Today at 1150 we departed the state pier in Buzzards Bay and started our incredible journey. Family and friends turned out by the hundreds to see us off, carrying banners, blowing horns, and cheering as the ship’s whistle blew to announce the beginning of our trip. There was plenty of excitement on deck, as we anxiously awaited the moment when the ship would start moving and we would finally be on our way.
Tonight marks the last night we’ll be in Buzzards Bay for the next six weeks. It’s been pretty quiet on board, not much different from any other night we’ve had so far. The holds were filled with the usual crowd of people and computers - watching movies, playing games, listening to music. There is an air of excitement building among the cadets, especially with the freshmen. In every hold you can hear people discussing their expectations for going out to sea, and experiences they hope to have.
I have set up my SeaWave e-mail account on board the Enterprise, and thought I would test it to make sure I was able to post blog entries with it. It also seemed like a logical time to post a few of the key points that we’ve been continuously reminded of over the past few weeks regarding e-mail. The e-mail system charges by how much data the e-mail account sends AND receives.
This morning at 0900 we had the official Coast Guard-inspected fire & emergency and abandon ship drills. It took about 90 minutes, and appeared to run smoothly, so we now have the official seal of approval to ship out! We have less than 24 hours until we depart, though you might not know it from the atmosphere on board. Everyone is continuing to go about business as usual, and I think it’s a testament to the planning and execution of pre-departure tasks that nobody seems to be feeling rushed or pressed for time.
The past three days we’ve done emergency drills every day. We have practiced fire & emergency and abandon ship drills each day, usually taking a total of about one and a half to two hours. Tomorrow we’ll be doing the official drills required by the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard inspectors will be on board to ensure that we know exactly how to respond to the different emergency situations. Hopefully things go as well tomorrow as they did before the Orientation Mini Cruise, when the Coast Guard didn’t require us to do more than one of the drills since we executed the first one so perfectly.
Today we spent the day loading food onto the ship. We need to load enough food for 590 people for our entire time at sea, so needless to say it’s an immense and time-consuming task. I was told by a fellow cadet that we loaded 134 palettes of food just today. We will be continuing this task over the next couple of days. I discovered the benefit of having watch between 0000 and 0800.
Today has been a very busy day. The morning started at around 7:00 when people started arriving in Harrington Hall to put their bags down and check in. We had a meeting in Admirals’ Hall until about 10:00 reiterating the basic dos and don’ts of the ship. We then broke off into our divisions, and headed over to the ship with our bags. We unpacked throughout the course of the day between other activities, such as lunch, muster, and the evacuation drill we did this afternoon.
As an avid WordPress user, I have come to rely heavily on some of my plugins. Occasionally I’ll browse the WordPress.org plugins section looking for cool ones to try, but usually I stumble across them trying to solve a problem or make my life easier. I’ve come up with a list of the ones that I find the most useful, or that are cool and worth having anyway. Google Analytics: This plugin is crucial to me, perhaps above any of the others I use.
I am no longer using GoDaddy hosting and as such have not maintained this file to account for changes to GoDaddy’s hosting platform. I’ve taken the file down, to avoid any errors resulting from using an out-of-date configuration. I’ve gotten a number of e-mails in response to a comment I made on a post about installing Wordpress on GoDaddy hosting. Given the response I’ve gotten, I thought it was a good idea to provide my PHP.
I’ve been using Azureus for years as my BitTorrent client, but I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with its performance. I often had trouble getting downloads to start (even with no proxies or encryption enabled), and it was hogging system resources it didn’t deserve. It’s become more bloated with each new release, and it got to the point that I didn’t even want to use BitTorrent anymore because my client was frustrating me so much.
