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August 04, 2006
Memorials at Night
As bad as the talks on the first day of the GMU AT&D Modeling conference were overall, the talks on the second day were surprisingly good for the most part. The subject matter still wasn't the most interesting necessarily (though the talk by Steve Hanna on trains derailing and tanker cars flashing many thousands of tons of chlorine (or other toxic chemicals) into the air in a matter of seconds was incredibly interesting), a much higher percentage of the presenters had a clue how to communicate and make an effective presentation.
On Wednesday evening after the talks wrapped up Walter & I took the Metro into Clarendon to meet up with Mark, a friend of Walter's from way back in middle school who now lives and works in Washington, DC. After dinner Mark took the two of us on a driving tour of DC, mostly since Walter had never visited DC before. It was after dark, so all the museums were closed of course, but it was still fun to go around to a bunch of the different monuments and memorials. 
I already have a bunch of pictures of them during the day anyway, from the previous two times I'd visited Washington, but I didn't really have many from at night. We managed to find a parking spot, and so got out and walked through the Vietnam Memorial and Lincoln Memorial before we endured a legendary cloud of gnats all along the Reflecting Pool on our way to the World War II Memorial. Mark also took us by a few other places like the White House, Capitol and Supreme Court before we made a stop at the FDR Memorial, one that I'd never been to before. 
That short visit was more than enough to put it in my top three favorite memorials/monuments in Washington, the others being Lincoln and WWII. I think it was all the waterfalls that did it. It was a humid, sultry night out, so they only made me more thirsty, but it was all good. I was really glad we got the chance to go into DC while we were at George Mason, it was a lot of fun, even with the heat and humidity. By the time we made it back to the hotel though, I was totally worn out. Good thing we had to wake up a tad earlier in order to check out and everything before the last day of the conference...
Day 2 of the conference spoiled me in terms of quality of the presentations, so I was a bit disappointed that Day 3 seemed to be more like Day 1, though the presentations were still a little better overall than the first day, to be sure. You really can only listen to so many 12-minute talks over a few days before your brain gets full, so I was ready for the conference to be done. We made the drive back to State College yesterday evening, and it's good to be back.
So now today I have the privilege of starting to pack up all of my stuff from my current apartment here in White Course so that I can move to my new place in Mt Nittany Apartments. Jon already moved in there on Tuesday, so I'm definitely the late-comer. I'm not sure yet where I'll be laying my head tonight, it kinda depends how much I get done this afternoon. But all that will have to wait until after lunch at the India Pavillion. Mmmm, nuclear chicken... :-)
Posted by Jared at August 4, 2006 11:43 AM
Comments
There goes my appetite...
Posted by: Jeff at August 7, 2006 10:04 AM