Pre-Presentation Panic

I’ve been pretty massively stressed out lately, thanks mostly to my research, which hasn’t been going well at all lately. Coming up in mid-November is the Chemical & Biological Defense Physical Science & Technology Conference down in New Orleans, and I have a half-hour slot in which to give a presentation (this is the conference to which I was awarded a scholarship to attend by the people running the conference, my project’s sponsors). Yet when are the slides for our presentations due to the CBD folks? This coming Monday. Yep, a full three weeks before the conference. Ridiculous. Now of course we knew about that deadline months ago, so why am I suddenly frantically scrambling to pull something together for my talk? To put it nicely, let’s just say that WRF is a particularly difficult model to get to run properly on a new system, especially when you’re trying to do it mostly yourself. I’ve run into roadblock after roadblock after roadblock in my effort to get this thing running the way it should. My latest problem? When I try to run my 4-km high-resolution domain, it keeps crashing the compute nodes on the student cluster at ARL for some unknown reason (we think it’s memory-related, but can’t figure out how to address it or pinpoint the actual problem). There’s something over there that I don’t have set up right, but I don’t know what, because on the meteo systems WRF generally runs without a problem (now it does, don’t know how long it took them to get it to work at first though). Needless to say, I’ve had an incredibly frustrating last couple of weeks in particular, and especially the first half of this week. After all my troubles yesterday afternoon, I finally decided to give up on getting any of my model runs done in time for this presentation, so instead am now giving mostly a talk on what I plan to do for my thesis research (or at least the first part of it). It’s not exactly what I’d hoped to give, or what I’d told the conference organizers in my abstract that I’d give, but it’s what they’re getting because I don’t have anything else. AJ is being really nice and helping me out and giving me some of his model results from his poster though, so that I at least have some “preliminary results” to show during my talk, to go with my methods/plans. It’s not quite what I wanted to do for my talk, but hey, it’s better than having absolutely no results to show! Anyway, after basically freaking out over everything around midday today, I think I’ve calmed down a little bit since then. This afternoon I managed to think straight enough to sketch out a rough outline for what I’d now like to do for my presentation, given my current state of affairs. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll be very glad when Monday qfternoon comes, because either my slides will be in, or they will have extended the deadline a bit. I’m so looking forward to a chance to relax a bit.
So once I’m past that deadline, I’ll hopefully blog a bit more, and put up some photos from my brother Nathan & Laura’s visit and John & Ruth’s wedding a couple weekends ago. I’m still in the process of recovering from my hard drive crash too, and I have yet to send my old hard drive off to the data recovery place even. I’ve just been too swamped with research, trying to get as much done as possible (yet being stymied every step of the way). Anyway, maybe life will start to get back to normal sometime soon. Normal would be nice. It hasn’t been normal for a long time.
Until then, may you, my blog-reading public, enjoy these links:
I’ve probably told many of you about Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub, over in Clearfield, PA, where the small burgers are huge, and the big ones are monstrous. In fact, once I downed a one-pound burger there (I had a pretty solid food coma after that too). Denny’s has contests starting with their two-pound burgers, but apparently this guy thought the challenge of even the three- or six-pound burger was beneath him, so he tried the fifteen-pound burger. And ate it. I don’t know whether to be impressed or nauseated. Now that’s what you call being a bad fatty!
And just when I thought weather-themed movies couldn’t get any worse than Category 6: Day of Destruction, Category 7: End of the World or Day After Tomorrow, Lifetime just had to go out and make a movie that’s potentially worse than all of them: Storm Cell. (h/t: Jeff [Frame]) Tornado Alley moving north? Somewhat plausible, perhaps. But moving west? To the other side of the Rockies?! To Seattle?!? And the National Weather Service doesn’t notice, but this one lady on her laptop is the only one who sees the storm coming? C’mon… No wonder “Family Guy” made fun of Lifetime as “Television for Idiots.” Without even having seen it yet, I think it’ll definitely crack the pantheon of worst weather-themed movies ever, joining the others I mentioned above. Do any of the rest of you have additions to the list of worst weather-themed or weather-related movies ever made?
Oh, and if any of you would like a good historical primer for this weekend’s titanic clash between #3 Penn State and #9 Ohio State, read up on this account of the first-ever meeting between the two teams, way back in 1912. Apparently Ohio State’s fanbase was a bunch of hooligans way back then too! Shock!