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MSC Magnifica’s smashing visit
Friday 5 March 2010
ALTHOUGH the visit of MSC Cruises latest vessel MSC Magnifica to Southampton was not graced with the presence of the ship’s godmother, Sophia Loren, who will officially name the ship in Hamburg, guests on board did have the privilege of listening to renowned British actor Sir Christopher Lee.
He was on board the vessel as a special representative of United Nations children’s organisation Unicef. Sir Christopher’s unmistakeable voice outlined how funds raised from passenger donations would be used for education projects in Brazil.
MSC has formed a partnership with Unicef, raising money from small voluntary donations of £1 or €1 from passengers on its cruiseships. Since the Get on Board for Children initiative was launched in July 2009, MSC passengers have donated over €230,000 ($314,630).
Ship naming ceremonies are traditionally marked by breaking a bottle of champagne over the ship’s bow, and occasional failure of the bottle to break is a well-known hazard at such events. MSC Magnifica ’s inaugural visit to Southampton suffered the opposite problem.
Although there was no naming ceremony or champagne bottle, the Port of Southampton marked the occasion by port director Doug Morrison presenting the ship’s master with a decanter and a bottle of vintage Scotch whisky. Unfortunately, during the presentation the decanter slipped out of their grasp and smashed on the deck, though the whisky bottle and its contents remained, thankfully, intact.
Sports bar proves a big hit
AMONG the innovations incorporated on board MSC Magnifica compared with its earlier sisterships is the inclusion of a sports bar, called L’Olimpiade, replacing a wine bar on the other vessels. This feature was added in response to a large number of requests from (mostly male) passengers for somewhere on board where they could watch football matches and other sports. During the ship’s visit to Southampton, it was popular among Italian and British guests watching the Italy versus Scotland rugby international.
The sports bar also includes pool tables. This poses obvious potential difficulties when the ship is sailing in other than perfectly smooth waters. The solution adopted is to apply stabilisers to the tables so that they will remain firmly in position despite the ship’s motion.
Reliable anti-spam solution
ALL companies face the challenge of dealing with spam email.
No software system can offer a perfect solution that avoids genuine email being discarded as spam or letting through some spam messages. Shipmanagement software and IT specialist SpecTec, which interestingly outsources some of its own IT services, has come up with a novel, but simple solution. It has contracted a Ukraine company to check manually incoming email flagged by software as spam and then identify and put genuine messages back into the main system.
This was proving more reliable and cost effective than any available software, said chief information officer Paul Ashton. Who says there is no place for the human touch in IT?
