2009 GMU Conference

[On location in Fairfax, Virginia]
Greetings from the deep, DEEP South of northern Virginia! I’m down here in Fairfax for the 13th Annual George Mason University Conference on Atmospheric Transport & Dispersion Modeling. This is my fourth year in a row coming down here for the GMU conference, and Penn State once again sent a large contingent down here (11 people!). With it being only a four-hour drive down here from State College, it’s just a really cheap conference to send people to. PSU constitutes 80% of the posters at this year’s conference (four) and has more presentations (ten) than any other organization or university. In session #3 on Tuesday, five of the six presentations were by Penn Staters (including me, sandwiched between Walter & Dave S.). And usually it’s the hottest week of the year when we come down here to GMU. Highs threatening 100 degrees with dewpoints in the low 70s have not been uncommon. This year the weather’s actually not been too bad, however. Tuesday it was 83, yesterday 88, and today it’s supposed to hit 90. Compared to how bad it usually is down here, I’ll take it.
Last week was rather stressful for me, getting my conference presentation put together (and doing a fair bit of extra work for it) and writing my prospectus. Several *long* days at Walker, let me tell ya… But hey, I got the conference talk made (27 slides for a 12-minute talk) and I also finished a complete draft of my prospectus by the end of Friday afternoon. As of this morning I have edits from Sue to implement before I send it to my PhD committee by Monday. And then once I’ve sent out my prospectus, it’s going to be time to study-study-study for my written comprehensive exam, which will last for 8 hours on Fri 31 July. [Gulp.] It’s getting to be crunch time.
Anyway, as for the conference this week, my talk, “Toward an NWP Ensemble Configuration for AT&D Applications,” went really well! I’d practiced it just twice last week, both times being able to zip through my then-28 slides in 13 minutes. It was definitely a bit more information than I wanted to include, but there were some good reasons to have it in there, so it stayed. When I gave the talk on Tuesday, I took a deep breath mentally while I was talking during my first slide (if that makes sense), which calmed me down a bunch and allowed me to slow down to a somewhat more comfortable pace. I figured I could slow down a touch compared to my practices because I didn’t think I had to worry about the session chair standing up and telling me I was out of time. Why? you ask. Because the session chair was the person who last week insisted on me adding a few slides of extra info at the end of my talk. So yes, I knew how to play the game. 🙂 I don’t think I went longer than my allotted 15 minutes anyway, but it was probably more like 14 minutes instead of the 13 minutes I’d been taking in practice.
As for other highlights of the trip down here, on the way down a few of us stopped by Frederick, Maryland, to see Joel, my former co-advisor. (Joel left Penn State a year ago to take a position at Bechtel Corporation.) His wife Maureen and their toddler Eva joined us all for dinner at a really neat place in Middletown called The Main Cup. It used to be a creamery way back in the day, but they remodeled it and fixed it up, so now it looks really nice and has tons of character. Very charming. Very good food too! It was good to see Joel again, and see that he’s really happy with his new job and everything. It was also good to touch base with him at least once briefly before I send him my prospectus and he then comes up for my oral comps.
My friend Betsy from Gustavus is now a librarian here at George Mason, so it was really easy to visit her. On Tuesday night I went out to dinner with Betsy and her fiancee Shawn (a very recent development, congrats to them!), and brought a bunch of the Penn State crew along (just like what happened two years ago). Then yesterday I had lunch with her too. It was fun to see Betsy down here at GMU yet again. She & Shawn invited me along to go see the new Harry Potter movie last night, but the timing wasn’t quite going to work out, so I’ll go see it when I’m back in State College.
As for some actual amusing conference items from the talks themselves… Well, there was an Australian who joked about emus being so smart that they probably ran toward the chlorine rail tanker accident in Macdona, Texas, in 2004, thus leading us to believe that the extent of the lethal chlorine leak wasn’t as far from the accident site as it actually was. The same guy also had a funny line about wanting to get away from some “f-ing” theories/descriptions of the boundary layer that incorporate the Coriolis parameter (f). Both of those definitely got a good laugh. I like that guy! And then yesterday one of the speakers said “uhh” or “umm” a total of 229 times in his 12-minute talk(!!). And that’s not even counting some in the first minute before McKenzie started keeping track. It was rather astounding. He averaged one “uhh” every 4 seconds! I’m not sure I could, uhh, do that if I, uhh, tried. Wow. [UPDATE at 1:55pm: I forgot to mention that late in Walter’s presentation on Tuesday, his Blackberry started talking to him while he was on stage: “Please say a command.” Repeatedly. Pretty funny! And a presenter this afternoon, after a phone was ringing for awhile, said, “oh, that’s probably my phone.” Also classic. 🙂 ]
Well, now that I have my prospectus edits I should get started on those (while paying more attention to the talks if they seem interesting or relevant to my work, of course). And just to be clear, the vast majority of this post was written last night, and not during the conference talks. 🙂 Just two more sessions to go, one before lunch and one after lunch. There are three Penn Staters giving their talks in the very last session this afternoon (Kerrie, Andrew & Luna), so we won’t be heading out until at least 3pm. I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed again, and actually not eating out for every meal. Not looking forward to all the studying I have to do, though.