Because semi-arid San Diego County (as a whole) needs to import some 80% of its water from hundreds of miles away via a complex delivery infrastructure of aqueducts and pipelines with significant energy, environmental, financial, and legal implications, water issues have become a growing interest of mine and a majority of this blog is devoted to news and stories on regional water issues.

Some features on this blog include:

• San Diego Regional Water News Roundups (headlines from news media with contextual briefs) posted usually on a weekly basis.
• Reports on San Diego Public Utilities Department (water and wastewater) activities informed largely by attending meetings of the City’s Independent Rates Oversight Committee, attending (or viewing on their web stream) City Council meetings, and attending relevant meetings of the City Council’s Natural Resources and Culture Committee.
• Occasional reports and stories on San Diego County Water Authority activities and its 24 member water agencies through attendance at board and committee meetings and participating in private and public guided tours of water and wastewater facilities.
• Shooting and editing surfing videos in a very irregular series titled “Friday spot check.”

The Topical Guide on the menu bar under the GrokSurf’s San Diego title banner contains a thematic arrangement of some of the reports and stories I’ve written.

It may seem unusual that I’m focused in this direction because 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 then moved to the UCSD Libraries. Initially I did serials cataloging, and completed a project to catalog a backlog of serials in the Archive for New Poetry.

In the late 1980s I migrated into library automation activities and eventually became the Technical Services Automated Systems Manager. That migration involved participating in a transition from a manual environment of typewriters and card catalogs to internet-based technology managing a variety of online databases and services.

During 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, which was cited in the 1997 Neal-Schuman Directory of Library Technical Services Home Pages as “one of the finest, if not the finest Cataloging Department site around.”

I was also the library’s OCLC telecommunications coordinator and 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.

Now that I’m retired, when I’m online, along with managing this GrokSurf water blog I have a website that lists many online information resources that I use (and may be of interest to you), use Twitter to share information on local water issues and other topics. I shoot, edit, and share videos (mostly surfing) on YouTube. I no longer use Facebook because I dislike their privacy practices among other reasons.

I created and manage the websites for Navajo Community Planners and Del Cerro Action Council.

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: