(February 14, 2003) - What do the following phrases all have in common: "Arctic Exposure," "Java Jam 4," "Perl Whirl '03," "Mac Mania 2," and ".NET Nirvana 2"? No idea? Here's a few clues: it lasts a week, always includes a Saturday night…and owes its entire existence to a longtime programmer and computer magazine publisher, Neil Bauman.

Still no idea? The answer is: a "geek cruise." They are all the names of work-vacation cruises for computer programmers and software developers.

Geek Cruises, Bauman's Palo Alto, CA-based company (he's both chief executive of the company and captain of the cruises) is the result of its founder having once spent a lot of time on an Alaskan cruise a few years ago just sitting up on deck reading a book on Perl. Since then his idea of providing programmers with education on board ship has grown into a minor industry.

The current cruise, ".NET Nirvana," sails out of Tampa, Florida, tomorrow morning and sets course thereafter for Grand Cayman, followed by Jamaica, then Mexico. It has a very unusual educator on board, for a .NET cruise: none other than SYS-CON "regular" and Keynote Panelist at Web Services Edge 2003 East, Simon Phipps. What a charming idea: a sailing "Devil's Advocate" - it gives a whole new meaning to the notion of trouble at sea.

Participants are assured of a lively voyage as Phipps - who is chief technology evangelist of Sun Microsystems and a Java advocate par excellence - engages with the .NET developers who have signed up with Geek Cruises for this particular week. We will endeavor to keep you posted, though we are not sure how much connectivity goodman Phipps will enjoy while sailing the ocean blue, so he may not be able to report in himself until the cruise is over. (Assuming, that is, that he's not been thrown overboard by then.)

Bauman is certainly to be congratulated on his imagination for inviting a lion like Simon Phipps to sit down for seven days with the .NET gladiators. His fellow instructors are Francesco Balena, Jason Clark, Brian Noyes, Jeff Prosise, Brent Rector, and Jeffrey Richter. .NET DJ hopes he's not counting on being able to convert any of those to J2EE by next Sunday.