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Thank you all for writing in and posting great advice and making some excellent points. A different site on the internet recommended writing into an internet forum and letting it all out--so I did, rudeness and all. The folks that posted showed consideration and restraint, and wrote some good...

msquared48, I grew up as a latch-key kid, and put myself through college, no guidance, no plan, and no financial support. I had to figure it out on my own. It's a miracle I made it this far. Sure, the people that should retire have their reasons--they can't afford to live how they thought...

EQguys, Interesting take, I've taken a different route: 1) Quitting my professional organizations (the two that I belong to) in order to save money and time. 2) I have two licenses. I suppose I could pursue a structural license, but at some point I will have alphabet soup after my name. 3)...

YES. I have worked with talented old people 60+, that use AutoCAD and are very sharp. These are not the "old people" I currently work with, they can barely use Excel. I spent the last three years sucking it up and learning, what these people had to offer--which was not a lot. I try and...

ImminentCollapse, I was hoping for some sort of advice--not spite. This is a genuine post of someone that is frustrated in a difficult economy that has been busting their hump through thick and thin, and sees no end in sight. Posting 4 daggers directed at me, then posting 4 in-your-face...

1) I am a civil engineer in California. 2) I have been looking for employment elsewhere, for over 3 months. 3) An across the board pay-cut was instituted at my current employment. 4) I took this job when I was laid-off due to lack of work in 2009, when construction froze up. It did not pay...

1) When calculating in inches asphalt weighs 12 lbs/sqft, exactly. That way you can just multiply by 12 and not touch the calculator. 2) When estimating quantities asphalt weighs 150 pcf, exactly. Because you don't want to come up short, even by 4%. False precision breeds the lie that...

I'm no expert in flat-car bridges at all. Each one was different. I worked on some odd stuff in private practice. Honestly, I don't have anything more to contribute on the topic. I was laid-off from my non-bridge job, at my new job I'm working with bridges again, but do very little design...

1) H20 and H20-44 maybe the same thing. But you'd better check because H20-44 looks like a typo where "HS20-44" was meant. 2) HS20 was the standard AASHTO loading that consisted of the truck or the lane load. The LRFD HL-93 is the LRFD AASHTO loading.

My take differs from dhengr, and I will comment further since dhengr contributed. However, I'm done on this topic and this is it for me. Lead paint is an important topic. In my career I have been the engineer of record on flatcar bridge designs and inspections. The region I work in presently...

Either way. Superiority of one or the other would be a tough sell for me, one of those false-precision arguments. Just tools in the tool box.

Does anyone have anything to share about lead paint and flatcar bridges? Time period it was/wasn't used? Are the flat-cars still being supplied potentially leaded? Stories...potential problems..?

Mathcad is the appropriate program. If you are working by hand, have your methods and know how, Mathcad allows you to set up templates to be used over and over and over...and over... Very intuitive and it follows your hand calc's. You will need to supplement it occasionally with something...

My recollection of sizing sewage pipes (for small subdivisions) is that the reviewers would typically redline for a bigger pipe than the one I correctly "engineered". Never understood it, but they all seemed to have functioned without problems.

A few observations: 1) People like them--because people like railroads. 2) They can make decent driveway bridges. 3) They are difficult to paint. 4) They are difficult to rate and often load restricted. 5) Many have wood decks that need replacement every so many years. 6) The railroad...

I use WSD when I need a quick no nonsense conservative design. It's generally no longer used for bond or compression members. Typically for quick simple designs I would just assume j=7/8. My current employment requires little design work, but only a few years back I did design on a daily...

Most of the plans I see now are on 11x17 sized paper, occasionally, but more and more, I am seeing plans at nonstandard "engineering" scales. It seems like it would be convenient if I had a ruler that had 1:8 and 1:16. Does such a scale exist?...If so where can I purchase it? 1) I know an...

"Its just a pedestrian bridge, not a real one" I heard almost this exact comment a couple weeks ago from the head as he made key decisions. I'm trying to make the best of my current employment, "at least I have a job". Most ped bridges I have done were prefabs. You still have to design the...

Correction, change "BridgeEI" in post above to "SDNewbie". Simple Typo.

I literally laughed, well written, very funny. I wish we did work together, we'd have a lot of laughs. My guess is that BridgeEI should thoroughly study civil engineering, except for a few of the fields (for instance water treatment). Civil engineering is the foundation.