- Pizza party
- Some strong language in this post.
Calm seas again today. I stayed up late last night: I got the urge to do some programming, so I tried to work on a new backup software I'd found on the Internet, but I hard a hard time figuring it out. So I drank a few beers trying different things, referencing the kid's write-up on it, and decided the source code I had was incomplete, like he'd committed it in the middle of rewriting part of it. I noticed he had included a bit of utility code that really should belong in a library, and also had already been done in Java (such as strings, UUIDs, base-64 encoding, hash maps, et cetera) so I tried to rewrite the code in Java and got stumped on how to split it up into separate files, and came to the conclusion that Cassandra (an open-source key-value database) would probably be the best solution, so I put it on hold until I could get an Internet connection - hopefully in Tahiti.
I wake up late and miss breakfast. I spend the morning sitting on the deck and reading. I bring my camera, but don't see anything worth taking pictures of. At lunch, they make two announcements over the intercom:
- Clocks are rolling back another hour tonight
- Pizza party at 1800 in the gymnasium
The officers, passengers, and some of the crewmen all sit together around the ping-pong table, with others on the bench along the wall and a few more in the crew's recreation room. First they're playing music videos on the karaoke machine and then they start singing. In the middle of all the noise, the 2nd engineer hears an alarm (even though there is no panel in the gymnasium and he's furthest from the door), and excuses himself. I assume it's a problem with one of the refrigerated containers, because a few minutes later he comes back and summons the reeferman to come with him.
Harvey picks up the bottle of Jack to inspect the label. "Only in America," he laughs, "would you name a town Lynchburg." I have to explain to him that it's named after a person whose name was Lynch, and not for lynch mobs, despite the town's proximity to Pulaski (birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan).
Table discussion wanders from topic to topic, eventually landing on politics. The captain, it turns out, is a fan of the socialist model, because of its ideals regarding taking care of people. Harvey, the retired banker, takes umbrage, trying to explain to him that socialism leads to idleness (not producing), and that's why so many countries in Europe are facing an economic crisis. The captain makes the mistake of using France as an example of a working socialist system, and now Eric (the Frenchman) jumps in. "No, no. French people are lazy. They do not want to work." They talk about hard work, and Harvey says, "Say what you will about the Americans. They work very hard." "That's why we're number one," I tease him, holding up my forefinger to drive home the point. "Hrmph, " he replies, "well I don't know if I would go that far." I can't help but laugh.
While all the talking and drinking is going on in the gym, the cook hijacks the karaoke machine for 4 or 5 songs - love ballads. The high parts are out of his range, but that doesn't stop him from belting them out. The gym being across the narrow hall from the crew's recreation room, we hear him in all his glory. "Who let the fucking cat on board?" asks the chief engineer as he gets up from his chair, slams the door shut, and opens the window to smoke. "Why don't you go outside to smoke?" asks Eric (not as a suggestion, but a genuine inquiry). His question is soon answered as a light spray blows in. "It's raining," answers the chief engineer, taking a drag off a Marlboro Red, resting his hand outside the window sill so the smoke won't come in. "Well, if you're gonna stand there, " says Eric, rising from his chair, "do you mind?" The chief engineer reaches into his pack and hands him one. "Aren't you running a marathon in Noumea?" I ask. "Yeah, but I screwed myself taking the ship. I cannot run here, so smoking will not make any difference."
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