Tuesday was Dave’s twenty-second birthday.  I had ordered him what he had asked for, an Ozzie Smith, powder blue, Cardinal’s jersey, but first we got an email that it was on backorder and then on Tuesday of all days the outfit that I had ordered it from cancelled the order.  I reordered it immediately through Amazon, but it won’t show up until next week.  We also sent him a Care Package of food stuffs from the Best of Missouri festival at the gardens, but again I let him down and procrastinated, it is not scheduled to show up in New York until Friday.  Just chock me up as a bad dad. 🙁

Anne and I did call him Tuesday night to wish him a happy birthday and to interrogate him too.  [Editor’s Note: No extraordinary techniques were employed, in order to garner the intelligence disseminated in this briefing post.]  Here is the Dave News that we gleamed:

• Dave thought that his poster session went well.  He and his boss drove to Pittsburg earlier this month, for Dave’s first technical conference. 
  • For the uninitiated a poster session is one of the lower rungs on the ladder of research presentation.  Generally a large room is reserved and an equally large number of poster presenters are used to fill the room.  The timing of the poster session is usually between the end of the end of the day’s papers and happy hour.  All of this is supposition, based upon le Marquis’ past experiences.
  • Dave had a few lookers, but only one real visitor during his poster session.  His visitor was a friend from school.  Part of the problem was that being an undergraduate, he and the others of his ilk were relegated to the back corner of the room.  Dave also explained that another issue was that with his work’s involvement with both neurology and audiology, these ties left him outside the mainstream of the thrust of the conference.
  • He has plans to elaborate on this work so far and make a real scientific paper out of it.
• Dave will fly to NYC later this month.  I think that he said it would be in the last week in October.  The purpose of his trip will be to visit a job fair at Columbia University.  He’ll need to get an interview suit.  The best part of this trip is that Rochester is picking up the travel tab.
• Now about Dave’s graduate school plans, well here is an update:
  • He was surprised to hear that Dan was out in LA looking at grad schools.  Doesn’t anyone ever read this blog?  The reason that he mentioned this was that I mentioned that Dan had visited UCLA.  Dave mentioned that one of the schools that he is considering is a small school, whose name escaped him, that is affiliated with UCLA.
  • He seemed more definite about Case Western Reserve, which is located near Cleveland.  At the conference in Pittsburg, he met the director of their biomedical-engineering program and also with one other professor from the department.