I apparently live in the only part of California I can stand, since I don't like heat.  The Bay Area is relatively cool, the rest of California is hot.  San Diego is doubly so.  Everyone needs hats, the bigger the brim the better.  Sunscreen and a water bottle are a must.  

San Diego Zoo vs Safari Park

With limited time and some free coupons in hand we hit the Safari park instead of the zoo, which is out in a part of the Gobi desert known as "Escondido".  It's very hot and sunny there, hydrate often, bring your big hat and your walking shoes.  Free coupons won't get you much except the basic tram tour, and the wait (in the blazing sun and heat) is over an hour for it since it's free.

There are plenty of animals but they're very spread out.  You'll do more walking than animal appreciation unless you drop $300-$400 on the special safari tour where you go in a bus out into the special no-pedestrian-access area and feed giraffes leaves from within your safari jeep.    If you have that kind of money, go for it, it sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Legoland

Legoland is not owned by the Lego corporation, it's owned by Merlin Entertainment.  It's actually quite a fun park for little kids.  You won't find any adult thrill rides here, everyting has been scaled down in perceived risk for kids of the 3-13 age group.  If your kid doesn't like Legos, the park is about half as big, since there's a lot of Lego-focused activities.  There's the test, build and race room, where you build a racer out of Legos and run it against the other kids.  There's also many places where you play with Legos or look at enormous models of Legos.  

Go on a weekday and if you're clever, spend the morning in the pool and arrive at Legoland at 2pm.  It's open until 8pm and you'll get only the coolest parts of the day there.  

There's a special deal where you can add a second day to your Legoland ticket for $10 per person.  That's a really good deal, go back for a second day from 2pm 8pm.

Do I need to explain that even though the park closes at 8pm, the store at the entrance stays open a very long time after closing?  

The pool / the place to stay

I don't really know how anyone survives a vacation in July and August in San Diego without access to a pool.  I spent many an hour floating in the one at our "resort", the Carslbad Seapointe Resort.  

Speaking of which, this is an entirely satisfactory place to stay.  We waited too long to make plans and all that was available was this place near Legoland.  We got an apartment with a full kitchen, a separate bedroom, and a couch bed for the kids.  We made almost all our meals and that recouped some of the cost of the room over what we would have paid for a cheaper place without a kitchen and eating out all the time.

1. Negotiate with a landlord over subtleties of our lease, and then
2. Work out an HR issue with an employee and outside HR counsel, and then
3. Hold our telecomm vendor's feet to the fire for an outage and get credit, and then
4. Negotiate a payment plan with a vendor whose bill had grown too large to pay in one payment without cutting off service.

Operations makes all your trains run on time so the rest of your company can focus on your mission, and it's contribution to a company's success is often understated.  However when it goes bad, it can be a disaster.  You would be very lucky to have my colleague Matt run your operations for you.  

If you have a small company in the 20-80 person range, you need someone with experience like Matt.  Please drop me a note and I'll put you in touch.

I'm happy to have had some small role in the fact that your free speech online is guaranteed and protected by the First Amendment.

Over the last few years I've played the most at  Bay 101 (about an hour away) and Lucky Chances (20 minutes away).  The limit games in these rooms are run entirely differently.  Bay 101 $6/$12 games tend to be tables full of mostly strangers.  There is no jackpot there and therefore, a lower rake.

Lucky Chances is more like a dormitory disguised as a card room.  All the dealers and players are very chummy, there's a bad beat jackpot that regularly runs between $75,000 and $125,000 and is awarded every couple of months, or more.  And the rake is awful.  $3 rake and $1 for jackpot.  There's another $1 that eventually comes out of the pot (at like a $20 pot).

The dynamic of these cardrooms plays differently.  The limit games at Lucky Chances for the most part aren't good, money-sloshing games full of tilty players.  Here's why:

Implicit collusion: Most of the players in the 4 or 5 running 6/12 tables know each other.  They don't try to play that hard against each other, and they often agree to check down hands to minimize variance.  If you sit at a table long enough, people get bad beats, go on tilt, and then spew money.  This is what you're waiting for.  But if the guy with the pocket aces checks it down against his friend, he doesn't get the aces broken by some joker who calls him with 7-3, and he doesn't go on tilt.

Because the dealers, management, and players spend so many hours with each other and because the players are tipping the dealers and floor, these practices will never end.

Of course the guy with Aces doesn't make as much money, but exploiting premium hands for value isn't the point, because of the...

Bad Beat Jackpot: I cannot even count the number of times I've carefully architected my river play to get an extra river bet and had someone turn to me and say, "what are you doing, trying to make money?  You know we're all just sitting here waiting for the jackpot."  

The goal of many of these players is to sit here as long as possible, putting in as many hours as they can waiting for the jackpot.  They often all play like nits, trying to lose the minimum every hand, and not trying to extract maximum value.  Lots of hands get folded around and then chopped, which is partly because they're friendly, and also because of...

The awful rake: $4 and $5 drops when you count up the house rake and the jackpot rake.  Ugh.

The end result of all these factors is games in which people just sit, fold a lot of hands, don't re-raise very much, and check it to the end.  They sit for hours nursing their stacks.  

Since the games at Bay 101 are better but it's too far to go on a regular basis, I think I'm going to switch to no limit for a bit and stay at Lucky Chances.  The tilt and spew factor is probably better at Lucky Chances at no limit, and my no limit game isn't too bad.

(This isn't a new year's resolution or anything, I just like being alone.  It is probably decent exercise, though.)

When I realized this habit had come upon me, I desired to gather some data (of course).  I know myself well enough to know I couldn't be too involved in futzing with a new device, and I really didn't need a new one.  I have a Samsung Captivate phone ($60!  I rule the frugal!)  that runs Droid and I don't need yet another device.

I was interested in the ability to track my walks, and upload and tabulate everything.  When I read that some of these devices also tracked sleep, I was more interested.  I'm often a very light sleeper and am interested in improving my sleep at this point in my life.

The FitBit seemed to get good reviews for tracking sleep, but I wasn't hearing from actual users.   I asked on Facebook and the wife of a friend gave me a personal review of her FitBit, and how it's recorded her sleep data very poorly.  I confirmed this with several people on the FitBit forums.  There seems to be some class of people for whom that feature is not working well.  (It seems to be a great exercise tracker though.)

Since I really didn't want to spend $100+ anyway (that's another show stopper) I started looking at the app store.  I found two products that seem well loved: Endomondo and SportyPal.  I really liked SportyPal and went ahead and downloaded it.  It took a little work to figure out that I had to download an app specifically to make the GPS in my phone work better for stuff like this, but the results are great and the app's price is right.

You can see an example of one of my runs before I figured out how to boost the performance of the GPS chip here.  After I figured out you need to run a booster program for the GPS chip, the lines get quite a bit smoother and more accurate, like here.  It's pretty simple.  You turn it on at the beginning of your walk, and turn it off afterwards.  It works for walking, running, biking, waterskiing, all sorts of stuff that you can track by distance.  It also tracks work inside the gym, but I'm not interested in that.

If you're curious about such things, you might really enjoy downloading it and trying it out.  It's a pretty app.