J Ben Deaton

When optimism doesn't make you happier

I had an interesting conversation with my wife the other day. She made the comment that after every day at work, she’s usually positively surprised because she accomplished much more than she thought she would.

Opposites attract.

I’m a generally optimistic person—I don’t have to try too hard to see the silver lining in most situations. But this also means I’m overly optimistic about what I can get done in a day. I’ll start the day off with a list of ten things I can easily knock out that day, and… you can see where this is going. Often I only finish the first few things on the list.

The problem isn’t work ethic. It’s the unrealistic estimate, which leaves me disappointed at how little of my list I got through. So I’m learning to feed the inner cynic to end the day more satisfied.

Circa Trumps Moleskine

Like you, I need a new notebook like a hole in the head. But I just might have stumbled onto something with the Circa notebook.

I have always liked the Moleskine notebook. What’s not to love? In my case, two things (which are actually common to any permanently bound notebook): (a) the pages are difficult to scan and (b) I’d always wind up writing something really personal on a page and then stop using the notebook out of fear of leaving it in the office where someone might stumble upon it.

About six months ago, I stumbled onto some info about the Levenger Circa notebook (I honestly don’t remember the first source). The Circa notebook is bound using little discs which allow for easy removal or rearranging of pages without damage. What really got my attention was their partnership with Behance.

Behance is a company closely associated with the creative design community. They’re the folks behind the 99% Conference, the Action Method, as well as their own line of physical products via a company called Creatives Outfitter. You may have heard of their well-known Dot Grid paper product line.

Anyway, Levenger sells a product called the Circa Action Method notebook. It comes stocked with dot grid and action paper filler. The paper is 80lb stock and archival quality. If you’re the type of person that appreciates the finer things, this will not disappoint.

Here are a few of the reasons I love my Circa/Behance notebook:

• The paper is extremely high quality.
• I can easily remove a page and scan it.
• I can remove a previously mentioned too-personal page.
• I can mix, match, and reorganize pages based on projects or types of paper.
• I don’t subscribe to the Action Method philosophy, but I have learned that writing to-do’s on paper is best for me despite how much I want to be a hard-core OmniFocus user.

A well-crafted Circa notebook becomes a very flexible tool. You can add subject dividers. You can fill a section with calendar pages, a section with scratch Dot Grid paper, a section with Action Method to-do’s. Or have one section with several types of stock, and the rest of the sections devoted to different current projects. Maybe you devote one section to personal journaling, and offload those pages to a large archive Circa notebook you keep safe at home. Hopefully you get the idea that you can make it what you want.

All that to say: I really like it, and you might too.

Update (2018): I’ve been back on Moleskine for years.

Benefits of having an iPad at a conference poster session

I recently gave a poster presentation at a conference, a first for me. Due to the organization of this event, the poster sessions actually ended up being the most effective interaction platform—oral presentations were cut down to 8 minutes, whereas I actually had several hours of conversation with interested parties.

I brought my iPad to the session (mostly in case I got bored) but had no idea it would be so useful.

Here are a few tips for using your iPad in a poster session:

• Show related work or greater detail than went into your poster. People who specifically visit your poster typically have a niche interest within what you did, so be prepared to go deep on one particular aspect of your work. I could quickly produce the relevant supplemental figures in my thesis.
• Be sure to sync your key papers/references via Dropbox to Goodreader before your trip in case you don’t have an Internet connection there. You should sync these papers already anyway.
• Sketch out a figure using a drawing app during conversations. I really like Draft for this. Have your Cosmonaut stylus ready. Afterwards, you’ll have all these sketches in a single place. You can email a sketch to the person you just spoke with.
• Photograph business cards and/or people’s faces.
• Keep a running text file open in your favorite Dropbox-synced editor. Record key take-aways or ideas between conversations.
• Download the conference program PDF and ditch the paper version. You don’t need the extra weight. In almost every case, I think you could get by with the iPad the only item in your bag. This version is searchable so you can look up the person you just spoke with.

I know most of these use-cases are obvious, but I hadn’t thought of them all in advance. If you have an iPad, it’s definitely worth carting it with you around the world to your poster session—although I’m sure you were going to bring it anyway.

iPhone + international travel

I brought my iPhone to Portugal last week and purchased basic data/sms plans for the trip. This turned out to be way cheaper than I expected. I bought 120mb data for $30 and 50 text messages for $10. I used 72mb of data and 1/50 text messages (it didn’t occur to me that my wife and I are both on iOS so our messages are sent via data).

Here are a few of my observations:

• I went on one day trip with nothing on my person except my phone and wallet. No map, guide book, anything. I took photos of the relevant pages in the Rick Steves book, used Google maps to navigate, and the 4S camera for photographs.
• Depending on where you travel, Google Maps on iOS is very accurate. Transit directions worked well in Portugal. I didn’t update with iOS 6 until after I got back because I knew I’d be relying heavily on Google Maps.
• When trying to tell your taxi driver where you are staying, pulling out your phone with the pin on your hotel is an effective cross-cultural communication tool. I stayed at a relatively new hotel that many taxi drivers didn’t know, so I used this trick several times.
• Make sure the GPS dot is visible when you show your phone to the taxi driver—it tells them that you’ll know if they take you on an indirect (e.g. “scenic”) route to drive up the fare.
• FaceTime was a great way to interact and stay connected with my wife and little girl (over wifi).
• Denominations is an effective, to-the-point currency conversion tool.
• You look less touristy checking your phone than a travel guide or map.
• On the other hand, you have to be careful that your phone doesn’t get snatched. Then you’ve lost your map, photos, digital guidebook, and who knows what else if you haven’t taken adequate security precautions.
• On that front, you should set your phone to (a) require passcode immediately after locking and (b) to wipe the phone’s memory after 10 failed attempts. (Beware of this option if you have small children who like games on your phone.)
• With AT&T;, you can purchase international data/voice/sms and apply it to your account retroactively. I have no idea why they let you do this. Their copy says something like, “If you go over on text messaging, no problem—add the next tier to your account and backdate it effective before your trip began.”

I almost didn’t even look into this before the trip because I assumed it would cost too much. Now, I can’t imagine not doing this for future excursions overseas.

15WCEE Paper on FEA of Beam-Column Joint Failure

Next week I’ll be in Lisbon for the 15th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering. My paper—on nonlinear finite element analysis of older reinforced concrete beam-column joints—will be presented on Wednesday. This one is a summary of one of the first major studies in my PhD. There are 3700 accepted papers, so good luck finding me there!

Here is my poster (click for pdf):

You can download the paper here: Nonlinear FEA of Cyclically-Loaded Exterior RC Beam-Column Joints with Inadequate Seismic Detailing (pdf)

If you’re going to be there, do ping me on Twitter, send me an email, or stop by my poster on Wednesday so we can wax poetic over the exciting field of nonlinear constitutive modeling of concrete failure. This also might be the first engineering conference I’ve ever attended where there were more than two people on the official hashtag—we’ll see but I’m not holding my breath.

FYI, I made the poster using a free PowerPoint template (nobody tell Tufte, okay?) from Imago Visuals. It wasn’t worth the trouble of hacking on a LaTeX/Beamer template for this one conference.