A young engineer was leaving the office at 6 p.m. when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand.

"Listen," said the CEO, "this is important, and my secretary has left. Can you make this thing work?"

"Certainly," said the young engineer. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button.

"Excellent, excellent!" said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. "I just need one copy."

A programmer and an Engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from Los Angeles to New York. The Programmer leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks.

The Programmer persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don?t know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don?t know the answer, I pay you $5."

Again the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep.

Time Engineers is a really cool looking game that teaches kids fundamentals in engineering. It's aimed at middle and high school ages even though it looks entertaining (and maybe even educational) for adult engineers. The basis of the game is to unlock the time travel machine and go back to help cultures in the past with their engineering problems.  For instance you could help the Egyptians build the pyramids or design a draw bridge in Medieval France.

The thing that really tickled my fancy is the first two exercises involve principles that I've included in my PLC tutorial.   The first hurdle involves the time traveler having to use decimal to binary conversion to open up the door to the machine.  After that, a series of switches must be set using Boolean functions like AND, OR and NOT to power up the time machine.

I love educational software like this.

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

Engineer: What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!
Doctor: I don't know but I've never seen such ineptitude!
Priest: Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him.
Priest: Hi George. Say George, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow aren't they?
George: Oh yes. That's a group of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight while saving our club house last year. So we let them play here anytime free of charge!
(silence)
Priest: That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.
Doctor: Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them.
Engineer: Why can't these guys play at night?

A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume.

The mathematician carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.

The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the total displacement.

The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his "Red-Rubber-Ball" table.

Warning: this is from the humor department. 

I think this is a must see by any automation professional. 

Rockwell Automation's Retroincabulator (video at ebaumsworld.com)

If you go to a dead link on Omron's web site you get a 404 error that says, and I quote,

The Board of Trustees of a nearby University, decides to test the Professors, to see if they really know their stuff.

First they take a Math Prof. and put him in a room. Now, the room contains a table and three metal spheres about the size of softballs. They tell him to do whatever he want with the balls and the table in one hour. After an hour, he comes out and the Trustees look in and the balls are arranged in a triangle at the center of the table.

Next, they give the same test to a Physics Prof. After an hour, they look in, and the balls are stacked one on top of the other in the center of the table.

Here's a nice tip from WebmasterWorld if you have multiple sites you manage as a webmaster and want to do local development.

This is an example to set up two websites so I can access them at http://mytestsite1 and http://mytestsite2.  You can name them anything you want.  Note also that you can put any extension on the end that tickles your fancy.  Some like to have it as .loc to indicate it's a local copy.

I'm using the Apache web server on WindowsXP so I add this at the bottom of the http.conf file under the VirtualHost section: