San Diego: German for...

Last week I was on a business trip for work. I was attending the annual CSUN Conference, for those of you who don’t know what is, it’s put on by the California State University at Northridge’s Center for Disabilities. There are sessions about cognitive disabilities, making the web accessible for the deaf and blind, and anything you can imagine. I work in web accessibility and have been focusing recently in the social media area of the web. Not too surprisingly social media like facebook, YouTube, and even Blogger (Blogspot) are not accessible and therefore it’s an entire area of the web people with disabilities are unable to navigate through and get information. Now without boring you, it’s surprisingly easy to make websites accessible, but sites like facebook and YouTube are not hurting for customers so they may not see the point in opening up there sites for people with disabilities. YouTube to be fair is working towards it. One thing they are doing is allowing people to add captions to the videos. It was a really great experience and while I did know a lot because our office is on the cutting edge in a lot of areas, I still learned some valuable stuff. If you’d like me to go into more, message me I’d love to tell you.

Now while the reason I was out in San Diego was for work, I did find plenty of time for fun. One thing you should know about San Diego is that the weather is amazing, it was in the 60’s and sunny all week. One bartender told us the coldest it had ever been was 47 degrees at 3am in the winter. Not bad if you ask me.

I was traveling with my friend Casey who also works with me. We arrived on Tuesday morning and went to the hotel, our rooms were not ready so we went out to fine lunch. Our hotel was in the Gaslamp District of downtown San Diego. Our hotel concierge said it was like San Diego’s Georgetown. The only comparison is that they both have a lot of places to eat. We found a Friday’s and got lunch and 3 buckets of beer. We finally were able to get into one room. The hotel was awesome, although Casey’s room didn’t have a bathroom door. And one wall was glass floor to ceiling. (Once I got my room, we realized they all had the glass wall, but the rest seemed to have doors.) We then went to visit the USS Midway, which is an aircraft that has been converted into a museum. This was cool just for the fact we were able to run around an aircraft carrier. That night we went to dinner at Rock Bottom Brewery, so yes our first day in town we ate at two restaurants we could eat at anytime back home.

The next day we ate lunch at a bar that all of you have seen and if not then you should be ashamed of yourself and go out and rent Top Gun. The Great Balls of Fire scene with Goose at the keys and the final scene where Charlie finds Maverick sitting at the bar were filmed there. The name of the place is Kansas City Barbeque. After the conference we went back and changed and asked the doorman if he knew a good Irish bar in the area since we had already seen four different ones. He recommended Dublin Square and I recommend it to all of you. We sat there and drank beers during Happy Hour. They had live music which added to the atmosphere. We were singing along with the songs we knew and the band appreciated it. The lead singer invited us out to his show on Friday in Ocean Beach.

On the third night we really hit the town, since the doorman hooked us up with the Irish restaurant, we asked him about a good Mexican restaurant. He failed us, the restaurant el Puerto was good, but it was Americanized and not what I was looking for when I asked about Mexican food. Afterwards we walked around and went to one of the other Irish bars, Maloney’s. This bar was in the basement and was set up a lot like the bar in Cheers. We spend some time talking to the bartender here and he told us if we waited around we could sample some 12 year Scotch’s, so we did. After Maloney’s we worked our way back towards the hotel and stopped at Double Deuce, the country bar. The Double Deuce had a mechanical bull. I’ve always wanted to ride one so Casey gave me 5 bucks and I rode the bull. (See the video below.) Afterwards I realized why the sign said not to ride if you are intoxicated. It was rough afterwards. If you can imagine doing pull-ups with one arm while someone is pulling on you the whole time and shaking you around. This is the closest thing I could think of, it was awesome and I’d do it again.

Friday the week was catching up to me, I woke up and my body was aching, stupid bull. Not much happened this day except we did get to watch the USS Nimitz and some of the ships that were deployed with it return to San Diego. The Nimitz battle group had been deployed for 8 months. Seeing these ships returned made me Proud to be an American, I’m thankful for what those men and women do in there sacrifice for this country. That night we took it easy and went to Anthony’s Fish Grotto for dinner with co-workers. Our flight left at 6:45 am so we went back and crashed after walking around town for a bit. You could certainly tell the Navy boys were home. It kind of felt like Newport News back in the day with the Navy boys from Norfolk.

I do have to recommend San Diego as a place to visit if you get a chance, there was so much more for us to see, so I know I’ll be returning again, but it is good to be back in the Commonwealth.