Moonarino

Certainly. As a former IT Pro I'm just of the mind that there were residual issues after the site(s) came back up. And an email address change that I had done on X two days ago had never actually taken. My old email still worked. IT gets more and more intricate and (overly) complex as we move on. To me it's utterly scary.

This. It wasn't exactly "maintenance" (insinuating a planned event), it broke. Starting early yesterday I couldn't get logged in on either X or RCI (they share IT resources). According to one commenter who called, Royal tried to pretend it was an "upgrade" . . . LOL . . . nobody in a 24/7 for-profit business would normally risk doing an IT upgrade on a Friday. Celebrity is reportedly working fine now, via web browser and the app, and I never had to clear any cookies.

RCCL and Celebrity share IT resources. Somebody in the Celebrity thread called this afternoon and was told the site would probably be back up "sometime tomorrow". There are a few different sections in any large corporate IT web. One section or another might work or might just look like it's working. I would not trust doing anything important in the app or anywhere until the whole shebang has been restarted.

Jeez. Okay. Check-in opened up for my November 7 cruise today and of course Celebrity web has been down since early this morning.

My lady and I have sailed on "small" ships (Carnival Destiny, Legend), huge ships (RC Oasis, Allure, Indy OTS) and many between. Smaller ships might offer more destination choices, as opposed to a mega-ship that can only port at certain islands. Tampa only offers smaller/older ships, but I loved the one time we sailed out of there, beautiful departure. Just to mention. One thing I check for early (before booking any ship) is dining options. We love a variety of choices. Smaller ships won't have as many choices. Oasis class has about 25 different food venues (including doughnut shop etc), whereas many smaller ships might only have a third that many. As for shows, the best we've ever seen were on Carnival Triumph ("smaller") and RC Allure (huge). A toss-up. I won't sail on a ship that's more than 20 years old. I've seen too much rust on ships that were 5 years younger than that. When I can see it, I have to wonder about all the places I can't see.

$200 for a self- test? Heck no. If you're asking about brand, BinaxNOW is the most commonly available and recognized, any pharmacy should have it (for $25 or less). Walgreens also has at least one other brand, can't remember the name. That one is a little cheaper per test but there's only one test in the box. The BinaxNOW has two per box. My problem with the BinaxNOW test is the dropper for the solution. The tube is hard plastic and small and you have to be sure to get exactly 6 drops (all of each drop) into a little hole. Maybe another brand is a little easier to use.

No prob, same here, no big deal.

I made my point actually, which is exactly what you wrote there. Quoting myself, "I don't know why they even bother". Edit: I should note that a commenter's post on Page 1 that had the word "stop" in it was deleted. I tried to "like" the post but got an error, refreshed the page and the comment was no longer there. Just sayin'. I can't say for sure who deleted it, but poof, the whole thing disappeared.

And let's just hope they can get the skilled labor & expertise when they need it over an extended schedule. Well-written contracts, let's cross our fingers. . . . plus whatever you lived through (Great Depression, WWII, Great Society, Affluent Society . . . Millennials . . . Gen X, Z, etc). My first education on this subject was in Air Force leadership training, early 80s -- before Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" got shot down by too many over-educated people over-thinking the human psyche.

I'm sure I read last week that Solstice ships won't get it till early next year (maybe Spring), Edge being the first priorities. I could be wrong.

I had a nagging thought in the back of my head about that. Yahoo has gotten its hands into a whole bunch of stuff over the years.

Lol, okay. But AOL still is, and it's almost as old as Compuserve.

Take some of this as a form of protest if nothing else. I don't know why they even bother, and as I noted before it needlessly costs everybody time and money (one way or another).

Yep, US-based unvaxxed cruisers age 5 and older still have to test. https://www.celebritycruises.com/healthy-at-sea/updated-us-travel-requirements

Woah. Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, the former "big three". Tons of early innovation there. I had no idea AltaVista was still around. As for Compuserve, you reminded me that AOL is only the second-oldest email service that's still kicking.

Please view this first part of my response as thoroughly light-hearted (and consider that I'm retirement age myself) but you do know about "phablets", cellphones as big as tablets used to be? My lady's phone has a 6.8" screen with 4k resolution. My chronic carpal-tunnel-like affliction won't allow me to even think about something that big and heavy. My current cell screen is 5.5", with hardware buttons instead of onscreen (so relatively bigger than 5.5" with onscreen buttons). I do also have a 9" tablet with a case that props. But I still much prefer big-screen TV for football and basketball. Sports bar. Indy OTS has a very nice one (Playmakers) just off the Casino. Logging in on my last 3 cruises (Royal and CCL) at peak times would often take minutes, even with always being careful to disconnect from WiFi every time after logging out. Still not optimum per se. This is one thing I hope gets better as part of Starlink (accompanying WiFi/router/switch upgrades etc).

Yeah, let's not go there lol . . . . . although we really should rail nonstop. Looks like BoA (for one) actually wants to go another round.

Yep, it means exactly that.

I once asked for a couple of weeks off -- because (a) one of my subordinates had previously gotten approved for it by somebody else, not me, and (b) because I had been seriously burning out for months and I desperately needed it -- and thought I might get fired just for asking. So I share that older gentleman's disgust. 😉 We also avoid cruising certain times of the year for the same reason you stated, which of course (I presume) will affect age range. For years I have had the "sense" that Celebrity cruisers were older on average, mostly because of X's approach to cruising, the way the cruise line presents itself.

Ooops . . . somebody's "stop" comment was deleted, just when I was gonna "like" it. Oh well . . . . . . . . whoever you are, I for one appreciate the effort.

But what good does it do if you can't prove it's a recent test? I could use a test result from when I had a fever a few days ago (from a sinus infection) and home-tested just to know if I was covid-positive or not (the test was negative) and I'm not sailing till November.

You can snap a photo of a test, taken exactly when (see my above) and from whom? (And was the test actually done correctly or not?) Under current instructions there is pretty much no way to confirm any of that by just snapping a photo of "a" test result. IOW, they might as well just give up on the whole deal.

I think the biggest part of the question is how do we prove the date . . . or the name for that matter. (Whose test result is it? 🙃 ) As for date, it's probably not widely known (or at least thought of) that one can set a cellphone date manually, thus the possibility of fooling pretty much everything and everybody.

If you were cruising in early September 2008 I can only imagine what kind of "tension" you were experiencing. (Or even not cruising.) That was the month when the finance giants started falling like dominoes (although it had all started unraveling a year earlier). Anyway, I saw that happening on TV news feeds in the Olympic Bar on Carnival Triumph, wishing I had good Internet so I could get online and read a whole lot more meat (and real facts) than TV news ever gives out. (I didn't have Internet on that cruise because it was my first, and was learning what I could do without or would sorely miss.) Emails -- this is one reason why I stated my first "skepticism" that a main-pipe upgrade might (again) ignore the chance to upgrade a ship's entire network infrastructure. Regardless of how fast the super-broadband uplink might be, when you have to wait 5 minutes just to get logged on to the ship's wifi, and then 5 minutes just for a first email check, you know something was missed. This has been the case with every advertised major upgrade of Internet "speed" I've experienced so far. It's like hitting a major traffic backup on the on-ramp of a superhighway with 70+ speed limit. Superhighway does nothing at all for us if we can't even get on the highway. But again I'm hopeful that they'll be smart enough that we end-users will actually be able to see the difference this time around, regardless of time of day, or port-day versus sea-day.

1994. 2400 baud dial-up was the state-of-the-art (for anybody anywhere on the public side of things) and the entire "Internet" was barely more than text. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released late that year. Before then I had found a "nice" little Dungeons-type game that was not much more than arrow keys (to navigate in a box) and the space bar. Google was just a pipe dream, if anything at all. We've come a loooooooong long way baby. This also relates to why I can be satisfied with a reliable 20Mb home Internet connection, but I also love seeing progress in communications (to a point), and am still utterly amazed that computers and comm systems can routinely handle billions of data bits per second. And about every 10 years it all gets multiplied by another thousand. @fstuff1, I can relate at least from the sense that I (mostly) just check email to see if anything urgent has come up with family, as we're all getting older and older. But 15-20 years ago, as "the" IT person in the 24/7 business I worked for, before any vacation I always had to repeat several times to several people, "I will NOT be reachable next week!" or whatever. But now (sad to say) you practically can't escape it.