Just like our last visit, after disembarking the ship, we walked along the marina and harbor area of Cabo San Lucas toward Medano Beach. After surviving a 50-minute barrage of salespeople offering fake jewelry, cigars, timeshares, and water taxi rides, we dipped our feet in the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean. Valerie waded in the ocean for a few minutes and then we sat down in a beachside restaurant for a couple margaritas and a basket of chips, salsa, and guacamole. To avoid a 50-minute walk back to the ship, we took a $6 5-minute water taxi back to the marina.

The first day of the cruise is at sea. Since we didn’t have a chance to eat there last cruise, we dined at the French-themed specialty restaurant Le Bistro. Unlike the steakhouse-themed Cagney’s, Le Bistro served a delicious meal for only 2/3 of the cost.

Valerie and I embarked on a cruise to and through the Panama Canal today. Valerie’s parents took the day off from work and drove us to the Port of Los Angeles. Before departing, we ate lunch at the San Pedro Fish Market at the Ports ‘o Call just outside the World Cruise Center. At the SPFM, you choose your the seafood you want to eat from a large fish-market-like selection and then carry it to the kitchen area and have the staff cook it (fried or grilled with cajun spices). For our first dish, we ate grilled whole Mexican Sea Bass that was recommended by a staff member. For the second dish, the chef combined shelled shrimp, scallops, calamari, potatoes, vegetables, and garlic bread into a tasty tray of greasy goodness.

Valerie and I are consolidating our Europe trip updates on her blog.

When Valerie and I booked our flight to Europe last year, we used a British Airways companion pass to get two tickets for the price of one. However, the companion pass is only valid for round-trips. Since we were returning to the US on a Transatlantic cruise, there was no need for a return flight. Not knowing what to do, we just booked a return flight from Paris for as far in the future as BA would allow with the intention of canceling it after the cruise. Fast forward half a year and we’ve decided to use that ticket. Next week, Valerie and I are leaving for a trip to Eastern Europe, Turkey, and France!

Valerie will be describing our travels in her blog at http://valeriechang.net/blog/.

One of the great things about being a software developer is that I get to learn new and relatively useless information all the time.  Today, I learned about emoji or Japanese picture characters.  As far as I can tell, these characters allow users of many Japanese cell phones to text cute pictures like balloons and bowing businessmen to one another with ease and at minimal expense.

One neat fact about emoji is that it falls outside of the basic multilingual plane (BML), which means that it cannot be represented using three or fewer bytes in UTF-8 (a popular character encoding in modern software). Unfortunately, for historical reasons, MySQL’s utf8 character set can only represent characters within the BML.  That means that if you want Japanese cell phone users to be able to store balloon picture characters in your MySQL database, you can’t store that text as utf8 character data.  (Luckily, the folks on the MySQL team recognized this issue and added a new character set [utf8mb4] capable of storing emoji and other characters outside the BML in version 5.5.3.)

If you’re on a Japanese cell phone, here’s a balloon: 

We disembarked the Noordam for the last time in Fort Lauderdale, Florida around 10:00. Since JetBlue rescheduled our flight for 19:00, we had some time to kill. We rented a car from Alamo (via Costco Travel) and drove to Everglades National Park. There are alligators everywhere in the park and they don’t seem to mind humans at all.  While Valerie and I were afraid to approach the gators, we saw other tourists walk right up to them and pick up their tails. On the drive back to the airport, we took a detour through Miami. Despite what CSI may portray, the colors in Miami are not super-saturated. Rather, the city reminds me a lot of the unremarkable urban sprawl of Los Angeles.  After a quick stop by the beach, we headed back to the airport and boarded our flight.  Our roommate Belinda kindly picked us up from the airport when we arrived at SFO.

Being stuck on a ship at sea for 7 days has its advantages. As we go about our daily activities (meals, shows, trivia, mixology class), we’ve met a lot of fun and interesting people from around the world. It will be sad to leave this floating paradise and return to the real world.

As predicted, it was very rocky the last couple days.  The captain changed course to avoid the brunt of the storm, but he could not avoid the 6 meter swells and 50 knot winds.  Also as predicted, Valerie spent most of the last two days in bed to avoid seasickness.  I did the same.

I love sea days. There is nothing to do but eat, sleep, relax, and enjoy the entertainment options available on the ship. But sea days have downsides too. Since we’re stuck on the ship, we naturally get less exercise than if we were wandering around lost in port. Since I’ve been gaining some weight recently, I’ve made it a goal of mine to ascend more than 100 floors (according to the FitBit) during one of the sea days. A quick sanity check of this plan revealed that I get tired after about 25 floors, so I’m not so sure that I will succeed.

The captain is warning us of “more than average weather conditions” due to a low pressure front unrelated to Hurricane Sandy. Valerie says she will probably spend the next two days sleeping to avoid seasickness.