Compliments & Critiques – Carnival Cruise Lines

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A few final thoughts that I’ve been kicking around in my head before I put that lovely cruise to bed and reluctantly float back into reality.  I try to be one who both compliments and criticizes when I offer up my critiques of a particular whatever, so here are just a small number of random points where I think Carnival did particularly awesome, and also some where I think that they could stand to improve…

The Good…

Service at Sea
Just like our last cruise, I don’t think we could’ve asked for a better staff while we were out at sea – our room steward was great and I’m still impressed how she remembered our names to greet us each day in the hall, all of the various waitstaff around the dining room were for the most part prompt, friendly, and knowledgeable (we did anytime dining, so it changed every meal), and the entertainment staff was just a riot. Carnival really hires great people to run its ships, and it shows through and through.  😀

Live Comedy
We only made it to two shows, but frankly I wish we could’ve seen a few more because I really like how they’re starting to put more of an emphasis with dedicated comedy clubs and more comedians booked and all of that. Clearly a lot of other guests enjoyed this as well because both shows that we attended were almost completely packed, and as I mentioned in my other post, my only complaint is that I wish the shows we had attended would’ve been just a little bit longer.

Carnival’s Seaside Theater
The Carnival Legend didn’t have one of these, so the big screen was new to us on this cruise and I thought it was a really nice addition to the Lido Deck’s pool area because it gave everyone something else to do while laying about. We ended up watching two movies during the course of our stay – Goldfinger and Spider-Man – and both were a nice way to spend a relaxing evening. And again, my one critique is that if anything, I guess I would’ve liked to see even more shows on the big screen because it felt too often during the day like they just had the Carnival logo up on it half the time…

Maybe one or two more recent movies, too – while it was fun to watch The Avengers on demand in the room, it would’ve been a lot cooler watching Earth’s Greatest Superheroes put to the test poolside!

Room for Improvement…

Touch Screens & Other Interfaces
Specifically the touch screens on the machines in the gym, and also the remote control for our room’s TV – both were pretty terrible! For the touch screens, sometimes they just didn’t work at all and others you had to find the right spot a couple inches to the left of whatever button you wanted to press; and as for the TV remote, you pretty much had to hold your arm three feet in the air at a very specific angle to get the thing to respond – bad for changing channels, and even worse for trying to use the interactive features!

The High Cost of Photography at Sea
We took a lot of photos with the professional photographers that are out in troves during the elegant nights, and an impressive number of them actually turned out pretty nice! But that said, $22 a piece for 8x10s of the elegant night photos is simply ridiculous, and it kind of makes me sad to think that so many of those get thrown away simply because they’re overpriced (we did a tour last cruise and the photo manager cited somewhere between 80-90% of photos taken are trashed).

And the worst thing is, most we wouldn’t have wanted necessarily to hang on the wall or send to Grandma, but they would’ve been nice to post online and share with Facebook friends and whatnot … but Carnival doesn’t have an option like that. Well, they technically do, but you have to first purchase the original print for $22 and then you can get a digital copy for another $10!

We had about 20 photos that we liked, so that would’ve been $640 for 20 photos to post to Facebook … ha!!! 😯

Something like what Disney does at the parks with Photopass would be nice – pay $150 upfront and then get digital copies of everything, or maybe just cheaper per picture options instead. Again, it’s just sad to see all of that hard work and those nice memories go to waste, and yes, if 80-90% of photos are getting tossed, then they’re just not priced correctly.

Lost & Found (Back Home Again)
And lastly, while Carnival’s service was pretty much impeccable the whole time that we were at sea, I’ve got to say that it left something to be desired only hours after we had returned back home again. Fun story – not long after we got back home, I realized that all of our credit cards had disappeared. They had been in my pocket and somewhere between our room and our car, they must’ve fallen out. I first tried calling the bus company that carried us from the terminal to where our car was parked, but after they never answered the phone (not Carnival’s fault), I tried calling Carnival, thinking that maybe somebody could run and check in our room real quick before the boat went back out to sea again…

…and I was told that it would be 2-3 weeks before they could come up with anything! The lady I spoke with on the phone told me that “they were just too busy trying to get the boat back out” and “they couldn’t just stop to look for one person’s credit card,” which for me just reaffirmed what I read from a lot of forum posts online when I looked into their lost & found – Carnival’s customer service on land kinda sucks compared to their service out at sea!

I mean, I get that everybody is scrambling at that time because they literally have to turn over the entire ship in a matter of hours, but still – I wasn’t asking them to scour the ship, but simply have someone check in our room real quick to see if the cards were still on the desk or in the drawer where I thought I’d left them. I figured that someone on land would call a housekeeping manager on the ship, who’d then radio to our room steward to ask if she’d cleaned room 12201 yet and if so, had she found anything. And it wasn’t like I’d forgotten my sunglasses or something – we’d basically lost all of our access to money, and were trying to figure out how we were going to eat for the next couple of days!

But the lady on the phone calmly explained that they didn’t have time, and that their procedure was for the housekeeping staff to bag and catalog anything they’d found and turn it in to the terminal the next time it was in port (a week from then), and then everything would be shipped down to Carnival headquarters in Miami, where they have a lost & found that guests can call in to ask for.

At that point, knowing that I wasn’t even 100% sure that they were on the boat, I finally gave up and explained in less calm words that their procedure didn’t help me in the slightest, and that instead I’d just call my providers to report the cards lost and get new ones issued long before their process could ever have a chance to play out. I guess it was just a little disappointing – to be back on land and then realize that you don’t have people willing to bend over backwards to help you anymore.

Another random comment – when we were working our way to baggage claim after disembarking from the boat, I overheard a Carnival employee tell a guest, “The fun’s over now…” while we were waiting in line, so yeah – in general, Carnival’s service at land could stand to learn a thing or two from its service at sea.  😳

Still a fantastic vacation all in all, though, and I look forward to our next cruise just as soon as we can fit it into our budget and schedules! Not sure if it’ll be another trip on the Carnival Dream or a new ship & itinerary – the wife has already expressed an interest in exploring the other side of the Caribbean next time – but make no mistake about it … we’ll be back! :mrgreen:

Carnival Dream Cruise Photo Fun, 2012 Edition

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So … a bit about the awesome vacation that I just two days ago returned from!

My wife and I took a seven day cruise on the Carnival Dream out of Port Canaveral down to the Western Caribbean (Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Mexico – Pt. 2). It was a bit different than our last cruise of 3 years ago – bigger boat (almost twice as many passengers as the Carnival Legend!), bigger port (though a farther drive for us from Tampa) – but easily just as much fun … I won’t get into playing favorites because both were pretty great trips!

Our Stateroom
…was pretty awesome! We ended up splurging for a room up on the spa deck (#12), which is the highest deck with guest rooms on the ship and also considerably smaller than any of the main areas, so for the most part it was a little bit quieter and secluded. Plus, it was literally right around the corner from the gym & spa, which made it a little easier to actually go on a regular basis! Also, for whatever reason, we kind of had two bathrooms in our room – or at least two showers & sinks, anyways, which made it a lot easier for us both to get ready at the same time!!!

Exercise?!
I still hardly believe it myself, but I actually exercised multiple times throughout the course of this trip!!! It kind of became our morning routine to get up and knock out 30 minutes on the elliptical down in the gym before laying around in the spa and then proceeding to gorge ourselves on food the rest of the day. …but hey, those 330 calories burned still … helped, I’m sure! 😯

Spa!
Albeit a little intimidating for a guy who A) knows nothing about this kind of stuff, and B) is a guy, having access to some of the spa amenities as part of our room package was another nice way to relax away from all of the hustle bustle of the rest of the ship – it’s nice to know a place where there’s typically only half a dozen people present at the same at the same time that you are! 😀

I used the Thalassotherapy Pool (basically a giant hot tub with mineral salts and revitalizing blah blah blah) pretty much every day after my workout, and then worked my way over to the saunas to lay around a little more, though some of the more intense steam rooms were a bit much for me. Unfortunately, we didn’t end up having enough money to do any of the massages or anything – we’d really been looking forward to doing a couple’s massage – but we did do this Mud Room Therapy which involved green mud and covering each other in it and I’ll stop now… 😉

Wine Tasting
Another particularly interesting thing that we did this week was drink – there was a lot of wine consumed by the both of us, but at least we got something at least partially educational out of it by attending a wine tasting & pairing seminar that one of the wine stewards hosted. I think we’ve both been curious about wine for a while, but we never really know what to buy and typically just end up sticking to the one or two kinds that we know for sure that we both like, so this was super interesting to not only get a chance to sample five different types of wine, but also see just how dramatically different wine can taste depending on the foods that you’re eating with it – a simple bite of cheese or fish changed a bitter wine into something much more desirable, which we both found kind of fascinating! It ultimately encouraged us to buy two different bottles in the dining room to have with our meals, plus we had actually brought two bottles with us, so yeah, it’s safe to say that we did a fair amount of drinking on this trip,  but at least this time it was sophisticated drinking… 😉

Martini Tasting
More alcohol! Honestly, neither of us really drink martinis, but this seemed kinda neat anyways and we figured what better way to find out if we like martinis than by drinking eight of them in one sitting?! Our bartender was amazing, as dully noted in the photo below as he pours four different drinks at the same time! They are mini glasses, mind you, and we each had about half of each one, which we figured worked out to about two full-sized drinks a piece, but I myself was still a bit tipsy making my way to the dining room after that! I think my own personal favorites were the Spicy Chipolte, followed by the Sea Blue, which should be numbers 2 & 8 in the picture below…

Bond, James Bond
And what goes better with martinis than a little James Bond?! One of the nights they had a Bond marathon on the 22′ big screen out by the main pool, so after dinner and all of the other festivities I convinced Sara to sit out with me and watch Goldfinger for a little bit. Awesome way to spend an evening, if I do say so myself! :mrgreen:

Funny Peoples
I remember hearing the announcement not too long ago that Carnival had chosen George Lopez as the sort of celebrity sponsor of the new comedy clubs on their ships, so I was pretty curious to see how it all turned out. Apparently there’s sort of a bad stigma that comedians who work the cruise ship circuit get, though I’ve never really noticed any difference in “quality” myself on either of the two cruises that I’ve personally been on.

We only made it to two shows this cruise – their schedule was kind of confusing because when we first heard them boasting about “20 shows this week,” I guess I just assumed that it translated to shows every night, when in fact they did 3 shows a night on select nights at the beginning and end of the cruise, and sadly, the shows that we ended up going to were only 30-40 minutes long. They also did a “Comedy Brunch” that was basically a teaser to get you to come to the full show that night, but even those only featured maybe 5-10 minutes of material during your meal.

I detail this out only because it was actually a lot of fun and I would’ve liked more! Of the two shows that we hit, one was kinda so-so but the other was absolutely hilarious – it was a lot of improv acts with some comedians and some of the entertainment staff, and they just really went all out and it was pretty great. As opposed to my wife wanting to see all of the stage shows just about every night, I think next time I’d make more of an effort to get over to the comedy club because this really was a hidden gem and the place was packed to show it!

Pretty Views
From sunrise to sunset, I think they speak for themselves… 😉

Rest & Relaxation
In summary, I guess you could say that all in all it was a very lazy vacation – lots of laying around, napping, relaxing, very little schedule-following, and generally just a chance to take a break from reality for a while and instead focus a little more time on each other, and also a little dedicated time to really and truly unwind, which frankly has felt long overdue!!! We actually didn’t go on a single shore excursion and really only even got off the boat in two of our four ports of call, and even those were just to wander around and shop for souvenirs for maybe an hour each time. We spent a lot of time laying around on the Serenity Deck (adults only!) and even just a lot of time laying around our stateroom, and it was great. 🙂

Things we didn’t do that we would’ve liked to – I wanted to spend just a little time losing money in the casino, as mentioned above – massage!, we would’ve liked to fit in a dinner at the steak house, oddly enough never quite made it on the water slides right outside our own deck, and even a nice and quiet shore excursion involving a beach, maybe some snorkeling right off said beach would’ve been nice. I definitely wouldn’t want to do too much because I can’t tell you how valuable all of that nothing time was for my sanity in hindsight, but I suppose that just gives us another excuse to go back again!

More Photos Here…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssevener/sets/72157631726966408/

Open Graph + WordPress != Fun Times

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So today I spent pretty much all day setting up a feed from my pumpkin site into its new Facebook page.

It shouldn’t have taken all day – it was really only supposed to take a couple of hours, by my calculations, but apparently Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is a gigantic pain in the ass. Or the new WordPress Facebook plugin is a pain in the ass. I’m honestly still not really sure which…

In the past I’ve always done this by using a Facebook app that uses the site’s RSS feed, but it always seemed inefficient, there was the inevitable lag time from when I posted a new article to when the service actually checked for updates, and I’m not really a huge fan of relying on lots of 3rd party hosted services anyways, so it made sense when I started seeing push to Facebook-style plugins for WordPress popping up that eventually I’d move to using something like that, too. And since pumpkin didn’t even have a page of its own yet, this seemed like a good opportunity to experiment and find the best one to eventually roll out to all of the other sites as well.

Boy, did I not know what I was getting myself into!

Part of my problem was that a few months ago I started experimenting with an Open Graph plugin that simply adds all of the OG tags to your pages – it doesn’t do any actual publishing, but at least it puts the tags out there because otherwise when somebody shares a link to one of your articles on Facebook, the site has to crawl the page to figure out what to show for the title, description, thumbnail image, etc…, and the results of that crawl aren’t always that great. Or at least that was my experience, so I installed that plugin and was more or less happy with the results that I was getting.

Fast forward to today when I needed to figure out the publishing part. My first stop was the official Facebook plugin for WordPress because it was new and shiny and seemed to have some neat features like mentions and messages that other plugins didn’t.

Unfortunately, it also has a couple of ugly bugs that I personally decided I couldn’t work around – namely, it wasn’t selecting the correct image for the post’s thumbnail, it was doubling up the description, also somehow it was including HTML markup in one of the copies of the text in the description. Eventually I learned that apparently I had conflicts from two different plugins both inserting duplicate Open Graph tags into my pages, but even after disabling the first plugin, I was still getting the goofy double results with no end in sight. And it was really bizarre – posts would appear fine if I copy & pasted the link into Facebook, but when I had the plugin post as if I was publishing a new article, I’d get the bad results.

I honestly fought with this for a while and even considered trying to migrate some of the features that I liked from the other plugin into this one, but after probably a good 6 hours I finally decided that enough was enough and I’d need to move on to something else – a pain because I really wanted to use the official plugin, but I still had other writing to do, too! 😯

So next I moved on to a plugin called Simple Facebook Connect, which was just about perfect except for one kinda dumb, little detail – for some reason, the link used to post to Facebook wasn’t the properly formatted permalink, but instead the original WordPress link (i.e. /?p=12345 instead of /blog/post-name/). That bugged me and I found a recent post from the developer citing that he had no plans to change it anytime soon, so I didn’t get too attached and kept looking…

FINALLY I settled on this older plugin called Facebook Page Publish and after some quick testing, I concluded that it not only did it format everything the way that I was looking for, but it also somehow posts them as links rather than as application posts, so they’ve got the little embedded box as if I had actually just copy & pasted links into the page like I first started, which I kinda like. The settings that I’m using look something like this:

I probably should’ve also taken some screenshots along the way to show just how anal I was about getting the formatting just right, and I’m honestly still not 100% satisfied with my results because I read that Facebook likes to tweak Open Graph a lot, so there’s a good chance that my posts could stop working at just about anytime, but at least for right now, it seems to be working ok.  😕

One other tool that I’ll share that helped me a lot to really pinpoint where my problems were – Facebook’s debug tool essentially takes any URL that you feed it and spits back the Open Graph results that it reads off the page, whether through analyzing the page or even just reading the tags from your header directly. I guess this is also supposed to flush out the cache for a given URL, which was a suspect for me at one point when I couldn’t seem to get the post thumbnails even remotely close to being accurate!

Ultimately, big wall of text translates to about 10 hours total fighting with Facebook and WordPress … but who knows, maybe your site will be different and the tags will automatically populate correctly based on your own formatting styles the first time around!!! I hear the official plugin works better if you use featured images in your posts instead of embedded images like I do with this site…

Woof – I don’t even want to think about it anymore. Onward, to something else … anything else! 😯

“If Romney doesn’t win, then I’m moving to Canada!!!”

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I got a kick out of this new promotion that JetBlue is running for the election – basically they’re giving away a free flight in response to those people who complain that if their candidate doesn’t win then they’re leaving the country!

jetBlue Election Protection 2012
http://www.jetblueelectionprotection.com/

I must admit, though, that I was a little disappointed to read the fine print and see that it’s actually a round trip ticket that they’re giving away, not a one-way ticket, just because I think that would really help to sell the joke even better … and you don’t even give them a choice in the matter, either – come 11/7, you just show up on one of these guy’s doorsteps, quote them the ignorant Facebook rant in question, and tell them to collect their things so that you can help them get out of the country as quickly as possible!

You know, if Obama really wanted a bit of last-minute fundraising help, I’d be willing to chip in a few bucks if we could buy everyone who uttered those words one-way tickets to a far-off land. Maybe that’s the hope and change that we really need here in America… 😀

Dream Journal : Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Snakes

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This is one that I actually had while we were on our cruise, but it was pretty distinct so I thought I’d try to recollect it when I got back home…

I’m a pretty big fan of Kris Straub and Scott Kurtz – I read their comics, I loved their PATV show, I pretty much eat up just about anything that the two of them do together. Well, in this dream I must’ve sent Scott a copy of my new book to check out (note: in real life, it isn’t out yet, but maybe soon! 😉 ) because I was watching some random show that they were doing online and at one point the camera panned across his desk and I saw a copy of it sitting there as if he had been reading it, or at the very least he opened the package addressed to him that had contained it! Either way, that was pretty cool.

Fast forward and I guess at some point we must’ve become friends because the next thing I knew we were all hanging out at a party together, and we were having a great time, cracking jokes and playing video games with everyone else, when all of a sudden things started getting weird.

I remember wandering into a side room to find a smaller group of people doing things that they shouldn’t have been doing. The illicit vibe was very similar to what you would expect when you walk in on somebody doing drugs, but instead, we found ourselves facing a handful of guys instead playing with snakes that were slithering around all over the floor. Seriously, Indiana Jones would’ve hated this room, and I guess the three of us did too because we were not at all comfortable about walking in on this group of guys playing with live snakes! Occasionally one of the snakes would bite somebody and everyone would cheer, which just made it all the more disturbing, but when finally pressured to join in and pick one up ourselves, we all said “Hell no!” and immediately became the uncool guys at the party.

My last vision of this dream was being chased out onto the lawn by guys throwing snakes at us, and then I woke up just as the cops pulled in, lights flashing and sirens blaring, presumably to break up this illicit snake ring that we had accidentally stumbled upon.

In retrospect, I guess this one was a little fucked up, but at least we all learned an important lesson – friends don’t let friends do snakes.

A Good Day To Die Hard

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Seriously.

That’s the name of the movie.

The new Die Hard movie.

Because Live Free or Die Hard wasn’t god awful enough.

At this point I honestly think that this franchise is only going to die after Bruce Willis does, which probably won’t be for a while yet. Maybe the guy just really needs the money – what was the last actually good movie he was in?  Maybe if we all chip in a few bucks instead, he’d just let it go and stop torturing us with sequels that will never be able to live up to the amazingness that was Die Hard 3…

</vacation>

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Don’t get me wrong – it’s definitely good to be back on solid ground, in my own house that I just bought two months ago, with a happy puppy and plenty of creative projects to finish out the year on, but I’d be a fool if I still wouldn’t rather be 751 nautical miles away down bobbing around in the tropics somewhere with chefs to prepare my meals and a spa for my relaxing fancy and a full bar to keep me entertained poolside in between!

*sigh*

Pictures will go up in the next couple of days – shouldn’t be too long because I didn’t take nearly as many as before. This was definitely much more of a lay around and relax-kind of vacation than the run around and do lots of stuff-kind, and I think it’s going to be particularly hard to get back into real life come Monday when I have to start doing things for other people once again instead of everybody waiting on me hand and foot as I most certainly enjoyed over the last week… 😉

IT’S FINALLY VACATION TIME!!!

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Well, I may not have lost the weight that I was hoping to lose, and I’ve still got about a brazillion writing stuffs that I had wanted to get done before today, but I really need a break!

Leaving for a 7-day cruise down to somewhere distant and exotic with the wife today – surprisingly not even bringing along a computer this time, so it should be nothing but the open sea, a relaxing atmosphere, and plenty of coconut rum to help recharge the old batteries.

Try to be good, Internet – see you in a week or so! :mrgreen:

Comment Spam for Dummies

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I’m very thankful that Akismet does such an amazing job of blocking comment spam on all of my WordPress sites – I really don’t even have to think about it, but every now and then out of morbid curiosity I’ll skim through one of my spam queues just to see what kind of stuff is getting stopped anyways.

A quick note to whoever runs the Easiest Automatic Blog Commenter – you might want to change the name that your app posts under to something just a little more discrete … maybe! 🙂