And that was my first Slashdot comment ever; please pretend there are paragraph breaks present.

Welcome to the club! I'm a Spring 07 alum, and probably the biggest geek onboard during my voyage. Although all the ideas presented here are interesting, you want to be realistic: Satellite internet coverage is expensive, and using your phone as a internet device can rack up global charges very quickly. (I work for a cell phone company and you have no idea how many times I run into bills with thousands of global charges) If you're a true addict like me, you can purchase more internet time through the purser's desk on the ship. It is EXTREMELY expensive ($250 for 400 minutes I believe) and slow as hell. The only time you get a decent speed is when everyone is sleeping (and not hogging the bandwidth), making even VOIP possible. I accrued $2500 in internet charges on my AmEx that took me a few months to pay back. (I have an excellent job that pays my tuition, so it wasn't a huge deal for me) The other real option, that everyone will be doing, is to visit internet cafes in port during your downtime. There isn't a whole lot of downtime when you're exploring a foreign country on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but when there is (ex. immediately after a field excursion, waiting to depart from an hotel/airport, recovering from a big lunch, etc), internet cafes around the world are very inexpensive. Just be careful of all the malware/keyloggers that could be on there - bring along a USB drive with a secure brower or a bootable OS CD if you'll be doing anything important (like checking your bank statement). Check out my voyage blog http://www.alexsong.com/sasblog/