Well, I got called into the boss’s (math dept. chair) office yesterday. Evidently sneakers, shorts (cut off cargo pants), and a T-shirt displaying the musical theory of E( it’s equal to F flat instead of mc²) isn’t up to the department’s standard. Not that there is an official standard of course. Oh well, it probably had something to do with the fact that we had to take pictures for the yearbook that day. Oops.

Scout is upstairs cooing right now. I think she might be waking up soon. She still has a fairly regular routine at night. She gets up at midnight(ish) for a bottle, then again at 5:00(ish). With some convincing I’m usually able to get her back to sleep at 5:00 unless she wakes up Drake. Drake will go back to sleep, not Scout at that point. Melinda and Drake went to do some shopping and I got to stay home with Scout. We listened to music and danced a little. She likes to spin.

Drake has really taken to an old toy of mine recently. It’s a three wheel thing without pedals. I reckon it’s supposed to be an ATV. Drake calls it his motorcycle and like to ride it around in circles through the living room, kitchen, and hall announcing “motorcycle coming!” He’s a hoot. We watched a video with him tonight that we borrowed from a friend about trains. I found out something I didn’t know. If a train is trying to go up a steep incline and it loses traction, there is a pipe right behind the wheels on the engine that spits out sand to provide more friction. Neat. I think we’re going to watch another one tomorrow. The deal was that if Drake didn’t get upset when we turned off the video, we would watch another tomorrow night. He was a little fussy, but I think he did pretty well.

I think that there is a Renaissance Fair on Dauphin Island this weekend. We may try to go to that, but I’m afraid that it would be too crowded because of the holiday weekend. We’ll see. We had also talked aboout going on a camping trip next weekend. We’re waiting to see what the weather will be like. There is a state park (Blakely Park) less than 5 miles from our house that we were planning on going to. That way, if it’s a disaster we can always punt and go home.

My Tau Kappa Epsilon letter shirt came in today. I think it looks pretty nice. I think the students will get a kick out of me wearing it at school. Those folks are really a bunch of great guys. Turns out that Tau Kappa Epsilon is the largest frat in the country and the Spring Hill chapter (which is less than 10 years old I think) was voted the nations best chapter three or four times. I gotta admit, it’s kinda neat to know a secret handshake.

Wow, I heard about this on the radio this morning. Evidently in U.K. cigarette packaging is going to be a little different. Instead of just the warning written on the side they will now print pictures on the front, including a diseased lung, a dead body and a picture of someone with their chest opened for heart surgery. Wow.

On a personal and sort of bizarre note, I had a student in my precalculus class this morning ask if I would be the faculty advisor for the archery club. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll have time, but that could have been really neat. She (the lady starting the club) evidently placed third in a national archery competition. She uses a recurve bow; I’m too much of a wimp for that.

After a few mishaps which “will only take me a minute” to fix, my code is now up and running (again) and I hope to collect some decent data over the next few months. I reckon I can go ahead and write the majority of the paper and just leave the appropriate holes for the data and graphics. There are a couple of technical issues I will need to work out and so this might be fun to try to do with some unsuspecting undergrad. I’ll just have to see. I also contacted a fella that proved a particular case of a conjecture I had in my dissertation. With his ideas I think we can push through and prove the conjecture outright! That would be really neat. I sent him my thoughts yesterday, so I just have to wait and see if he responds.

Melinda, Drake, and Scout have headed off to the Explorium (the local science museum) this morning. Drake really likes playing there. They have a large area dedicated to kids under five years (the wharf of wonder) which is a boat sitting in a sea of those plastic balls you find at places like Chuck E Cheese. There’s also a light house (including light and a foghorn, which Drake loves) and a dock including a shop. It’s really a marvelous place for kids. It’s gated too, so you don’t need to worry much about your kid escaping. The Mom’s club frequently makes trips there. I can’t wait to hear about it.

The other night, I guess it was two nights ago, we were all marching upstairs to put Drake to bed. I can’t remember exactly what Drake and I were talking about as we walked upstairs, but I do remember that he asked my “why?” That’s a first. I expect I’ll be hearing a lot of that soon.

Scout is still winning the award for sweetest baby around. Unless she’s really hungry or really tired, she is always smiling and laughing. Especially at Drake. She absolutely cackles when Drake plays with her. She now has two teeth in the bottom of her mouth and we think that she may be getting another one in too. I think she’s also getting close to puling up.

Good news and bad news. A while back Melinda had an allergic reaction to something while we were staying with her parents. One of Melinda’s fears was that it was chocolate. Turns out it might have been ants. She was bitten several times today while outside and the individual bites swelled about as much as mosquito bites do for me. Then later on, it looked like a rash was starting to form. She took some Benadryl^TM and that seemed to nip it in the bud. She’s currently sleeping like a stone, as are the kids. So, she’s having a potential allergic reaction, but it’s not because of the chocolate.

I meant to show you all one of the most ridiculous things I had ever seen. As you may know, another fella in the math dept. is not at all pleased with the new rooms we have. He evidently asked several times that the rooms be soundproof so that he would not be disturbed while waxing mathematic. Well, long story short, the rooms are (of course) not sound proof and he made quite a stink about it. The real drag for me is that the room opposite his is mine and so he has been dragging me into the mess insinuating that I too am not able to do any work because of the lack of absolute silence. I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one side, I have to work in the same department with this guy, so I don’t want to tell him to leave me out of it. On the other hand, I don’t want to buck the administration either. *sigh* At any rate, during the last meeting which included the science division chair, the head of the builiding and operations department, and the provost of the school (second, third, and fourth in the school’s hierarchy only leaving out the president) it was made quite clear that they were not willing to spend any more money trying to soundproof the walls. They had evidently already double insulated the dividing wall and done some extra duct work in the ceiling. In a last ditch effort a white noise generator was suggested. These things are supposed to supply ambient background noise that would lessen the effect of sharp spikes in noise. Whatever. Well, they came in the other day. I didn’t know it, but I got one too. Check it out.

It sounds like a fan, but according to the directions it’s better. There are two ways to adjust the sound. They each change the level of air that is allowed to escape. The change is not unlike someone having a fan in a room and slowly opening and closing the door. I’m not real sure why this is better. A fan has the added benefit of circulating air.

In more academic related news, I think the math club is now official. So, I’ll get to start helping out with that. I had thought that the math club might be a good forum to excite students about some research. In a grant writting committee I mentioned that I had a project that I was wanting to work on with some students. (Remember all that stuff I mentioned in a previous post dealing with FORTRAN libraries? That’s it.) The real hard part about getting a group of students together is finding some way to advertise. The project won’t need much more than Calc III and some programming skills, so I think that this would be doable by more than just math majors. If the math club thing happens, at least I’ll be able to pitch it to some students and hopefully they can get the word around.

Sorry I missed the post last night. It was my hope that I could spend some time writing blogs while Melinda puts Drake to sleep. We have somehow fallen into the habit of Daddy/Scout Mommy/Drake pairings when it is time for the kids to go to bed. Every now and again we attempt a switch but Drake and Scout are quick to let us know that we’ve screwed up. That’s what happened last night.

Today I have almost three full hours to work on some research. I have two projects that I would like to work on. One of them is essentially done, I just need to run a program for a couple of months (it’s already written), collect the data, and write up a small report. The other involves writing code for a project that was started as a research experience for undergraduates at UGA. It’s potentially very neat. I’ll need to write a gradient descent algorithm with a bit of a twist. The twist involves performing a computation that is numerically unstable in its simplest form. There is code already developed, which I can port directly, that does what I need in a numerically stable and hopefully fast way. Interestingly, the libraries are written in FORTRAN 77. They have been ported to C, but I am toying with the idea of trying to write code in FORTRAN, just to refresh my mad programming skills. I am somewhat reluctant to do that though because there is a piece of the algorithm that is fairly nasty to code, and has already been done in C (by someone who is not me). We shall see.

Classes went well(ish) yesterday. I got to teach my upper division class (Abstract Algebra), and I think that the class went well. I was a little dissapointed that none of them seemed to remember anything from linear algebra (the course I taught them last spring). It makes me a little nervous that nobody objected to the statement that every nxn matrix has an inverse. When I reminded them that this was not the case and asked how you check, no one remembered what a determinant was or how you use it. *sigh* Oh well.

I plan on grading a little harder this year. I’m afraid I was too soft on my students last year. That was not to their advantage. I wish that several of my professors at West Georgia had been a little more demanding of me. Perhaps then I would not have had so much of a hard first year at Georgia Tech.

I finally have my office looking roughly how I want it to. I had to take many (most) of my books home, but I still have enough here so I can get some work done (right). Here it is in all of its glory.

It appears that I have had some success trying to install WordPress. It is my hope that I will be able to update this page on a quasi-regular basis. This blog will for the most part be on an invitation only status. I hope to be able to post some pictures of Drake and Scout, but I’d rather they not be widely available to the outside world. Mercifully, WordPress has a password feature when writing posts/pages so that should add a little more security.

Although this is the same software that we are using at Spring Hill to update the Science Division departmental pages, I am largely unfamiliar with many of its features. I have weak access to the site at Spring Hill and I’m rather excited about being able to view/modify the css and php files for this blog. That written, there will probably be some periods of downtime for this blog when I am trying to figure out how to undo what I should not have done.

On a personal note, I started teaching classes today. I taught a section of precalculus and a section of calculus. Each class was held in one of the new (to Spring Hill) modular trailers. I wonder how pleased the well-to-do parents are about sending their kids to a $20,000+ per year school and having them take classes in a trailer. Oh well. At any rate, I again introduced each class as a chance for students to learn the practical side of how to survive a zombie outbreak. There were a couple of students that seemed confused, and many other that seemed amused. It looks like it is going to be fun. Ah well, I need to head off to bed. Melinda just came downstairs muttering something about “that son of yours…” and I think my uppence is about to come.