Where in the world am I today?: At Sea off the Coast of South America aboard the GRAND Princess.
OK… I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a tech junky… I’m a big fan of gadgets that actually do make my life better and easier. One such gadget that I had more or less taken for granted recently were the two little USB Flash Drives that I normally carry with me when I travel. I find these little drives fantastic for quickly transferring files between computers and in this digital age the ability to just throw what you want onto one of these sticks, hand it to a friend and have them grab it is awesome. This ability to transfer information is also great when getting files to the tech crews on the cruise ships. I handed one to the lighting designer on the GRAND when I was here about ten months ago with a picture on it and they turned it into a PowerPoint Slide. One file needed to be transferred, I threw it on the stick, handed it to the lighting designer and with in a couple of minutes the image was on the slide and being projected into the theatre advertising my showtimes. Fantastic! Not only that, but they threw the PowerPoint presentation back onto the stick so I could have it when I worked on other ships. Fantastic x 2!
This time around when I joined the GRAND I decided to take a stab at redesigning the slide that gets projected in the theatre before the show… Took one of my favourite images, took the sort of look and feel of the Marquee images and postcards that I’ve got and did up a new version of the slide that was more in keeping with the look and feel of the rest of my promotional materials. Got everything as I wanted it, went to the spot that I normally keep my flash drives and discovered that both the drives I normally carry had been left behind. Doh!
One I was aware of leaving behind because I used it to transfer files for a Holiday Greeting Card that I”m getting printed from my computer to the print shop that’s doing the printing. The other I realized after I had gotten to the ship was sitting on my desk at home because I’d been using it to transfer files between the computer I travel with and the family computer at home. Grrrrrrr…
Not the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination and I did end up finding an alternative way to transfer the information and get it to the lighting designer, but it was just one of those little tech toys that I didn’t realized I relied on so much until I found myself with out one.
On a separate technical note… The internet connection aboard the GRAND Princess is likely the slowest I’ve experienced in recent memory… As a result, it may be a day or two before I add the regular hyper-links to the body of some of the posts that I’ll be posting – just can’t stand the pain of trying to do very much at this connection speed… Grrrrrr again!
(Side Note – Got to Dominca and tapped into a decent connection here… Links are now part of the fold again…)
