Matt Smith

More than a laugh out loud travel memoir, Dear Bob and Sue: Season 2 will bring to life the joy of discovery, the pure satisfaction of accomplishment, and the humor that comes with experiencing new places and activities. Season 2 is the follow-up to Dear Bob and Sue, a charming and sometimes irreverent chronicle of a middle-aged couple as they visit each of the country's fifty-nine national parks, testing their mettle and stretching their endurance. In their second book of the series, follow Matt and Karen as they work their way around the western United States discovering some of our most beautiful public lands, hidden gems, and revisiting a few of their favorite national parks. This book is not a hiker's guide, though you will feel as if you are right there with them on some of the most amazing trails the country has to offer. Through a series of emails written to their friends, Bob and Sue, the couple brings the reader along on their adventures, sharing their experiences as they hike the lesser known parks and national monuments. By the end of the book, you'll be itching to drag out your hiking boots, dust off your tent, and discover the culinary joy of eating freeze-dried meals next to a campfire. If you are looking for a fun and easy read that takes you to new and exciting places, the Dear Bob and Sue series is for you.

Travel with Matt and Karen as they float down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In September 2016, they experienced the trip of a lifetime with 14 friends and a crew of 10 while traveling in wooden dories through the canyon. Dories, Ho is a story of their adventure and discovery. Similar to their first travel memoir Dear Bob and Sue, this book is as much about their relationship as it is their fantastic trip. Matt and Karen's quirky writing style is both humorous and irreverent. It's fun, laugh out loud, and an easy read. While not intended to be a traditional guidebook, anyone contemplating a river trip through the Grand Canyon will benefit from this firsthand account. The reader will feel as if they've traveled with the authors on their journey to and through Grand Canyon National Park. If you are looking for a story that will make you laugh and inspire you to get out and see our incredible national parks, Dories, Ho is for you.

Anyone interested in playing blues guitar can pick up this well-paced, comprehensive method and get started right away. Beginning concepts include blues theory, left-hand technique, call-and-response phrasing, intros, turnarounds, improvisation, and the rhythmic styles of Texas swing, slow blues, and minor blues. Intermediate topics include phrasing, fills, non-scale tones, chord extensions, substitutions, and "Licks of the Masters." The book concludes with advanced techniques such as composite scales, the Mixolydian mode, arpeggio superimpositions, the eight-bar blues, gospel blues, minor blues, and techniques of great players like Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Freddie King, B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, and many others. Whether you are just starting to learn guitar or are an advanced player looking to improve your playing, this is the one book on blues guitar you will ever need. This complete edition includes a full instructional video, available online via streaming or download, hosted by guitar virtuoso Jared Meeker for each book it includes, Beginning, Intermediate, and Mastering Blues Guitar. MP3 audio files for all three books are also available online. Includes: * Examples in easy-to-read TAB and standard music notation * Large chord and scale diagrams * Licks in the styles of blues masters * Eight- and twelve-bar solo examples * Techniques and theory for lead and rhythm guitar playing

Over 100 recipes exploring the new and exciting features of Unity 5 to spice up your Unity skillset About This Book • Built on the solid foundation of the popular Unity 4.x Cookbook, the recipes in this edition have been completely updated for Unity 5 • Features recipes for both 2D and 3D games • Provides you with techniques for the new features of Unity 5, including the new UI system, 2D game development, new Standard Shaders, and the new Audio Mixer Who This Book Is For From beginners to advanced users, from artists to coders, this book is for you and everyone in your team! Programmers can explore multimedia features, and multimedia developers can try their hand at scripting. Basic knowledge and understanding of the Unity platform, game design principles, and programming knowledge in C# is essential. What You Will Learn • Immerse players with great audio, utilizing Unity 5's audio features including the new Audio Mixer, ambient sound with Reverb Zones, dynamic soundtracks with Snapshots, and balanced audio via Ducking • Create better materials with Unity's new, physically-based, Standard Shader • Measure and control time, including pausing the game, displaying clocks and countdown timers, and even implementing “bullet time” effects • Improve ambiance through the use of lights and effects such as reflection and light probes • Create stylish user interfaces with the new UI system, including power-bars, clock displays, and an extensible inventory system • Save and load text and media assets from local or remote sources, publish your game via Unity Cloud, and communicate with websites and their databases to create online scoreboards • Discover advanced techniques, including the publisher-subscriber and state patterns, performance bottleneck identification, and methods to maximize game performance and frame rates • Control 2D and 3D character movement, and use NavMeshAgents to write NPC and enemy behaviors such as seek, flee, flock, and waypoint path following In Detail Unity 5 is a flexible and intuitive multiplatform game engine that is becoming the industry's de facto standard. Learn to craft your own 2D and 3D computer games by working through core concepts such as animation, audio, shaders, GUI, lights, cameras, and scripting to create your own games with Unity 5. Completely re-written to cover the new features of Unity 5, this book is a great resource for all Unity game developers, from those who have recently started using Unity right up to Unity professionals. The first half of the book focuses on core concepts of 2D game design while the second half focuses on developing 3D game development skills. In the first half, you will discover the new GUI system, the new Audio Mixer, external files, and animating 2D characters in 2D game development. As you progress further, you will familiarize yourself with the new Standard Shaders, the Mecanim system, Cameras, and the new Lighting features to hone your skills towards building 3D games to perfection. Finally, you will learn non-player character control and explore Unity 5's extra features to enhance your 3D game development skills. Style and approach Each chapter first introduces the topic area and explains how the techniques covered can enhance your games. Every recipe provides step-by-step instructions, followed by an explanation of how it all works, and useful additional refinements or alternative approaches. Every required resource and C# script (fully commented) is available to download, enabling you to follow each recipe yourself.

Doctors are struggling. The profession has changed, from a craft focused on healing and built on knowledge, thought, and character, to what ends up feeling more and more like a factory job with an assembly line mentality, concerned primarily with budgets and efficiency. Doctors have gone from leaders to servants. Stress, uncertainty, and burnout have naturally followed. This is not a book about health care policy, or about what might, could, or should happen in the future. Instead, it's a book to help every doctor understand what is happening - to him, to his colleagues, and to his profession - and to help everyone who works with doctors understand how to harness the power of doctors in order to move health care forward. It's a book that shows doctors what they can do to empower themselves, expand their influence, and make a difference in their professional lives, every day. Solutions to health care problems have become so much more varied and complex than they used to be - but what they all have in common is that they are filtered through doctors. And, unfortunately, too many doctors today are suffering. In this book, you can take the three-step journey to help Rescue The Doctor - REFRAME the way you see the state of health care and the changes affecting doctors worldwide, TRANSLATE these shifts into the skills that you need in order to succeed and thrive, and then DELIVER real results - along the way becoming a more fulfilled, more satisfied, and more successful doctor - a rescued one. Doctors today aren't just patient healers - they're system healers, the connectors between management and patients, research and clinics - the bridge carrying medicine forward into the future. To rescue health care, and make things better - for patients and for society - it's imperative that we Rescue The Doctor. "Pramstaller and Smith offer doctors a clear and useful roadmap to accomplish the patient work that they aspire to. When doctors reframe, translate, and deliver, they rescue themselves and serve their patients. This rescue has implications for doctors, patients, policy makers, and administrators throughout the health care system. The authors do an exceptional job of adapting management principles to physician opportunities." -- Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor of Business, University of Michigan

"A sword untried is a sword untested," says one raven to another as they set out to witness the fate of the finest farm in Garmrland and its owner, Barbarian Lord. When he is cheated out of his lands and banished, Barbarian Lord begins a quest for allies and for justice, encountering monsters, ghouls, gods, and mediocre poets along the way. Combining the rich traditions of the Vikings and Nordic lore with sword-and-sorcery-and slyly understated humor-this graphic novel introduces an original hero with classic flair, brought to life in Matt Smith's beautifully drawn, detailed, and action-filled black-and-white illustrations.

To truly be successful, today’s financial advisor must strike the right balance between effectively engaging with his or her clients and finding meaningful ways to maintain their financial security. By framing your mission in this way, you can help your clients clarify their vision, build a plan to achieve it, and manage that plan so they stay on track. Nobody understands this better than authors Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith—two seasoned financial professionals with over five decades of combined experience working in the asset management business. And now, in Someday Rich, they show financial advisors with clients who are rich, or have the opportunity to become rich, how to sustain a client’s desired lifestyle to, and through, retirement. Engaging and informative, Someday Rich provides the context, description, and implementation suggestions for the Personal Asset Liability Model—a process that will allow you to determine a client’s funded status relative to their future spending needs as well as develop and monitor their investment plan accordingly. While the methods in the Personal Asset Liability Model may not have been practically accessible to past advisors with a large number of clients, this model now brings together the technical methods to answer important client questions in a way that is feasible and includes the communication strategies that can make the delivery of the advice model more effective. Along the way, this reliable resource discusses the business of giving good advice and addresses how to incorporate these steps into a client engagement road map. Insights on various other issues associated with this discipline are also included, such as how to develop client trust and deliver personalized service when you have so many clients, and contingency risks—life, health, disability, and long-term care—that need to be considered in the financial planning process. And in later chapters, single-topic essays, contributed by experts in the financial planning field, cover issues ranging from target date funds and the investment aspects of longevity risk to modern portfolio decumulation. Building more valuable relationships with your clients is a difficult endeavor. But with Someday Rich, you’ll discover what it takes to achieve this goal as you put them on a path to a sustainable financial future.