Oceans 2003
The reason I was here in San Diego again in 2003 was to attend the Oceans 2003 conference.
The reason it made sense that I attend this conference was
because I had begun working again on the hydrographic side of the agency.
I find I enjoy the people working in hydrography better than most people
wtih whom I've worked over the years I've been working.
Granted this is a generalization and a statement with some holes in it,
but what does it mean?
Does it mean I fit in here
or are these people my opposites having something I don't and thus intriguing to me?
In one of the opening addresses, Dr. John Orcutt from Scripps Institute for Oceanography
mentioned that Thomas Jefferson while being a president of this country
was also president of the American Philosophical Society
₀which sent him into the dark.₁
This and a lot of other things at the conference were over my head.
The focus seemed to be on the cutting edge of ocean technology.
My field is really information management
and the data we get is whatever we are sent—moreso tried and true run of the mill
rather than experimental or cutting edge–but
I found that I had abundant curiosity and adequate intelligence to get a lot out of the conference.
That said I do find a bias for the cutting edge.
People expect everyone to be fascinated by the new and amazing.
I guess I prefer a faster computer to a slower one,
but I prefer walking to biking, biking to riding in an automobile, the local roads to the interstates, etc.
Enough is new and fast in life already.
I find myself seeing too many things as a blur as it is
without constantly having to jump aside to make room for this ever cutting edge.
While some food was included in our conference package,
we were left to our own devices for most of our meals.
On the second morning I discovered a little stand
across the bayou at the Fashion Valley Transit Station
which served pastries, fruit, juice, coffee, etc.
for a more reasonable price than anywhere on the resort.
Lunches and I guess dinners could have been found reasonably at the Fashion Valley Mall,
but it wasn's until our last day that we found our way over there.
It must have been on one of these occasions
heading across the footbridge from the resort to the transit station for breakfast
that I realized what this “bayou” was I had been walking across all these trips.
The footbridge crossed the San Diego River.
Being used to the rivers east of and including the Mississippi and some in Texas,
I was unprepared for what appears to pass for a river in California.
The nation's water policy was a clear concern by many at the conference.
One influential person (search notes to see who this was?)
was said to have proposed redrawing territory boundaries in the west
in order to base them on watersheds.
He pounded on that drum once too often and was booted out of the position he held.
Perhaps we are now paying the price for not following that advice.
Perhaps the San Diego River trickling past the resort hosting the Oceans 2003 conference
is a cry for attention to this issue.
Unfortunately many of the conference attendees never walked across that footbridge,
and of those who did many failed to realize it was more than just a ditch.
Perhaps that's all it really is.
The conference schedule really kept us quite busy.
I was glad to have the days before and after to do the sightseeing I did not get to do in January.
While I'm sure I could find things to do if I were to have another trip to San Diego,
I am quite satisfied by what I have done on these two trips.
As a part of our conference fee we were allowed to
tour
the SSV Robert C. Seamans,
launched in 2001 for the SEA education program and being the most advanced research vessel under sail.
In addition to this we were treated to a nice evening at SeaWorld.
This time of year the park closes to the public early and opens for groups in the evening.
We were wined and dined and allowed to see the polar and shark exhibits
before watching
the orca whales
do their thing.
I had never seen anything like that.
The only things I remember about my school trip to the sea park
on the gulf coast east of Louisiana somewhere
was that one kid stole a leather whip from the shop there
and that a following day in class a teacher mistook the palm tree
on the shirt I bought at the park for a marijuana plant.
One of the high points for my co-workers,
a couple of the harder working, probably under-paid civil servants,
was stumbling across a Rock Bottom Brewery
in the Gaslamp District our last night together in San Diego.
A number of people in my office are in the
mug club
at Rock Bottom.
Despite my not liking beer (How will I ever fit in?),
I took this opportunity to join the club too.
While I don't get the benefit of a bigger mug for my alcohol,
it seemed the thing to do.
I do get the other benefits of the program.
How this measures up on the scale of the more prolific
supermarket loyalty programs one of my
pet peeves, I have yet to decide.
With a last supper in Old Town at the Cafe Coyote Restaurant, we retired for the night.
By the time I got up the morning, my co-workers were on their way home
and I was on my own again.
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