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Get Firefox about me: Jared Lee age: 25 current residence: State College, PA hometown: Cumberland, WI undergrad major: Physics, Gustavus Adolphus College grad program: Meteorology, Penn State University
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One Blog to Bring Them All and in Happy Valley Bind Them
[On location in New Orleans, Louisiana] I always like to take the opportunity to write "on location" posts from new places, and this week is no different! I have had some down time today because the talks scheduled for today at the CBD Conference didn't look interesting at all. As one conference attendee put it, "The atmosphere is an afterthought to these people." I can't really disagree with that sentiment, considering the sheer volume of chemistry and biology talks compared to the miniscule number of atmosphere-related talks. Before getting into how the Crescent City has been, I'm gonna rewind to last weekend, when one of my good friends from high school, Mike M., flew out from Green Bay to Penn State to visit me! He had originally planned to come out on the weekend of the Penn State-Oregon State game in early September, but when Aaron died he managed to get it rescheduled to last weekend. And he almost wasn't able to come out this time either -- Mike works at a Sherwin Williams paint store in Shawano, WI, and last Tuesday his boss was fired, which left Mike as the only employee at the store. Fortunately the regional manager was able to pull someone in from another store to cover for Mike for the weekend, so that he didn't have to cancel his visit. That would've been a major bummer.
On Monday morning I had to get up early so I could catch my 7:50am flight to New Orleans (via Philadelphia). We got to New Orleans around noon, so after we checked into the Hilton Riverside downtown, those of us who came down that day (me, Kerrie, Sue, Andrew, Luna, David & Lili -- Dave, AJ, Glenn, Brian & Brian all came down Sunday) grabbed lunch at a cool place called Mulate's, just a couple blocks from our hotel (and across the street from the Riverwalk mall and the Convention Center). The blackened alligator and jambalaya were really good, I must say. :-) After lunch, Sue, Kerrie, David & I wandered around the city for a bit, going down to the French Quarter, Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, Cafe du Monde (where we had some delicious cafe au lait and beignets!), and then along the riverfront for awhile. There were appetizers served at the welcome reception that evening at the hotel, and that was more than enough for us considering the huge lunch we'd had.
 Our hotel is pretty nice. I mean, what would you expect from the Hilton? My room is on the 17th floor and overlooks the Mississippi River, it's been cool to see all sorts of riverboats, tugboats and barges go by. And the food that's been provided as part of the conference here has been fantastic too. The downside is that despite being an expensive, swanky hotel, they charge for just about every little extra item that'd typically be complimentary at more mid-range hotels. For example, something that's now as standard as wireless internet? $15 for 24 hours, or $6 for 1 hour. That's outrageous! I bit the bullet and paid for it my first night here though, because I absolutely needed to get some forecasts done for class, and to get some other work done that required the internet. Since Tuesday evening I've been fairly successful with leeching internet from someone's wireless in a nearby room. It's not a fast connection, but it's been relatively reliable at least.
With Kerrie's birthday happening this week, I had been trying to arrange a surprise visit from Daniel on Monday afternoon/evening. But on Monday morning while we were in Philadelphia I got a call from him that his Air Force bosses dumped a bunch of work on him that had to be done by Wednesday morning, so he wasn't able to make the trip down from Shreveport. :-( It would've been so fun to see him again, but such is life. I gave my presentation on Tuesday morning, the first talk in the first set of parallel sessions. It went really well, too! I wasn't nervous at all or anything, either. I think after being so stressed out a few weeks ago about whether I'd even have anything to present, there wasn't anything left to be nervous about when it came to giving the presentation, haha. Dave & Sue were really glad to see that I'd implemented (nearly) all of the nitpicking suggestions that they'd made the night before when I did a dry run of my presentation for them. I got quite a few compliments about my talk from various people, including the NCAR folks that were there. I was very glad to get it out of the way! All the talks in that first session were really good, with a couple other NCAR talks (which were very well-done as usual) and then Dave giving Walter's presentation too. From my (biased) point of view, it was easily the best session of the whole conference. And it's definitely been all downhill from there, as the rest of the sessions have gotten further and even completely away from meteorology. That night most of the PSU NWP group went out to a place across the street from the hotel called Gordon Biersch's, which had some excellent beer. I'd really never hung out with many of them in a social setting before, but we all had a great time. AJ & Glenn in particular are so funny, even before having a beer. :-) For instance, before Glenn mentioned it at dinner, I never knew that AJ learned English from Beavis & Butthead, haha. I set my alarm for Wednesday morning, but forgot to turn it on, and so I got downstairs a bit late for some of the morning talks. Oh well. By afternoon there wasn't anything I was interested in anyway, so I skipped out for a bit after lunch to work on some other homework and whatnot. I tried going to another couple talks late in the afternoon, but I couldn't make it through a third (even though that would've been the last one of the day).
We have just a half-day of the conference left to go tomorrow, but the talks tomorrow morning look interesting again at least. Sue also gives the last talk of the conference right before noon, so she & I basically bookend the conference sessions. Our flight leaves New Orleans at 3pm, and we get back to State College a little after 10pm. It's been a fun week in New Orleans, and unlike back in July when I found out I won the scholarship, right now I'm glad I won it and was able to come down here (and even back then I knew I'd feel this way now). It was a lot of work and a lot of stress, but it worked out quite well in the end. It'll be good to get back to Penn State though, if only so I can go stand outside all day in the cold on Saturday, tailgating and going to the game (it's only gonna be in the 20s, but unfortunately it probably won't snow during the game, sigh...), and so that I can start driving home for Thanksgiving break on Sunday morning!
There's promising news about the photos on my dead hard drive! I finally sent in my hard drive to Ontrack Data Recovery Services a couple weeks ago (on their dime via UPS, but I'm sure that's rolled into the $495 photo recovery fee), and last week I got word back from them. My hard drive needed to be taken apart in a clean room (which I figured would be the case), but they were able to image 87% of the drive. With the method they had to use in order to retrieve the files, they said they weren't able to retain any of the filenames on my photos, but they were able to recover 83-84 GB of photos! I don't remember how much total space all my photos occupied when my hard drive crashed, but that's gotta be the vast majority, if not all, of my photos! Ordinarily, Ontrack would just burn the recovered photos onto DVD and mail them back to me for free (again, included in the total cost, no doubt), but because there was so much recovered data, they asked me either to ship them an external hard drive, or to buy one from them, onto which they could put my recovered photos. So on Thursday night last week I went down to Best Buy and bought a 500-GB Iomega firewire/USB2.0 external drive for $160 (I was gonna buy that anyway pretty soon), and then shipped it to Ontrack (on my dime) on Friday morning. They got it today, so while it's possible I could get my hard drive and my photos back before I leave for New Orleans on Monday morning, I'll almost certainly have them by the time I go home for Thanksgiving! It'll be quite a relief to have my photos back. It'll take awhile to go back through and rename the photos that weren't backed up on my other external hard drive over the past year or so. That reminds me, I still need to pull those back over to my laptop... And for some various countdowns I have going on: 2+ days until my friend Mike M. flies in from Wisconsin to visit for the weekend!
While I am disappointed that Obama won today's presidential election, I'm not disappointed that McCain lost. I'm glad that we'll finally be able to turn the page on the Bush years though; maybe now the GOP will finally get back to being conservative, something it hasn't been since the '90s (and recall, unabashed conservatism is why they won in 1994). In any case, I will still pray that Obama would lead our country well, like I would for anyone who is elected President of the United States. Though I may disagree with him on almost every issue, I am not among those who childishly say, "He's not *my* president." Obama is evidently the man that God has ordained to lead the US for the next few years. No leader, good or bad, can be in power for one second longer than Yahweh allows as part of His sovereign plan.
It feels sooooo good to be finally past my super-stressful couple-week stretch. I got a power-point presentation put together and submitted on Monday evening last week for the CBD Conference, which was a huge weight off my shoulders. I'm allowed to bring an updated presentation on a memory stick to the conference, so while I still am pushing forward to get some additional results, I can work at a much more relaxed pace. Don't get me wrong, I'm still busy, but I'm not frantic or freaking out anymore, like I was a week and a half ago. That wasn't fun. And then I had a 2-3 page "research paper" on flash flood events for my forecasting class that was due on Thursday, so when I finished that at 12:30am Wednesday night, I knew I'd be able to relax a bit. And that I have!
 I think Sarah Palin did a much better job at the rally on Tuesday night than she did in the VP debate. *Much* better. She really showed that she can actually be a good public speaker, something that didn't come across in the debate. I'd chalk her shaky debate performance up to a combination of her being nervous and trying to remember all of the lines that McCain's advisers were coaching her to remember and recite. But when she was here in State College, she just seemed so much more loose and natural, so if she is indeed "going rogue" and being herself, rejecting the advice of McCain's handlers, I say good for her! We need more politicians who are willing to be themselves anyway, not not who the focus groups are telling them they should be.  While I didn't agree with everything she said, I thought she did a really good job, and I was glad to see her go on the offensive, both in making the case for McCain and against Obama. She put me at least a little more at ease with the concept of voting for McCain, but I'm still undecided between McCain/Palin and Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is getting even more frightening these days though, especially with his recent comments about the Constitution. I still don't think John McCain would make a great president, but I honestly don't think this country can afford even four years of an Obama presidency. Obama sure would provide change, but not all change is good change.
There were also a bunch of Obama supporters outside Rec Hall. A group of them were on the other side of Curtin Road, just chanting "O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" and "Yes we can! Yes we can!" I had no problem with them. There were quite a few Obama supporters with signs on the Rec Hall side of Curtin Rd, who really demonstrated their intellectual and rhetorical prowess. [/sarcasm] Seriously though, they were quite a bit more testy, vocal, and snide. Oh, and condescending and rude too. (None of this is by any means to claim that there aren't McCain supporters who exhibit these same lovely traits, I'm merely reporting what was publicly on display Tuesday night with these particular Obama supporters.) Anytime David or I would try to have a reasoned exchange of ideas with them, they'd only shout back with a slogan (if they'd even deign to pay attention when we'd answer one of their questions), to the point that it was impossible to talk to them. One of them even said to us, "You sound like you're intelligent. Why on earth are you going in there [to see Palin]?" And yes, it was dripping with condescension. One of the best parts of engaging the Obama supporters was when David talked to a couple girls who had signs that said something to the effect of "Nothing Is Certain" and "Question What You Believe." After a couple minutes, David got them to admit that their position was based on circular logic (if nothing is certain, then is that statement even certain?), and they just walked away! At any rate, I know that there are plenty of intelligent and reasonable Obama supporters, but all these sign-holding and argumentative youths were not among them. Oh, and I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'll be extremely glad once Election Day is over. Whoever wins, it'll be good to move on finally, after this ridiculously long campaign that's been going on since Election Day 2006. All these political ads, for federal, state and local candidates, have been a bit much (even when they're hilariously pathetic). So this is what it's like to live in a battleground state... Friday night Tracy & Amanda hosted a Halloween party at Dan, Luke & Noel's place (their own place was a bit too small). For a long time I wasn't all that keen on going, largely because I'm not a big fan of Halloween, even though Tracy & Kerrie were encouraging me to go dressed as a Mormon, "Elder Lee." I still wasn't excited about the party though. I just don't like the history of a celebration of evil that's associated with the holiday. I recognize that most people nowadays don't view or celebrate it that way, and treat it as just a fun excuse to dress up in costumes and have a party. My family never celebrated Halloween growing up, though, and I just haven't ever been that interested in the holiday. I went to Halloween parties my first two years of grad school, first year going as one of a group of Pac-Man ghosts, and second year going as a vector (in both cases the costume decisions were pretty last-minute and just some marker drawn on a t-shirt ... not exactly elaborate). But I didn't go to a Halloween party last year, and I didn't feel like I missed out on anything. In any case, by Friday afternoon I was leaning toward going to the party, at least to put in an appearance, if nothing else. Then I got a great idea for a costume -- televangelist Joel Osteen!
Maybe now I'll be a little more interested in going to a Halloween party next year, and a little more motivated to think of a costume before the day of the party, haha.
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! |
