Tuesday, October 21, 2008

And It's Squirrel at the Wire, Leading By a Nose

Well, after a little hiatus, I am finally getting the chance to post an entry. The reason I haven't been on lately is that I was in Louisville at a conference for the National Weather Association, also known as the NWA (snicker). I had written a paper on a wind event in Valdez that I submitted to the conference. Unfortunately, I was just chosen for a poster. However, my boss was chosen to present his paper, and since the office could only afford to send one person, I got to present his talk. I was pretty nervous, but it went really well. In fact, I think his presentation went better than my poster session.

All in all, it was really great. Getting to present scientific research that I wrote has always been a dream of mine, so it was awesome to do that, even if it was in poster form. I also really enjoyed being in an environment where I got to sit and listen to people talk about weather all day and no one thought I was nerdy. Plus, I got to meet some really cool people.

The negative thing I will say is that the venue, the Galt House, sucked! I feel like this needs some extra exclamation points, so here are a few: !!! First of all, it was very noisy. I could hear the traffic on the highway all night in my room, and in the conference room, we could hear the dog trainers' conference next door and the construction going on outside the building. Secondly, the business center was abysmal. I had to pay to even use the computer, which I find ridiculous for a hotel that charges up to $300 a night. I'm not talking about internet fees here; I couldn't even look at my files without paying. Plus, they had this stupid service that ran the computer that only let you perform certain functions. There was no "Start" bar for example, so I couldn't look at my thumb drive. I could only open things by clicking on their icons. Not to mention that the whole thing was out of date. So if you are in Louisville, KY, don't stay at the Galt House.

I didn't get much chance to tour Louisville, but I did go out to eat a lot and the food was generally good, although the service was generally slow. The last night I took a ghost tour for something fun to do. It was somewhat historical, somewhat ghostly, with a visit to several haunted buildings in Louisville. We did not see any ghosts, but some people did get some weird colored lights on their pictures ("orbs"), which also could have been lens flare. It was still fun, though.

So that's it for now. I would like to make a conscious effort to post more often, although Ethan argues that as posting frequency decreases, quality increases (can you tell I just came back from statistics?). But I know there's some kind of balance, because if I don't post more, no one will read. So I'll be back, hopefully soon.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

congratulations on your big presentation!! even though your lodgings weren't the best, it sounds like a great experience!

Anonymous said...

It's not so much a factor of number of posts, but an increase in posting quality can lead to an increase in readership. For example, if you have 7 hours/week to spend on your blog or web site, then you can spend 7 hours on one posting or 1 hour on 7 different posts. Assuming that spending more time means an increase in quality, then your readers get 1 good post instead of 7 not-so-good posts. The assumption is that folks will not have enough time to spend reading every blog post, so might as well give them the best you've got.

This is more for blogs that are trying to attract readers. Yours is there to inform friends and family, so a higher posting frequency won't really hurt.

Just wanted to explain.