was nice of them.
We're heading still further south tonight to Trinidad. Which barely qualifies as being in teh Carribean at all.
In other news, our call in Cartegena (I can't remember how to spell it - the place in Columbia) has been cancelled due to some tourists getting kidnapped. We'll be spending the day at sea. Our calls at Princess Cays have also been changed to Catalina Isle. I think somebody in the office realised that if we're going to go to somewhere that has absolutely nothing other than a beach and lots of uninhabited forest, we might as well go somewhere closer to the rest of our cruising ground rather than dashing nearly to the Bahamas and back. Presumably the fuel savings more then outweigh the potential gain from having pax spending their money on an island owned by P&O Princess.
posted by Simon Saturday, November 22, 2003
St. Lucia
Well then... I've just got back, knackered, from a taxi ride about 25mi down the coast to a volcano. Technically it isn't actually a volcano because it only emits gas, but I can't rememeb the correct name for it.
On the way there and back we visited a couple of waterfalls, drove thru a fishing villiage or two, and ate some Cassava bread, which is made from a grated fruit that I've forgotten teh name of.
Chatting to the taxi driver revealed an aspect of tourism's affect on the economy that I hadn't thought of. Unemployment is high in St. Lucia (as in much of the Carrbean, AIUI). But not because there aren't enough jobs. The jobs are there waiting to be filled, but people can make more money by begging for a dollar from cruise ship passengers.....
I could spend more time on this island - much of the interior is protected rainforest in national parks, with mountain bike & hiking trails, etc.
posted by Simon Thursday, November 20, 2003
I just saw the end of Bush's speech while I was getting dressed. I saw him basically saying that the British should like the Americans and be grateful to them because of US actions in 1943-45. All I can say is that if Bush is consistent then he will also be judging current Germans on what their ancestors did in the same time period...
Hmm, I wonder whether Godwin's Law applies to web pages?
posted by Simon Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Fun and games... some readers will be aware that just before coming away I bought a new laptop. I also bought (well, was given) a lock to go with it - the kind that inserts into a small slot in the machine and then opens up jaws to keep itself there.
Well, to be on the safe side I decided to test it in the laptop before actually fastening it to anything. Which is a good thing, because now I have a still-fully-mobile laptop that has a lock hanging out of the back of it. Although the combination is right and the button pushes, the jaws don't retract quite enough to actually come out of the machine.
Umm. Well, I've emailed Targus's technical support to ask (a) can they suggest anything other than applying a hacksaw; (b) if I did apply a hacksaw (there is a large enough gap between computer and lock that I could cut the jaws off without causing damage to the computer), is the 'slot' a seperate compartment or would I then have the severed teeth rattling around inside my computer?
I'll see what they say....
In other news, my MP3 jukebox has died. FOrtunately it will still be in warrenty when I finish this contract, but it means that I'm without music for the next two months.
I do not have a good relationship with my personal electronics at present....
posted by Simon Tuesday, November 18, 2003
St. Kitts
As Carribean towns go, I like this one (even though I can't remember the name of it. It's French.). This is partly because it is actually a real town, with real people living real lives, and not just here for the tourists (at least once you get past the first couple of streets by the terminal, which is fair enough). It's also a weird town architecturally.
This island was British until quite recently (in the 60s, if memory serves), and it has british stone churches and stuff, as well as colonial stone buildings standing next to wooden french-carribean ones.
The atmosphere is laid-back but without being proud of it - many of these ports make a point of "look at us, see how laid back we are! Give us your money!", wheras in St. Kitts this is actually the genuine lifestyle. Which is probably due to the size of the town again.
Looks like there's some really nice countryside, and apparently the largest British fortification int he carribean, to see. Perhaps next time if I have more than a few hours off.
The emailing-out-my-posts thing isn't going to work BTW. Tried to set it up but too much hassle.
posted by Simon Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Today was very mixed. I spent the morning much as I have spent the last few monrnings, having three production managers on board, two of whom are trying to micromanage me (although, to be fair, doing their best to avoid it and not entirely suceeding). THis is very demotivating.
Fortuantely this evenign I got to plot a cabaret which looked better than I expected, so I'm OK at present.
Oh, today we were anchored off Catelina Island, part of the Dominican Republic. From the ship it looked like it had a beach, some palm trees, a couple of huts and lots of rainforest.
posted by Simon Saturday, November 15, 2003
A thought - if anyone would like to have updates emailed to them automatically, I think this is fairly easy to set up. Let me know and I'll give it a try.
posted by Simon Saturday, November 15, 2003
Ocho Rios, Jamaica
Well... this place is a bit of a dump! I think I can best describe it as a laid-back version of Kusadasi. In other words, the town was built entirely for tourists and is full of tat. The big difference is that wheras in Kusadasi if you say 'no' the sellers will follow you, here they're more likely to do a high-five with you and/or offer you weed! Which is at least friendly...
I think Jamaica must have some pretty high unemployment, because unlike most of south-east Asia I don't think the currency is weak enough to make getting US$ out of tourists one bill at a time worthwhile if you could get another job...
Grand Cayman is much the same, in that there was little there. In fact, take my description of Ocho Rios and turn the street vendors into faceless banks, and you won't be far off. There isn't the unemployment, instead there are high prices, but there's still nothign much to do unless you're a diver.
The trouble with cruisign the carribean is that however interesting the islands may be, the places that we visit are the beach resorts. Which are all very much alike. After the last two stops I've just been feeling bored with ports and thinking about not bothering to get off. I always said that when I got to that stage I'd been doing ships for long enough so perhaps, although the cruising area probably contributes, that time has come...
posted by Simon Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Bonaire today, but I've spent the morning relaxing rather than going ashore - we repeat this cruise in a few weeks anyway.
I'm getting annoyed with software companies who assue that you're connected to the internet - I just installed the anti-virus software that came with my laptop and it insists on 'activating' itself before it will work for more than two weeks.
Having been away from windows for two years and not seen how it's developed, XP is quite consistently annoying me now. I seems that MS tried to implement a multi-user system and failed - I tried creating my user as a restricted one and having a seperate Administrator,a nd foudn it was so annoying to work that way that I changed it backj. Still, I'm not worrying to much about mucking the system up as when I'm back home I intend to reformat and start again - at present I'm stuck with Multivision's idea of disk organisation, a single 50Gb FAT32 partition...
posted by Simon Sunday, November 09, 2003
Ahhh.... Barbados
Well, here I am. The flight deserves some description.
When I'd found the right terminal (P&O told me the wrong one) and repacked my baggage (P&O gave me the wrong allowance information), we took off at around 1030. This was perfect. The angle of the sun was such that it reflected off the water giving a crystal-clear outline of the coast. We saw Chichester Harbour layed out below us, followed by Langstone & Portsmouth - at thsi point we were still low enough to see individual ships. THe Isle of Wight, with the Medina river clearly visible as a ribbon of sliver. Then a gap, then Poole harbour - I could see Brownsea with it's lagoon, and all the other islands. Adn in the distance about now, we staerted to see the French coast, followed by the channel islands.
That was amazing, but the remaining 7 hours were over the ocean. ;-)
Fortunately, the Barbados endo f the operation was slick - once I left the airport. The international airport here is currently only half-open while it's being expanded, and as a consequence although the runway can take a 747, the immigration hall can't, leading to me queueing for 45 mins. But once I left teh airport, I was met by a local agency who arranged a taxi for me straight to the dockside. Most impressed. Fortunately it's cloudy today so not too hot. It's humid, but then it's always humid here even on a clear day :-)
it's now 1900 local time, 2300 UK time, and i'm going to bed.
posted by Simon Friday, November 07, 2003
Here we go again.
I had a phone call a few days ago saying "Simon, we've got a problem, can you fly to Barbados next week?"
So my contract dates have changed by a few months, and I start again on Oceana next week. This will involve arriving and lighting a new show that week, which should be fun :-)
Diary updates will be resumed as and when I have anything interesting to say...
posted by Simon Saturday, November 01, 2003