Flying There and Being There
We planned and packed. We rose before dawn. We slept as we flew. Suddenly we were in San Diego and I was talking about computers with our Turkish-American immigrant Uber driver.
It turned out he had written a program to places calls for the Uber / San Diego Airport waiting list. After months of trouble-shooting, he got his hardware and software right. He started getting the best possible spot in the Uber ride list. Other drivers noticed. They wanted in. Now he offers his software as a paid service. The other drivers pony up to get the best spots in the Uber ride list for the airport. So we talked about his software for a while but also hardware. I asked questions about his design and I agreed he had implemented the failover correctly. I couldn't validate the load balancing just by his description but I had to say his app performance sounded like he'd done things right. (Also, I made sure he said he had offline backups and he'd tested them.)
Now our Uber driver was getting his main income from his app. His driving had become his side gig. It was very cool. His scheduler could probably expand more. Due to the way scheduling is different in different airports, he would need a server pair per area but still, that would be fun.
He's got an active mirror, a backup, and he's keeping up with the increased load of his customer base. He's doing it all with homegrown equipment. Also, he was a fun driver.
Segway Tour of San Diego
At our hotel, we checked in early. The staff was nice. We wanted to drop our bags and bolt. We didn't have much time in San Diego and Diane wanted to see as much as she could. She had scheduled a full afternoon of tours. First came our segway ride.
Amy was the tour guide. She's a Navy vet who spent most of her military tour in San Diego. She mustered out in the city. Now she proved able to tell us about the history of San Diego, how the harbor was discovered and named twice by different explorers; how the downtown was a scrub-brush desert; and how none of the plants we saw were local. The last part shocked me a little. San Diego looks lush. Every tree and flower was deliberately imported.
Opinion: Balboa Park was the best part of the tour. We entered over the Cabrillo Bridge, a narrow two-lane road that's more friendly to pedestrians than cars. Inside, we got to see how the park hosts museums, theatres, gardens, biking trails, and of course the San Diego Zoo, the most popular zoo in the country. One of the museums, in there is the Comic-Con Museum. (We did not drive into that one on our segways.) Balboa hosts the San Diego Air & Space Museum, Automotive Museum, History Center, a Model Railroad Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the San Diego Natural History Museum. You could spend a week just visiting the park.
A woman named Kate Sessions started the park, at least according to Amy. Sessions gave her plant nursery to the city, then she donated trees and exotic flowers every year. She's responsible for a lot of the plant life in San Diego. In 1915 and in 1935, the park hosted International Expos; some of the park architecture comes out of the preparation efforts of those. Then in World War II, the U.S. Navy took over the park and made it into a training ground and barracks. (They gave it back.) This is an intensely varied and worthwhile place.
Kayaking Tour of La Jolla
We discovered a few hidden factors involved in a kayaking trip in La Jolla in December.
- It's chilly (see: December)
- The previous kayakers complained to our faces about not having wetsuits
- The tour guides all had wet suits
- And we could rent wet suits
So we rented them. More properly dressed than I'd planned, I pushed-launched our two-person kayak into the waves. I had help from Tumas, our guide. Tumas hailed from Toronto, he said, not San Diego. He had gone to school in the U.S. and decided to get his green card so he could settle in the United States.
Diane and I paddled out into the deeps. Tumas promptly steered his kayak to stay in position between us and the shore. Apparently, most of the problems on the tour have come from kayakers straying too near the rocks.
Tumas pointed out leopard sharks beneath us but, to be honest, I only saw a few ripples and flitting, darkish shapes. Instead, I spotted bright orange fish around us. Those were garibaldi. They didn't dart around. They hung out and nibbled on rocks like stoners nibbling on crumbs from the couch, unwilling to move.
We were the only ones moving (except for another ripple that Tumas said was a seal). The main site we wanted to see in at La Jolla was a series of caves below the cliffs along the shore. The sun was already low. We wanted to get into the caves before it got dark. We weren't allowed to bring cameras in the kayak but trust me when I say the caves were, well, okay. Not breath-taking. Not astounding. They're nice if you like weird light and seaweed. And history. During prohibition, gangsters used the caves for smuggling barrels of alcohol, which they brought in on rowboats.
Back outside the caves, we saw a cloud of diving birds. They had formed a hunting flock, which our guide called a 'kettle.' The kettle consisted of cormorants, pelicans, and a few seagulls teaming up to pick off individual fish from a school in the shallows. The cormorants and pelicans seemed to be having success.
Then at my request, we kayaked southward toward a roost of sea lions. We could see thirty of them. Close on the north side, we saw a couple males threatening each other. Males weigh maybe 1200 to 1400 pounds. They are loud and territorial. They establish their positions on the rocks; a few females join; and that's their social order. Trouble starts when a male encroaches on another's territory.
Two of the males were mad. Our guide moved his kayak between them. The biggest sea lion howled. He swam toward Tumas's kayak. He picked up speed for a charge. Then he dove under the water. A minute later, he popped up somewhere else.
"They're pretty cool, aren't they?" said Tumas.
"Yes." That's why I wanted to get close. I wouldn't have gotten between them, though.
"Notice they don't eat the garibaldi?"
"Yeah. Why not?"
"Garibaldi don't poop like other fish. They excrete waste through their skin."
I thought about it for a second and said, "They must taste terrible."
"Yeah!" He smiled at the thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment