Don's Travel Blog

MacMania11 - Day 2

Arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay a little later than planned but as we weren’t planning on getting up early, it wasn’t a problem.

We’d arranged to go on a planned excursion to view the “Architecture and Old Town” later in the day. In retrospect, the town was so close to the Ship we probably would have been better off just walking off the Ship and looking around. As the tour wasn’t until the afternoon and the weather was still glorious, I did a little bit of sunbathing, a load of washing in the self service launderette (very handy having these on a cruise ship) and some work on my presentations. I’ve completed the outlines and slide sets of all of the sessions, but I need to tweak them by adding animations and transitions.

The organised tour was OK, but not really what I’d hoped for. We did see Architecture and the Old Town, but the tour guides just gave too much information and spent too long at individual sites, rather keeping a brisk pace and seeing more. Ah well! There was some drama when one of the attendees went missing, only to find he’d mistakenly joined another tour group in the same building. Took them a while to figure that out.

With the slow internet connection, it’s impossible to post any images, so for the next few days, I’ll have to stick with text updates. Email is a challenge with the limited speed and the fact I’ve bought a 1000 minute package for $100. I still need to keep on top of membership queries etc., so it’s a matter of logging on to the Wifi in my cabin early morning and later evening. Allowing Apple mail to sync. Logging off. Answering or filing my mail. Logging back on and letting it sync again. If I’m creating a blog post, I write it in TextMate and copy and paste it into the Tumblr web app.

As it was still incredibly hot, we had to call into a bar on the Ship after getting off the bus. Well we had to didn’t we. We even persuaded some friends to join us and as luck would have it, we stumbled into Happy Hour! 

Great!

Two drinks for the price of one - excellent.

So four drinks were duly ordered, expecting to get them for half price. But no, it’s not that simple. It truly was two drinks for the price of one, and eight drinks arrived for the four of us. Oh well. We may visit there again tomorrow.

Left Montevideo at around 6:15pm and went on deck to discover that the winds had picked up. The next two days are at sea and it’s expected to get a bit choppy as we head down to the Falkland Islands, with waves of up to three meters expected. 

Dinner was at 8:00pm as usual and we joined Leo for some good food and conversation. Table seatings are now flexible so you can pretty much sit wherever you want within the group.

The sessions started today, by the way, with the first one given by Randell Schwartz. They start in ernest tomorrow with two full days of sessions. I also managed to say hi to Sal Sagoian from Apple who is giving a full day of sessions on Monday. I’m hoping to attend some of the sessions myself, but I’d really blocked out the next two days to finish off my sessions, but we’ll see.

So that’s the emails for the day done, along with this blog post. Now to login again to upload and I may just do another hour of Keynote manipulation before retiring for the evening.