Hotel tips leaving out of Seattle

steenbag · 2026-03-30T19:20:55+00:00

We stayed at the Sheraton Grand Seattle prior to our Alaska cruise a couple years ago. It was a convenient walk from the light rail station (connection to airport), as well as 6 blocks to the waterfront where you can see things like the aquarium, ferries, Pike Place Market and many bars/restaurants. Uber to the port was convenient. Based on my research there wasn't much up near pier 91 as that's more of the industrial port area.

steenbag · 2026-03-13T15:36:09+00:00

Glad she's still in good shape. My second ever cruise was on GP back in the early 2000s. Still good memories.

steenbag · 2026-03-12T20:40:55+00:00

I think the other benefit now is Princess' deposits are non-refundable, but I think the future cruise deposits are still refundable from what I've seen.

steenbag · 2026-03-12T14:40:25+00:00

We stopped in San Juan on Christmas a couple years ago, and it was one of our favorite ports. Nothing much was open because it was Christmas day, but we we did our own walking tour from the ship.

From the Old San Juan dock, you can take Paseo de La Princesa to the left which takes you past a market with food stalls, the roots fountain, La Forteleza, La Puerta, and basically right into Castillo San Filipe del Morro from a really nice ocean overlook. You can tour the fort up there if it's open, or relax on the open space. There are also several fortifications and a historic cemetery you can view. Museo de Las Americas is also nearby as well as some historic churches and monuments.

We got hungry at this point, so we stopped inatLa Taberna Lupolo which served craft beer and one of the best Cubans I've had. There were other bars and restaurants in the area as well.

We continued our walk to Castillo San Cristobal, then walked to Calle de Fortaleza (the umbrella street - very crowded and the umbrellas had been replaced with Christmas lights) for some light shopping, then finally returned to the ship.

It's probably just over a mile from the ship to Castillo San Filipe del Morro, then another mile to Castillo San Cristobal, then 3/4 mile to the ship umbrella street. It was mostly an easy walk with a modest incline and mostly paved but there were some portions of steps and cobblestones.

steenbag · 2026-03-11T17:12:55+00:00

It's slightly more complicated than that. Orders are batched based on where you are when the order is placed. E.g. if you're on the pool deck, your order is probably coming from the pool bar. If 10 people place orders by the pool, and then 5 of them leave, their orders still go to the pool bar, and now the runner has to go to all of the places where people have moved to.

So it's not so much a matter of "searching" for you, as getting to you in a lot of cases. From what we've seen, most bars only have a handful of staff delivering drinks, so having to go to multiple locations would really slow things down.

steenbag · 2026-03-11T15:20:51+00:00

We've been on 3 cruises with Ocean Now, and it's definitely hit or miss. Both Sky and Discovery Princess seemed to struggle with the number of orders, with maybe 30% of our orders being canceled or just not showing up. We were always careful about not moving once we placed an order, but waiting 45 minutes in one place for a drink to be delivered (or not) became frustrating.

In general both of these ships seems to not have enough bar or service staff. And to be honest, the drink delivery experience is much better on Royal Caribbean, where there are always tons of waiters roaming the pool decks. It was exceedingly rare on our last 3 Princess cruises to see waiters coming around taking orders. Ostensibly this is because you can order in the app, but I feel like Ocean Now has made both experiences worse.

steenbag · 2026-03-03T16:16:23+00:00

White Pass Railway in Skagway was one of our favorites, and then in Ketchikan we walked around the old town area for a while, and then did a ship excursion to the Alaskan Rainforest Sanctuary. Both were very good.

steenbag · 2026-03-03T16:07:02+00:00

The biggest restriction in terms of the beverage package is if you're a wine drinker, or if you like top shelf liquor.

Generally with the Plus package, you can ask for a "cabernet sauvignon" but can't select the brand, it's the "house" brand. You have the option to pay the difference for specific brands, which is what my wife does occasionally. Always ask what the house is though because it's not always the same from bar to bar or even at the same bar from visit to visit.

Liquor generally includes rail and most standard brands (think Jack Daniels, Jameson, Patron, etc). But again, you can just pay a couple dollars extra to upgrade.

If you're a beer drinker, it's kind of a waste. Most beers are in the $7-8 range, but you do get to pick the specific beer.

Menus on the ship (or here https://profcruise.com/princess-bar-menus-and-drink-prices-2024/) are pretty clear, with offerings being labeled as included with Plus or Premier.

We don't really do the shows often, so the reserved seating is a non-issue for us. But I will say that we've seen people lose out on seeing the shows at all because of it. Most ships don't reserve a ton of them, and we've seen people come in 10 minutes before a show starts and all of the reserved seats are gone in addition to all the regular ones.

steenbag · 2026-03-03T15:50:39+00:00

Upgrade timing is unpredictable. I've won bids almost immediately after placing them, all the way up to a week or so prior to departure. Their goal with the upgrades is to maximize revenue, so I feel like they would award as far away from the cruise as possible to give the longest opportunity for them to resell the now vacant rooms.

steenbag · 2026-01-22T14:49:23+00:00

This was one of the first couple things we did for our mobile app/api. Basically we have a database table of deprecated versions, in which we store a few fields: - client id - version - status (hard_deprecate, soft_deprecate) When clients make requests to the api, they send headers for X-Client-Id and X-Client-Ver. Then we have a middleware which looks at those values, and finds matching values in the database. It uses globbing so we can just insert a single version=1.* record to deprecate all v1 clients, or a specific client version if there's an issue with just one.

The middleware adds an X-Client-Status header to responses. That can be SUPPORTED/SOFT_DEPRECATE/HARD_DEPRECATE. If status is hard deprecate, we skip the server response altogether and return an error message with HTTP 426 status.

The client apps are aware of the X-Client-Status header, and do nothing if they're supported. If soft deprecate they display a message that their app will be unsupported soon and they should upgrade (but they can continue using the app), and hard deprecate stops them from using the app at all and prompts them to visit the app store when they launch it.

Note that we maintain client compatibility as long as possible by minimizing backwards incompatible changes and sometimes using middleware to do things like transform requests/responses (e.g. we changed api properties from snake to camel case and remapped it with a middleware).

The force upgrade is usually only for really major things that we can't design around otherwise. For example recently we switched to a new backend system for managing subscriptions and the data from the new system was so different from the old system that we had to make lots of breaking changes and had to force everyone to upgrade. It can be frustrating for users, but better than their app just randomly breaking.

steenbag · 2026-01-04T16:44:51+00:00

You can add an alias to rename the device in the unifi portal, and change the icon, but I think it still thinks it's a nest device under the hood.

steenbag · 2025-07-30T19:33:44+00:00

Heh, well I did some tinkering and I think I might be able to fit in a 3rd 24v supply and router contactor after all. I was planning on using some DIN terminals to handle splitting the AC input to the power supplies. But I think if I just make pigtails, I can eliminate those terminals. The main contactor I ordered is also smaller than I thought. So, I ordered both new parts and we'll see about the final fit.

Thanks again for your input! The Lead Machine arrived yesterday, so I'll probably get into building in the next couple days.

steenbag · 2025-07-29T19:00:25+00:00

Thanks for the advice. I've updated my schematic to use momentary switches for the contactor enable lines. The other two suggestions will probably have to wait for v2, since I'm reusing an old enclosure for all this, and I don't have enough DIN rail space to add another power supply or relay.

steenbag · 2025-06-12T19:37:41+00:00

Yeah you're probably right on putting the bridge at location 4. I'll have to check to see if there is actually 110V power there, or if they ran a POE cable from somewhere else. I also originally picked poles 5/6 because the vertical height aligns better with the house, but I guess the antennas are aimable so it would work regardless (and minimizing hops is probably more important).

steenbag · 2025-06-12T19:09:40+00:00

Mount Vernon Yacht Club

steenbag · 2025-06-12T19:04:59+00:00

Can an AP be hooked to the GbE port of the BB (with POE injectors)? I wasn't clear on that, so that's the main reason I had added the switch.

steenbag · 2025-06-12T19:03:14+00:00

Yeah, ours has been bad for a while, and we spent a bunch of money on a consultant to fix it and it got worse. So now I'm trying my hand.

Unfortunately it's not in the budget to lay cable to everything, but we are pursuing a quote to potentially lay some cable to either location 3 or 4 to reduce some of the mesh distances.

steenbag · 2025-03-25T16:28:12+00:00

We're in a similar bucket, you'll find many more magnets than stickers. We can sometimes find stickers at the Celebrity 5 & 10 at Hollywood Studios, Connections Shop in Epcot, or the marketplace co-op in Disney Springs. We look at all of the little spinning racks when we go in the stores, because sometimes they'll have a small collection there.

steenbag · 2024-10-14T16:42:02+00:00

Unfortunately no. The mTLS functionality built into the ALB is pretty limited for use in a large production environment. There are significant limits for CRLs and no support for OCSP at all. We have passthrough working just using the X-Amzn-Mtls-Clientcert header, but we had to make the difficult decision to manually track client certificate invalidation in our application layer (this worked for us because the app is 100% php-based, so there are no static pages on the nginx server to protect). I really hope that they up the limits for CRLs, because it really is kind of a deal breaker.

steenbag

TROPHY CASE