Acronym City

[On location in Laurel, Maryland]
Select observations from Day 1 of the 4th NWS/NCEP Ensemble User Workshop:
— When giving a talk, even to an audience you think is probably entirely populated by experts from your field, please, please define all your acronyms at least once! They’ve been flying fast and furious today, and not all of them are common, at least in the opinion of this aspiring meteorologist.
— It’s deceptive to say you’re on your last slide, when in fact you have links to two or three additional slides from the text on your “last” slide. Especially when they’re all full of text. And especially when you’re already 15 minutes over time on your 15-minute time slot.
— Fire alarms are an effective way to cut short a talk that’s droning on 10 minutes past the time slot.
— If, as the moderator, you ask that people hold to their time slots, you must be assertive in telling people that they have to wrap up, so that the agenda can be kept on schedule.
— 8:00am to 5:30pm is a really long time to be listening to presentations in a dim conference room with a small off-kilter projector screen, while sitting in the same chair the whole time.
— Despite some of these initial complaints, the workshop presentations this year have been much better overall than at the last workshop a year and a half ago.
— Who would’ve thought that jokes about probability could be so funny?
— All A large percentage of probabilistic warning area names are funnier if you add “of death” after it: “cone of death” (hurricane forecast track), “bimodal cone of death” (hurricanes), “cottonballs of death” (aviation turbulence), “plume of death” (temperature or precip virtual plumes, or chem/bio physical plumes).
— That one attendee’s comment that Rich Grumm is the Dick Vitale of meteorology is very funny, and probably true. 🙂
— It’s always a pleasant surprise when you unexpectedly run into a friend at one of these things (Addison’s here too!), and to reminisce about all those amazingly tough classes we had together first year.
— It’s also a nice pick-me-up to receive an email during one of these talks that my Amazon.com order has shipped (“Bourne” and “Ocean’s” DVD trilogies, 2 Phil Keaggy CDs, 1 Newsboys CD, and a book for research, “Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences” by Wilks). Having those, plus my order of “Power Grid” from Games By James, waiting for me when I get back will be a nice plus.
— If I keep up the pace of eating at Outback Steakhouse once a week (I also ate there last Wednesday at the PSCG Leadership celebration dinner), I’m going to get very big very quickly. And I don’t mean growing vertically.
— And finally, the free MLB.tv gameday audio here at Holiday Inn is pretty sweet. Go Twins!