Seminar Bingo

Several of us kept ourselves entertained during today’s department colloquium (which was pretty interesting on its own, anyway) by playing “Seminar Bingo.” Ever since last week when it appeared in a PhD Comics strip online, we knew what we had to do. 🙂 Below the comic there’s a link to a randomized version of the Seminar Bingo, so we printed off several of those so that nobody would have the same exact board. I don’t think anyone got a bingo, there were only 5 non-free spaces that we were able to check off (use of powerpoint template with blue background, speaker forgets to thank collaborators, speaker bashes previous work, “… et al.”, there’s a grad student wearing same clothes as yesterday). The free space is the only given at seminars: speaker runs out of time. There’s at least one more colloquium this semester to try to get a bingo with the PhD Comics bingo sheets, and then we’re considering coming up with our own PSU Meteo-customized version of Seminar Bingo for the upcoming Hussey Lecture in May. At least bingo ensures that people aren’t drifting off to near-sleep as much, haha.
I got the first draft of my thesis chapter 1 back from Sue yesterday, and it came back with far less red ink than I was fearing, hooray! Now if only I could get some of these codes working that I need in order to finish some key parts of my research, sigh. Oh, and for various reasons (which include vacationing advisors), now it seems like I’ll be defending my thesis sometime around June 9th or 12th, probably, which is about two weeks earlier than I’d been thinking it’d be. I should still be able to get everything done, but it’s that much less time to finish it all.
It appears that there’s gonna be a big storm affecting the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast this weekend. Everyone’s starting to get excited because the forecast models are indicating that a powerful nor’easter is going to develop for Sunday into Monday. Initially when the models started indicating this massive storm, and that we had the definite potential to get dumped on with snow (over a foot?), we dismissed it as what some of us like to call “weather porn.” But more of the models are starting to come into agreement about the track and intensity of the storm, and they’re continuing to predict it run after run … for now. The rain-snow line looks like it’s gonna be pretty close to State College, so instead of a big snowstorm (bigger than the Valentine’s Day storm two months ago??), we might just as easily get 1-2 inches of rain. In any case, it’s looking like a mess of precip around here, with potentially hurricane-force winds at some spots along the coast. The snow geese are definitely honking again, and old man winter just does not want to give up this year!