Recently took a vacation on a cruise ship. I heard mixed reviews from everyone I talked to. Some loved it, some hated it.
I loved it and can't wait to do another one. We got a balcony, and I loved just sitting out on the balcony and watching the ocean. I kept thinking how I wish I had my laptop and could do work this way.
The free food, balcony, and exploring the ports were my favorite parts. I don't drink, or party, so that wasn't part of the fun for me -- but it seemed like most of the other people on the ship were there for that reason.
The only thing that I didn't like were the people on the ship, and I felt bad at how lowly paid the crew were.
>I don't drink, or party, so that wasn't part of the fun for me -- but it seemed like most of the other people on the ship were there for that reason.
>The only thing that I didn't like were the people on the ship,
You were on the wrong ship. Let me guess, Carnival?
Different cruise lines cater to different crowds. To get the best cruise experience, it's important to realize this and select a cruise line that lines up well with your expectations and that you'll fit into well.
Carnival caters to the drunks and partiers. There's a reason that every time you hear about some drunk cruise-goer falling overboard, it's a Carnival ship. You never hear about this with, for instance, Disney Cruises, or Norwegian or Royal Caribbean.
I've only been on one cruise, Norwegian, about 9 years ago. It was pretty fun overall, though I'm not wild about doing it again for various reasons. But I did not see much drinking or partying, even in the casino. The crowd was pretty tame, so I can't say I disliked the people on the ship at all. A lot of them seemed to be Germans actually. The ports of call were fun (it was a Caribbean cruise) for the most part, and there was an interesting event on the ship one day where some artwork was being shown (maybe sold, I forget now), and they showed a video of a short film that was a collaboration between Disney and Salvador Dali which was really interesting to watch. At the time, it was supposedly only recently released IIRC.
The dining experience varies a lot between cruise lines too. Now remember a lot of my information is almost a decade old, but at the time, Norwegian had very open dining rules: basically you could go to the buffets whenever they were open (which were pretty generous hours) and grab free food, and sit anywhere you like. The dining rooms cost more and needed a reservation, but you could do the whole cruise at the buffets for nothing. By contrast, I was told that on Royal Caribbean, there was assigned seating and assigned eating times, so unless you were part of a group, you usually ended up stuck eating with strangers you didn't know. On Norwegian, alcohol was pretty expensive, so I didn't see people drinking much. I was told that on Carnival, alcohol was free or cheap, so that would explain drunkenness on those ships.
Anyway, do your research on cruise lines and their policies and pricing before you go, and look at what kind of crowds they cater to, and also what kind of on-board events they'll have. You're likely to have a much more pleasant experience if you pick carefully.
You can cruise on good ships for less than $100 per day, if you shop carefully and wait for the right opportunity.
The advantage is the combination of extremely plesant, varied work environments, with no distrations from clients, coworkers, or the internet. The ability to sustain concentration lets do something hard in a week that might take you three months at home.
Serious question - is the mobile signal terrible if you're cruising on the Med? My data plan is £2 a day for about 500mb (or something like that) when out of the UK. That would probably suffice, assuming there was enough signal to bother tethering...
(Disclaimer: this is just hearsay) I think that most cruise ships have their own cell towers, with their own roaming agreements. So if you try to connect while you're on-board, you'll be on their network and paying their rates.
Related question: does someone know how expensive is a satellite phone plan? I've seen the terminals are about $1000 a piece and they're hellishly slow but considering this kind of use in a ship or maybe in a distant place, it could be an option if the plan is not terribly expensive.
Depends on location and provider, but I worked on a remote off grid monitoring station. We uploaded about 30 gigs a month over a satellite dish. The price was comparable to cell phone, but the ping was bad. 300 ms or so, occasionally much worse.
Wow! I don't think my ADSL land line would be much better than that. The A is for asymetric, downloading is not too bad. I'm surprised it's not specially expensive. Thank you for the info!
The internet on cruise ships are super slow and very expensive. So I don't know how to programming on the cruise ship would work if you are connecting to a server.
He writes about downloading all necessary docs beforehand. Also, it isn't hard to run servers in virtualbox or containers if you need them.
That leaves slow internet for occasional searches of stack overflow, which is doable.
Way cheaper on a crusie to get all meals included. Try and find a same price per day for a benefit by benefit equal land cruise. They don't exist. You are getting free meals because most people on ships make up for it with buying alcohol and other high margin vacation purchases.
Especially if you live near a big cruise ship port, you can get last minute deals on 7 day cruises for a couple hundred bucks. You have to be flexible, but it can be ridiculously inexpensive.
Cruise ships are slowly being outfitted with high speed spot beam internet access. A friend working on RCCL's Quantum Of The Seas can pull 50-60Mbps off hours.
In my experience, these kinds of connections are QoS'd on a per-port/protocol level, so every client gets an equal amount of bandwidth on that port. If you can get a tunnel or vpn connection going on a less used port you'll generally get far more bandwidth. Being on a non-standard port also helps since the systems are often under provisioned for the size of the NAT table they have to hold.
That's all assuming you can get an open port between a remote server and you, but usually there's at least some way to get a connection on not 80/443.
That said my experience is pretty out of date so it could be different these days. Thinking back, since I figured out that I could tether my motorola v710 for free 10 or so years go, mobile internet has gotten faster and far more reliable, (though a lot more expensive once smart phones made data plans more than an underutilized $5/mo gimmick on feature phones,) I've rarely used public wifi.
Getting good Internet when you visit a town every few days and working offline while at sea is fine once you get used to it.
Maybe that's just because it's how I grew up with networks, doing everything in batch mode. ("Bluewave offline email", for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave )
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416 (~3 yrs ago, 311 comments)