Yay for Funding

I know I haven’t posted anything in nearly a week, but there just hasn’t been all that much happening this week, and I just haven’t been terribly motivated to do much of anything.
Back on Monday after watching yet another thrilling “24” episode, I tuned in to the last two-thirds of the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game. For a 16-point blowout it was actually a moderately entertaining game, probably because of the stellar level of play that all the Gators had, especially the Androgenous Ponytail, and the parade of thundering dunks Florida had. I had no problem with Florida winning, I’m actually kinda glad they won their first title, but Chris (a Florida State alum) is really upset, and has said he won’t be going back to Florida for quite some time now, haha.
On Tuesday after teaching my lab I went with Kerrie & Caren to a PSUBAMS meeting that featured the VP of on-camera meteorology at the Weather Channel. He gave a really interesting talk on some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on at the Weather Channel, in addition to giving tips for what he’s looking for when he reviews people’s audition tapes that he gets sent. It was quite interesting hearing about all that, especially since I’m still tossing around the idea of potentially going into broadcasting, though that’s not as likely now as it was a year or two ago, when I was pretty set on that.
Wednesday evening after classes a few of us went down to the ‘Skeller for a bit of a farewell party for Mark Guishard, who passed his Ph.D. defense last week, and yesterday flew back home to Bermuda, where he’s now going to be the top guy running the Bermuda Weather Service. I didn’t go along with most of the people to the G-Man to play trivia though, since I actually needed to accomplish at least a little bit grading-wise.
Thursday I had to teach back-to-back labs as usual, so I had to miss Chris’s M.S. defense, which he passed (congrats Chris!). Little did I know that it actually would’ve been quite valuable to go to his defense. While floor managing for “Weather World” like I usually do every Thursday, I was able to witness yet another example of what can go horribly wrong during a live broadcast. This time while Todd was in front of the green-screen doing the forecast, the computer running the show (all the different maps and graphics you see on the tv) completely died, leaving Todd unable to click to the next map (and leaving the people in the control room unable to give me any time cues through my headset to relay to Todd for over a minute, until just 15 seconds before the end of his segment). Fortunately he did a marvelous job recovering from that and kept on going, even though the same map was up for the last two minutes almost. I’d probably freak out and panic if that happened to me, but that’s why it’s quite valuable for me to be able to witness a lot of these sanfus and glitches that happen and how people deal with them, before I get a chance to start going on camera a bit this summer.
I had to get up early yesterday morning to head over to the Applied Research Lab across the street from Walker for a meeting with Joel Peltier, to talk about research and funding he has available for me. Even though it’s probably not my #1 choice of what I’d most like to do, it still seems like some pretty interesting stuff, using mesoscale models to model the dispersion (and the uncertainty in the dispersion) of clouds of nastiness (e.g., nerve gas). It’s funded by an agency within the DoD, and they want this research so that if anything were to be released in the U.S. ever, they could accurately predict where it would spread to and in turn evacuate people. There’s pretty intimidating-looking physics that goes into the model, so it’ll be a challenging but valuable project to be a part of. I’m taking this weekend to think about it and decide if this is the research I’d like to do for my Master’s thesis or not, but I’m most likely going to take it, particularly since it’s April already and I need to have research lined up by the end of the month for this summer, and since there are probably no other (funded) research opportunities out there for me at this point.
Trivia last night didn’t go so well. After getting a perfect score last Friday night, we got rocked by several questions this time around, and didn’t place in the top three. Le sigh. I guess the law of averages had to take command at some point and even things out a bit. After trivia quite a few of us went over to Jacob’s place to watch the Family Guy movie, “Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story,” which was great.
So now I’m here, kinda miserable with a cold, trying to get up the motivation to read more journal articles for my Cloud Physics paper, so that I can perhaps get started writing it this weekend. I hate term papers…
The Australian Football League has begun their season, with this being the second weekend. And it sure looks as if my team, the Geelong Cats, is setting the stage for a huge season. After winning the pre-season AFL tournament title, the Cats have opened up the year with two dominating wins at home, drubbing the Brisbane Lions last weekend by 77 points, and this weekend doubling up the Kangaroos 138-69. The ‘Roos coach called the Cats his favourite to win the grand final this year. Hopefully that’ll come true, but there’s another 20 or so weeks of footy to be played before the playoffs even arrive, so plenty can happen between now and then.
I’ll leave you all with a weird story out of the Philippines, where a judge has been sacked because he claimed he was a ‘psychic friend of dwarves.’ I really don’t know what to say to that, other than he might fit in on the 9th Circus Court of Appeals in San Francisco…