So, I finally managed to get the site to a new server. The old server was on its last legs and I don't know how much longer it was going to last. At this point I think I have most of the bugs associated with newer versions of OS/software than I'm used to working with worked out. Or at least I hope so....

Well Hurricane Ike moved through here last Friday and I think it caught a lot of people a little off guard. We were quite a way from the center of the storm but we were in the northeast quadrant (the worst one to be in on a hurricane) and suffered extensive damage. I think we all new we were in for a rough ride, but just not to the extent that it ended up being.....

Beaumont (where Lamar University and the server is located) didn't have anywhere near as much damage as Bolivar Peninsula, Crystal Beach or Bridge City suffered, but we still saw pretty extensive damage.

The folks down here to help us recover have done an amazing job at getting us back on our feet. Most are still without power but they got the University up and running much quicker than they did after Hurricane Rita hit here 3 years ago (and I mean almost literally 3 years ago - only off by a couple of weeks...) so it looks like we're on the road to recovery!

Gas and food are still a little hard to find down here but if you were properly prepared (luckily I was as I had enough food and water for a week or so) you should be okay for a few more days and by then the situation should be much better.

Anyway, the site is back up and hopefully there won't be any interuptions but please be aware that it is completely possible that they will need to power down the grid a few times as they work to restore power to everyone. That did happen a few times after Hurricane Rita so I'm expecting it to happen here as well at least a few times. In those cases I'll work to get the site back up as soon as I can and I really do apologize for the inconvience all this has caused.

I managed to get Google's new Custom Search Engine up and running on the site today. This means you can now search from any page (which is a big improvement in my opinion) and you can also "refine" the search results to only those pages from say Calculus instead of from all the possible pages.

I finally managed to get my differential equations notes updated with new material! Here are the main updates.

1. Added a section on solving Bernoulli Differential Equations to the first order chapter.
   
   
2. Added a section on using Substitutions to solve first order differential equations.
   
   
3. Added a chapter on Higher Order Differential Equations. This chapter addresses nth order linear differential equations as well as a brief discussion on how to extend the material on 2 x 2 systems of differential equations to 3 x 3 systesm of differential equations.
   
   
4. Added a chapter covering basic Boundary Value Problems & Fourier Series. This chapter really just scratches the surface on these two subjects are are here to give you an idea of what's involved in these two topics as well as prepare for some basic partial differential equations.
   
   
5. Added a chapter covering the Separation of Variables method for solving partial differential equations. This chapter does not cover the method in complete detail but gives a basic overview of the method. In the process the Heat Equation, Wave Equation and 2-D Laplace's Equation.

I added in a new page to the Calculus I notes today. In the Applications of Integrals chapter I added in section on More Volume Problems. This section is about volume problems that are not solids of revolution or can't be be easily done as volumes of revolution.

It seems like the only news items that I ever put up here are outage notifications these days....

Not sure what the problem was yesterday. All we were told is that it was something "outside the Universities control" which covers just about every kind of possible cause.

Anyway, sorry for the outage and hopefully we won't have anymore this semester.

As I'm sure many have noticed I was down yet again. I'm assuming that it was still related to Humberto in some way but I don't know that it was a power outage. If it was it must have been less than 20 minutes as that's how long my backup power will keep my server running. All that I know is that the switches in the building were down again.....

Sorry about all these outages. I really wish that they could get some reliable switches in our building but to be blunt my server is the only server in this building and so since none of their stuff is here they don't seem to worry too much about the odd outage every once in a while.

So. I go to bed Wednesday night thinking that I might get woken up at some point by a tropical storm if the winds are blowing just right (i.e. blowing the rain straight at my bedroom window) and there is lots of thunder. In other words, I expected nothing different than when tropical storm Allison came through here a few years back. I didn't even bother to make sure to have a lot of supplies on hand in case of an emergency and I'm generally anal enough about that kind of thing that I have more supplies earlier than most.

So, I go to bed not expecting anything and instead I get woken up by a HURRICANE. That sucks. Supposedly it has set a record for strengthening when that close to land. On top of all that it is almost exactly two years after hurricane Rita roared through here. It's been years since a hurricane has come up through this area and now we get two pretty much direct hits in two years. Hopefully this will be it for awhile....

The good thing about Humberto is that it wasn't Rita. After Rita hit Lamar and my apartment was without power for 2-3 weeks (that was tons of fun....) and others were without power for far longer. There were close to 100,000 without power this time after Humberto was done but I never lost power at my place and parts of Lamar was without power for awhile. The problem is that the switch in the building that houses my server never reboots properly after a power failure (as I was reminded of last week as well) and so even though power came back on right away it took longer to get the server back onto the net.

So, I apologize for the outage over the last day and a half or so and I hope that there won't be anymore outages over the next couple of days. I do however recall that after I finally got power back after Rita that was several days before power was back reliably so I may get knocked back off the net occasionally over the next couple of days.

Tropical Storm Humberto is on track to make landfall quite near us as a "high end" tropical storm. Tropical Storm Allison several years ago only cause lots of flooding and no power outages so I don't anticipate any issues with the site but can't guarantee that there won't be an outage sometime tomorrow/Friday. If there are any power outages I anticipate things should come back up pretty quickly....

I just got the server switched over to the switch it is supposed to be one and it sounds like that switch just didn't reboot properly after power was restored. So there shouldn't be any more network problems related to the switch.

Problems related to the power outage however are a different issue. Apparently one of the main lines was damaged and all they managed to do was put a patch in place and so at some time in the next month or two we'll lose power again while they completely replace the damaged line.

I'll try to let you know when I expect to go back down again, provided they let me know that is....