I've said it before: I'm a licensed Engineer Intern in the state of Louisiana. (My registration number is 20327, if anyone wants to look it up.) In maybe a year or two, I will have been employed as an engineer long enough to be eligible to take the Licensure exam, and become a licensed Professional Engineer in my own right. Until then, my title is EI, not PE.

One of the requirements for maintaining a PE license is continuing education. In Louisiana, the requirement is 30 PDHs (Professional Development Hours) per two-year licensure period. Or, 15 hours per year.

To help our office fill this requirement (and make some money on the side from other engineers), Digital [Engineering & Imaging] (the company I work for) puts on a one-hour seminar once a month, to let some vendors come in and pitch their products. For me, it's a free lunch and I don't pay much attention.

(1 hour × 12 months < 15 hours per year requirement. Yes, I know. There's other opportunities to get PDHs beyond our monthly seminar.)

But today, today was worth paying attention. Today, it was segmental retaining walls.

A retaining wall is a wall built to stop a hillside from eroding. Where you had angled ground before, you can have flat ground at the top and/or bottom after. Neat thing for landscaping and preventing hillside washouts.

The retaining walls being demonstrated (sort of) are called "big block" walls, since rather than your typical brick, these use heavy, 1.2 ton (1.1 metric ton; 2,400 lb; or 1,100 kg) blocks of pre-cast concrete, stacked on top of each other.

With knobs & grooves.

One of the engineers from Jefferson Parish called them, and I attempt to quote: "LEGO Bricks for Engineers".

Only he used the plural form of the company name, and didn't use the word "brick" at all. Sometimes auto-word filters are a pain, yanno?

Anyway, I laughed inside. And said to myself that this had to make it into my blog today.

The website: http://www.redi-rock.com/

Y'know, sometimes being an engineer is fun.

-KIE