By paul motter
I was on Carnival Dream last weekend and it is my personal favorite Carnival ship yet. In terms of interior décor it is far more subdued than previous Carnival ships, even beautiful in many places.
Interior designer Joe Farcus was aboard to explain his new design concept as conveyed by Carnival Dream. While previous Carnival designs fall into the category of "entertainment décor," Carnival Dream represents what Farcus prefers to call "atmospheric."
Previous Carnival ships have "concept" decorative themes -- often beginning with the actual name of the ship. Carnival Valor, for example, has rooms thematic of famous acts of great bravery. Joe Farcus carried his definition of "concept décor" so far we even invented a name for it, "Farcusian."
Although the name Carnival Dream evokes all kinds of images one could easily exploit in concept décor, Joe chose to go elsewhere for this new ship. He opted for pure design, leaving concept design behind. Aesthetics are now part of the Carnival lexicon, at least where décor is concerned.
And to be honest, "Dreamy" would never have worked for a design concept for this new ship. Carnival Dream is indeed a Fun Ship. I have not been on a ship where the crowd stays up so late and parties so hard in ages, and this was not one of those two-day travel agent trips; this was a full-fared regular cruise out of New York City.
As expected, the entertainment was lively and hip. There was no "string quartet" or "classical guitar and harp duet." The Ocean Plaza has a rockin' band with "chick singer" and a lead guitarist who can cover everyone from Eric Clapton to Edge (guitarist from U2, in case you are wondering). Even the casino has a great bandstand - with a Delta-blues style guitarist doing a Muddy Waters thing. This is the first casino with a stage on a cruise ship, and for casino fans, Dream has one of the biggest I have ever seen.
The food is excellent, too. Especially the free sushi which had people lined up by the dozens. There is also a tasty pasta bar, Mongolian Barbecue, a new burrito bar with southern California-style hand-rolled burritos and an excellent 24-hour pizza place.
We even tried the "Chef's Art" Supper Club and we were not disappointed. My dessert alone would have been enough to feed four people, and no one at the table could finish their steak.
When Bad Things Happen
Starting late last week our parent company, Internet Brands, was subjected to a massive "denial of service" attack which rendered CruiseMates and many other sites unreachable for almost three days.
Even worse, we had also just launched our new message boards - which in itself requires a herculean effort for any web site. Our boards already have well over 1,000,000 posts and hundreds of thousands of readers monthly. Rest assured, however, the two events had nothing to do with each other.
I want to say a word about our parent company, Internet Brands, because you may not know much about them. IB, as we refer to them, began a concerted campaign about three years ago to acquire a number of "content" related web sites, and in the cruise space they selected CruiseMates and Cruisereviews.com.
Altogether, the aptly named Internet Brands now has well over 100 sites purely dedicated to information. That is one of the largest commitments made by any one corporation ever to providing content online - including large newspaper conglomerates like Gannett that own dozens of newspapers and are in the news business. However, Internet Brands is hardly a household name in the style of USA-Today. You can see all of their sites here: www.internetbrands.com
We do not know why Internet Brands was targeted for this attack, but our best guess is that it was a random act. Coincidentally, along with the release of Windows 7 by Microsoft last week came a new bug that makes such massive Denial of Service outages all too easy.
The attack was huge, we are just now learning. And it was particularly frustrating for the staff of CruiseMates coming upon with the launch date of our new message boards. The experience was a bit like having a semi-truck flatten a new brand new Ferrari just as we were admiring it from afar. Ouch.
In any case, thank goodness the worst is over, and we are close to business as usual, including writing this newsletter.
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