
Why Cruise Ships Are My Favorite Remote Work Location (2013) - syncopatience
http://tynan.com/cruisework
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okket
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416)
(~3 yrs ago, 311 comments)

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legohead
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.

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Grishnakh
>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.

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dTal
Blimey, how rich are all of you? If I scraped together enough money for a
cruise I sure wouldn't want to waste the experience working.

~~~
danielvf
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.

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iamben
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...

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narag
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.

~~~
Cerium
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.

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narag
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!

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samfisher83
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.

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mixmastamyk
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.

~~~
mrob
If you don't mind slightly outdated data, you can download and browse all the
Stack Exchange sites offline:

[http://stackapps.com/questions/3610/stackdump-an-offline-
bro...](http://stackapps.com/questions/3610/stackdump-an-offline-browser-for-
stackexchange-sites)

[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

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zeristor
I keep thinking about that article, working on a cruise ship. Here's a search
of his blog about cruises, it looks like he stopped two years ago[༆]

[༆] - [http://tynan.com/?search=cruise](http://tynan.com/?search=cruise)

~~~
alanfalcon
He had a Syndey -> Seattle cruise in the works as of his post two months ago,
so I'd wager he's still at it.

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kinkdr
Why not an all inclusive hotel/resort? Same benefits + reasonable Internet.

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andrewfromx
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.

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kinkdr
I see. I have always associated cruises with expensive, but it looks like this
is not the case anymore.

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nameless912
Yeah, cruises can be dirt-cheap these days.

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.

And note, that's food included.

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jkot
This was discussed in DN community a lot. Cruise ships are useless for slow
internet.

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toomuchtodo
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.

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jkot
Shared among hundreds of people... Not really reliable connection.

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Tiksi
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.

