Wild and Wolves

I’m hoping every Minnesotan out there that reads this was watching the Wild game last night because it was spectacular! They won their very first playoff series ever and they sure did it in style. I was honestly on the edge of my seat from the 3rd period on. You should have heard the SJU campus when the winning goal was scored. A swelling throng of students all simultaneously screamed for delight when we put that puck in the back of the net. Utterly spectacular.

Also on last night was the second game in the T-Wolves and Lakers playoff series. Unfortunately it was on at the same time as the Wild game so I was constantly switching between the two hoping to catch the best moments of both. I ended up flipping over to the Wild game exclusively towards the end of the Wolves game because we were just pile-driving the Lakers into the ground. Garnett with 35 points and Hudson, from out of nowhere, tallied in 37—a Wolves’ playoff high. The first game the Lakers ground us down and last night we turned the bit right back into them. Let’s hope that we can keep this momentum going as we play in LA. It would be nice to see the Wolves make it out of the first round for once. Until the next Wolves game, make sure to tune in to watch the Indiana Pacers play on Thursday. Their series is even at 1-1 as well, so they’ll need some heavy cheering.

Last night the Twins were also on at the same time as the Wolves and Wild. No one cared. Baseball blows.

As many of you may have known, my senior research thesis defense was last night. You may be wondering how it went. I thought it went fine. I had a few moments where I had a hard time finding my words so it might have seemed like I didn’t know exactly what I was talking about at those points, but besides that I think I made a decent presentation. It was weird synching my presentation with my powerpoint slides, but I guess that’s something that I’ll have to learn. I don’t know how much some of the computer science professors there got out of my talk since it was mostly philosophy, but I think one of them was pretty engaged in the topic, but that might also be simply because he was my computer science advisor.

There were a couple of interesting things that did happen during my presentation, however. I was unaware of either of these happenings until some of my classmates told me about them after my presentation. First, it seems to me that I must have bored one of the profs to death as I was told he spent a decent portion of my presentation time with his eyes thoroughly closed. Maybe he was concentrating hard on what I said……but I’m going to go with the more obvious answer and say that he was probably sleeping. Now I know how professors must feel when students fall asleep on them. It really didn’t bother me that much, except for the fact that he was grading my presentation. Hopefully he’ll give a good grade since he can’t really criticize what he didn’t hear.

The other incident seems very comical now that I think about it. During the middle of my presentation, one of the other computer science professors was going to throw away his pop can in the garbage outside of the room in which I was presenting. Not wanting to interrupt, he decided he wouldn’t throw the can in and let it rattle, but would instead set it at the bottom of the garbage. Now realize that the top of the garbage can has a small hole about the size of a 20 oz. pop bottle. As he was setting it at the bottom, his arm became lodged in the garbage so for the next five minutes or so, he was struggling with the garbage trying to simultaneously get his hand out while being quiet. From what my classmates tell me, it was hilarious and they were doing all they could to keep from bursting into laughter during my presentation. Most people might be annoyed by this, but I’m glad I had some comedy during my presentation. It just wouldn’t be normal for me to do something completely serious.

Now that I have that done with, what am I going to do with my time? Well, it won’t be as free as I thought as I have some web work to do for Kingland and a couple more papers to write for my other classes.