Hi, welcome and thanks for visiting. Management of water supply, San Diego County’s in particular, is a big interest of mine so a majority of posts are on regional water issues. I also do some surfing photography and videos, and stray into other topics from time to time, including news from San Diego’s Navajo Community (Allied Gardens, Grantville, Del Cerro, San Carlos) where I live.

Ongoing blog features that have evolved include:

• San Diego regional water news roundups posted once or twice weekly.
• Following selected issues such as Indirect potable reuse (under “local issues” on the menu bar)
• Illustrated reports on visits to water facilities, such as the Colorado River Aqueduct and All American Canal inspection trip
• Surfing videos in an irregular series titled “Friday spot check.”

About me, I graduated from UCSD with a BA in English and American Literature, spent 4 years as a cataloger at California Western School of Law Library and began a career in the UCSD Libraries. At first I did serials cataloging, moving into ‘original’ cataloging (more complicated) where one of my assignments was to catalog the serials in the Archive for New Poetry.

Over time I migrated into automation and became the library’s technical services automated systems manager. From the early 80s I participated in a transition from a database management environment of typewriters, card catalogs, punched cards, mainframe computers, and dumb terminals to the internet-enabled PCs utilizing the variety of tools and services of today.

Following the birth of the Web, in ‘93-’94 I developed TPOT (Technical Processing Online Tools), a staff website for the library’s technical services departments, possibly the first in the country (for a library tech services operation). It hasn’t changed much since I departed in 2004, though. I haven’t decided if that speaks to it being a good design or if it’s just not a priority for them any more.

I was also the library’s OCLC telecommunications coordinator and in 1994 administered a beta test of the OCLC Gateway system which enabled access to online databases from a variety of computer and terminal types. For libraries, OCLC was (and still is) a big deal.

Nowadays, when I’m online, along with this blog I have a website list of many local online information resources, use Twitter and Facebook (um, Facebook no more because of their unruly policies and practices), and share videos (mostly surfing) on YouTube.

People ask why “GrokSurf” — it was originally my buddy name for AIM (instant messaging) and I kept that handle. Grok because it implies an intuitive understanding, and Surf creating a double entendre of surfing ocean waves and surfing the web.

Grok comes from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land where he says: