What is the cost of...?

The Avengers had assembled, the Dark Knight is rising and Star Wars had ended, but all these doesn't have to be limited to the silver screen. Just as Titanic could be a lesson for an engineer, so could a few other big budget movies.

For one, if you are the project engineer in charge of estimating the cost of engineering such challenging items as those featured in the movie, how much would they cost? Interestingly, I stumbled into a couple of websites which considered those same questions and presented an estimation which was fun to read although their accuracy warrant further corroboration.

Image from Super-Team Family.

What Engineers could learn from the movie "Titanic"

A couple of days ago, I went to see Titanic 3D. This is my second, or maybe third time seeing the movie since 1997/1998 (it’s true, I swear! I know some of you saw it 10 times back then, don’t lie to me ;P). Back then when I was a teenage girl, Titanic did not left any impact on me from the engineering point of view, all I saw was the tormenting love story between star-crossed young lovers, Jack and Rose. Of course, I was like any other teenage girl back then, all doe-eyed for Leonardo DiCaprio.

Image from IMDb also includes reviews. 

Alright, this post is not actually about all the gushy-mushy gooey dooey loveyy storeyyy or how cute Leo is, but rather it is about the engineering lessons we could all learn from Titanic (3D or 2D, likewise).

What I "think" do vs. What I "really" do

"Hello world"

That phrase is one of the memorable words I learned to program in Computer Programming class. And those exact words is what I would like to greet you all with in my first post here as a guest blogger. I am very much excited to share some of my thoughts and experiences here and I do hope we all could exchange ideas along the way.

In the past few weeks, we've seen these meme about "What others think I do vs What I actually do..." one too many times. Most of these reproductions are really funny, quite to an extent that it is a chilling truth that we hate to admit.

(My notes today will talk about electronic engineering in general, but maybe it could relate to other engineering fields.)

The Journal of An Engineer

So, you have graduated from the prestigious (or not so prestigious, depending on your view) University of (insert here) with a Bachelor's Degree in (insert here) Engineering. Maybe you graduated with magna cum laude (or First Class Honors as the locals called it) and you expected a bright future ahead of you. You wanted to invent like Thomas Edison, or to build skyscrapers like the Petronas Twin Towers, or even to be worshiped like Steve Jobs even though he was not an engineer. The prospect seemed endless.

You are very sure that scores of companies will headhunt you and you have prepared your answers, but alas it is your coursemates who could not even spell the word 'engineer' who got a job first instead. Oh well, must be the financial crisis screwing things up, you thought, and so you began to look for jobs through classifieds and career fairs while being a little bitter that your coursemates got ahead of you.