Making Sound Waves

While enjoying ZeroPoMo, I've spent a little time over the last few days with the OpenAI API. To make a long story short, with a lot of help from ChatGPT I built a small LLM that generates blog posts written in the voice of my already published blog posts. I used the text-embedding-3-small model for … Continue reading Making Sound Waves →

OpenSees Malapropisms

Whether it's Yogi Berra describing switch hitters or Charles Shackleford remarking on his ability to sink shots right-handed or left-handed, "amphibious" was not the word these athletes were looking for to describe ambidexterity. This type of humorous mistake, from the misuse of similar sounding words, is known as a malapropism. The best malapropisms come from … Continue reading OpenSees Malapropisms →

OpenSees Pirate Jokes

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a "holiday" that originated in 1995 just up the road from Eastchester. Corollaries between OpenSees and pirate speak be plenty. Whether you are a landlubber getting your OpenSees legs or an old salt who doesn't need documentation, Google, or ChatGPT to define a 3D model of RC … Continue reading OpenSees Pirate Jokes →

Scribbled Lines

Like many people who were, have been, or will be around for long enough after 1973, every listen of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon amazes me. The album covers themes ranging from greed to existentialism. My standout track is Time. Most of the song's lyrics hit right on the nose: The sun is … Continue reading Scribbled Lines →

Hold on Loosely

Today I was setting up some GitHub Actions involving private repository A checking out and doing some stuff with private repository B, which happens to be home to BennySparse. After spending a couple hours generating personal access tokens and creating GitHub secrets then attempting to use the tokens and secrets in a .yml file, I … Continue reading Hold on Loosely →

The Emperors of OpenSees

A drabble is a piece of micro-fiction that is exactly 100 words long. Drabble can also mean to make dirty by dragging through mud or to fish with a long line, i.e., to troll. Herewith, I present my first drabble, The Emperors of OpenSees. Self-ordained during a void in the before time, the Emperors of … Continue reading The Emperors of OpenSees →

Egg-Centric OpenSees Jokes

As far as I know, OpenSees has no Easter eggs. But perhaps we should hide a few, e.g., to congratulate users who reach exactly zero for the norm of the residual or to deride those who use more than two integration points in a dispBeamColumn element. While you're waiting for OpenSees Easter eggs to be … Continue reading Egg-Centric OpenSees Jokes →

2024 In Review

2024 is coming to an end, so it's time for the obligatory review of blog stats and traffic for the year. The summary below is based on how WordPress keeps statistics. Word Count Published in 2024: 59 posts 30,991 words 525 words per post Assuming a journal article is 10,000 words, this year's word count … Continue reading 2024 In Review →

See You in December

This is my last post for November 2024. I will fail the NaBloPoMo one-post-a-day challenge. Or perhaps I will pass with 90%, or an A-, for 27 posts (including today) out of 30 days. Either way, there's nothing to prove. Time to focus on quality, not quantity. Thanksgiving is tomorrow in the United States. Or … Continue reading See You in December →

OpenSees Tom Swifties

According to its Wikipedia page, a Tom Swifty is "a phrase in which a quoted sentence is linked by a pun to the manner in which it [the quoted sentence] is attributed". For example, here is a Tow Swifty to which OpenSees users can relate: "I completed my first nonlinear frame analysis!", Tom beamed. This phrase uses "beamed" to … Continue reading OpenSees Tom Swifties →