OpenSees Blog Delurking Week

It's 2021 International Blog Delurking Week--the first full week of January. A lot has changed since last year's delurking week. Whether you lurk, running OpenSees in your cave, or actively comment here on the blog or on the OpenSees message board or Facebook group, please say "Hello" in the Comments section and let everyone know … Continue reading OpenSees Blog Delurking Week →

OpenSees Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, I'm thankful that you're here reading the blog. Last year's Thanksgiving post was a little preachy. This year, I simply want to reiterate that I'm thankful to have been a part of OpenSees from the beginning. Some exciting things are happening with OpenSees right now and … Continue reading OpenSees Thanksgiving →

Twitter Bot 200

The OpenSees Twitter bot, the one that likes and retweets any tweet with the hashtags #OpenSees or #OpenSeesPy, passed the 200 follower mark recently after just under a year in service. The bot's mission is to share with the Twitterverse all the cool things people do with OpenSees. Some day I'd like to create a … Continue reading Twitter Bot 200 →

A Quad Out West

I wrote this limerick in 2000 after coding the four node quad element in OpenSees. I once programmed a quad out West, Displacement-based, so not the best. Debugged emphatically, Converges quadratically. It even passes the patch test. I'm no Chris Jones. This and the algorithmic limerick are the extent of my limerick library.

Early Landscape of OpenSees

In 2016, a photographer recreated historic photos of Chinese cities to highlight the changes the cities have undergone. For example, here is a spot in Chengdu in 1994 and 2016. (I agree, 1994 is not that historic). Photo from dheera.net licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1999, when I started working on OpenSees (G3 at … Continue reading Early Landscape of OpenSees →

NaBloPoMo 2020 – OpenSees Edition

November is National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo. The goal is to write a blog post a day for the full month of November, and in doing so, engage readers and get the creative juices flowing. November is also NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but we're talking about blog posts, not journal articles. Each day … Continue reading NaBloPoMo 2020 – OpenSees Edition →

Glenn Holcomb, The Prof.

The Glenn Willis Holcomb Professorship in Structural Engineering was established at Oregon State University (OSU) in 2011 through a gift from the estate of Col. Roy C. Edgerton. While Col. Edgerton had an impressive civil engineering career, this post will focus on "The Prof." Glenn Holcomb joined the faculty at OSU in 1920 (when OSU … Continue reading Glenn Holcomb, The Prof. →

Where Is Eastchester?

I often mention Eastchester in posts, referring to a conversation with "a colleague in Eastchester" or showing an example from "a class I teach in Eastchester". But where is Eastchester? You won't find it on any map of the US Pacific Northwest. Eastchester is the home of fictional Cascadia College in Bernard Malamud's novel A New Life, … Continue reading Where Is Eastchester? →

Blog Delurking Week

I found out that this week, the first full week of January, is International Blog Delurking Week. Go ahead, Google it. This is a week where followers of a blog are asked to say "Hello" and comment on what they hope to see from the blog in the new year. Besides a GUI that does … Continue reading Blog Delurking Week →

OpenSees Twitter Bot

Twitter fascinates me. Not only because it's a platform where many academics disseminate the latest additions to their CVs, but also because it has an Application Programming Interface (API) through which you can automate all kinds of stuff. One cool thing I've come across is bots that automatically retweet and/or favorite tweets that contain specific … Continue reading OpenSees Twitter Bot →