I, Matthew A. Smith, in the nineth tenth year of the second third millenium*, hereby resolve to:

1. Travel to at least 50 places I’ve never been before
2. Get in the best shape of my life
3. Look for adventure in the mundane
4. Drink less alcohol
5. Eat better
6. Save $15,000
7. Redesign my website, and actually roll out a complete site on time
8. Create more videos
9. Take more pictures
10. Post content regularly, and of greater variety (see also, number 7)

Now, let’s see if I can pull this off… What about you?

*2000 would be the first year of the third millenium, correct… I originally had 1008?

Unfortunately the truth is a little more realistic. It is indeed true that I am an engineer, and also true that I have successfully completed years of advanced math courses. It is also true that I don’t employ the concepts learned on a daily basis and that “use it or [it will be relegated to the dark corners of the mind]” also applies. The fact is as follows: I haven’t explicitly used related rates in the past two years (though I have employed many theorems built upon the foundation of differential calculus). My first thought when asked? “Related rates… uh, I don’t remember those.” Fortunately Wikipedia came to the rescue with a nice brain-jogging overview.

After sitting down to analyze a few sample problems, I realized that in the brief time since I last did math homework, I had forgotten many important math principles. Fortunately I still remember how to add and subtract, but principles such as the chain rule (remember our old friends fog and gog?) had slipped my mind. Problems that should be simple ended up requiring a thirty minute review of the basics of differentiation. Thankfully, after about an hour of contemplation, I was able to solve the sample problems and drag some of those math skills (kicking and screaming, of course) from the dusty corners of my mind. Once I was able to do that, I was then able to create a plausible explanation of the concepts for my friend. I have yet to formulate an excuse as to why I did not know all the answers instantaneously.

In case you were wondering, related rates problems are called related rates because the rates are, well… related. All problems will center around a known rate (or derivative, dx/dt) and an unknown rate (dy/dt), some sort of equation that relates the known rate to the unknown rate for which you must solve (the Pythagorean theorem seems to be a favorite). Thus, all problems should reduce to something in the form of “dy/dt = a* dx/dt” where a is simply a constant multiplier that relates the known rate to the unknown rate. The only things that should change is the value of a, which could be positive or negative (and actually working through the steps to solve the problem is the simplest way to discover the sign and value of a). Of course, your problem could use completely different variables then x, y, and t… but the premise is the same.

I’m sure that didn’t make any sense, and I also do not have any facility on my site for displaying nicely formatted equations, so I apologize but I’m not going to torture you with a step-by-step walk through with textual representations of the math. The Wikipedia page on related rates is handy, as is a quick review of implicit differentiation (also try a google search). Oh and the image at the top of the post has nothing to do with related rates… but it does have something to do with differential equations (read about it here). And as usual, if you have comments or questions, use the comment form and we can start a math discussion!

Maybe on Monday I’ll have a few minutes to sit down and finish some other articles I’m working on.

Anyway, have a good weekend and enjoy your Columbus day (even if you have to work)!

Thursday afternoon, I packed my car and started the first leg of my trip. I was headed to Montgomery, Alabama, where I was to spend the night with my friend Matt who would be accompanying me for the remainder of the journey. Strangely enough, less than twenty minutes outside of Warner Robins, I ran into the hardest rain I would see for the duration of my expedition. Fortunately, the rain slacked up and turned into more of an annoyance than a hazard after about thirty minutes and I continued on my way. In Columbus, I began to notice strange electrical issues – radio shutting off, various vehicle electronics restarting, lights dimming, etc. Knowing that my battery was rather old, I stopped at a friendly Wal-Mart to purchase a replacement. To my chagrin, the weather decided that it would be funny to unleash annother torrential downpour. Undeterred, I purchased the new battery and proceeded out into the tempest, where I was immediately soaked to the bone. Despite the unfortunate weather, I proceeded to hunker over the trunk of the BMW, attempting to replace the battery using nothing but the clumsy “tools” provided in the on-board tool kit. Finally, after several minutes and the liberal application of “blue words,” my task was complete and my car functional once again. Note to BMW: please include better tools. Of course, the minute I completed my task, the rain stopped. Thankfully it was late in the evening; otherwise I’m pretty sure the sun would have come out just to spite me.

Annoyed and wet, but happy that my car was functional once again, I resumed my travels and after another hour or so arrived at Matt’s humble abode in Montgomery. I enjoyed getting to spend the evening catching up with the latest events in Matt’s life, such as law school. Ever the gracious host, Matt managed to make a delicious dinner and scrumptious chocolate cake, between furtive glimpses at the imposing mountain of textbooks lying unassumingly on his desk.

Friday, Matt had to attend law classes from early in the morning until sometime in the afternoon, after which we planned to embark on the final leg of our journey to LSU. I awoke sometime after noon and decided, after watching the television for a few minutes, that I should venture out into the city and have a look around. After checking the car out and topping off a few fluids, I proceeded gingerly away from the apartment. Once out upon the main road, I headed off in search of something, assisted by my trusty iPhone. And then I ran across a Best Buy. After leaving the electronics emporium, I decided that I should find the school Matt attends and surprise him. Unfortunately, I googled the name of the law school (Thomas B. Goode School of Law), not the name of the actual college (Falkner University). Thinking I was headed in the correct direction, I followed iPhone’s directions right into… the middle of nowhere.

Finally realizing my mistake I called Matt and remedied the situation in short order. Upon arriving at the campus (which wasn’t terribly far away – middle of nowhere ended up being the edge of somewhere), I was taken on a brief tour of the law school, which ended in the library where Matt was hurriedly attempting to “finish up some work” before leaving town. I should have noticed the theme then and there.

Anyway, after running a few errands and totally missing our goal of leaving Montgomery by 5 pm, we hit I-65 around 7 pm. A few miles out of Montgomery and we hit the second (and final) rainstorm of our trip. Weird, all that rain and none of it in Louisiana (hah, take that mom). After trekking through the bleak stretches of Alabama and rolling along I-10 and I-12 for a while, we arrived at our destination unscathed! After getting settled in, out came those textbooks once again.

Law school, gee what fun!

The game day festivities were all wonderful as expected. We spent part of the time walking around LSU’s campus and doing that whole ‘tailgating’ thing that’s oh so fun. After that got old, we headed to a nearby apartment to watch the game on TV, with all the comforts of indoor living complemented with substantial quantities of beverage and food. What great fun!

After the win, we headed back for a night of rest and to prepare for the trip back, which was relatively uneventful and boring. Sunshine, no rain, etc. One thing did strike me as curious - while I was busy tailgating, I kept getting these strange reports of outrageously priced gasoline, all the way back in Macon. Rumors of gas shortages, $5/gallon gas, etc. However, in Baton Rouge, prices remained the same and there were no lines or panic at the pumps. However, the closer we got to home, the higher the prices seemed to creep… by the time I arrived in Macon, gas was $1/gallon more than in Baton Rouge.

Weird.

[Show as slideshow]

I’m currently writing from Montgomery, Alabama, where I will be spending the night and morning with my friend Matt before we head on over to Louisiana. So far I’ve driven through some nasty rain in Georgia and had to replace my aging car battery in Columbus… hopefully the rest of the trip will run smoothly and without any further car repair purchases.

Tomorrow night should find us at a pub crawl in New Orleans and then Saturday will be filled with tailgating goodness. I plan on returning to Metro Macon sometime Sunday evening, armed with tails of debaucheries and video evidence of our celebrations. Hurray!!

Now to avoid that hurricane…

ps. Image is from Wikimedia commons. Unfortunately I don’t believe I’ll be quite that close to any LSU cheerleaders this weekend.

Reasons I’m Sad

• No more staying up until 3AM
• No more sleeping ’til 12PM
• No more all night parties
• I have to pay bills

Reasons I’m Happy

• No more finals or exams
• No more school loans
• No more drama (who am I kidding)

Anyway, I’ll be around Macon (and the rest of Georgia) next year. I have accepted a job at RAFB doing some sort of engineering work and I’ll be living with another ATO alumnus who is buying a new house about ten minutes from campus. The party shall continue (but only on the weekends)!

On another note, I’m going to be around Macon from now until I start my job at the end of June (aside from a couple weeks of vacation), so be sure and look me up. I want to hang out and enjoy my last few weeks of freedom!

Martha Blalock Hawkins Jolley

MACON – After a 2 year battle with Parkinson’s disease, Martha Blalock Hawkins Jolley, 76. of Macon, passed away at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Sally and Terry Theus. Visitation services will be held Monday, February 18, at 2:30 p.m. (EST) in the chapel of Hart’s Mortuary in Macon, GA with a Memorial Service immediately following at 4:00 p.m. (EST). A graveside service will be held Tuesday, February 19, 1:30 p.m. (CST) at Hillcrest Cemetery in Boaz, AL.

Mrs. Jolley was a member of the Baptist faith, she taught Sunday School and hosted a weekly Radio Bible Hour for Second Baptist Church in Warner Robins during the 1960′s and 70′s. She was a member of Women’s Aglow and hosted a Bible study at the Villas in Macon for several years. Born to Omer L. Blalock and Sally Mae Johnson, she was predeceased by her husband, Robert Hawkins, 5 sisters and one brother.

She is survived by her husband, Rev. Donald Jolley, son Jim (Tammy) Hawkins of Macon, GA, daughters and sons-in-law, Sandra (Judd) Smith of Macon, GA, Sally (Terry) Theus of Macon, GA, 9 grandsons and 2 granddaughters, sisters, Betty Otinger of Boaz, AL, Johnie Lynch of Huntsville, AL, Chessie Mason of Guntersville, AL, numerous nieces and nephews.

Hart’s Mortuary and Crematory in charge of arrangements.

The pictures and video that will be displayed at the visitation are the same ones that I worked with on the “family photo project.”

Speaking of work, I’ve been developing some Windows scripts to help with system administration. They may be simple but I think that they are super-cool! I’ve been learning to work with WMI through JScript (not because I love WSH or JScript or anything, but it’s built into all the machines I manage and JScript looks more like the languages I’m familiar with than VBScript… read this for some other reasons) and it allows me to do some really cool things. The coolest part is that these functions can be executed against either a local machine or a remote machine… which means I could write some scripts that scan the network and create reports of certain configuration settings on all the machines that are found. I’ll be writing more on this later, and probably create a site section dedicated to these code snippets I’ve been creating (they are reusable and can be inserted into many scripts).

Ps, Thank You Kenneth

On a side note, thanks Kenneth for all your comments! If you don’t know, I love receiving comments on my posts (and I reply to them) because it reminds me that people actually read this stuff! It’s fun to have a little dialog on the website from time to time… so if you’re feeling game, don’t hesitate to drop a line – even if it’s just to say hi!

With all that in mind, those are just excuses, since it really doesn’t take a whole lot of time to just sit here and hammer out some words. I will try to mak more of an effort to keep giving you something to read…assuming there are people out there who actually read this (at least Matt will, right?). If you, the reader, have any thoughts on something you’d like to hear me write about, just let me know. Me and Matt had some big plans on something things to write going into the school year, maybe we can pick some of those back up, who knows? Anyway, don’t touch that dial…