What I do at work.

Apart from sleeping, the one thing that takes up most of my time is work.
What do you do? I hear you ask.
Well, I am an Engineer. Technically my job title is Structural Design Engineer but that sounds a bit over the top. Engineers are at heart problem solvers. The problems that I solve at work basically revolve around buildings and making sure they stand up under a set of assumed loads.
Much of my day is spent in front of the computer (hence being able to blog things whilst not actually owning a computer) designing things, and the rest usually involves going out on site inspecting the buildings being built to make sure they are building it right.
For a typical building, we will get the Architectural drawings and from that I will make a finite element model of the building in my computer. It's pretty fun and generally doesnt require too much brain power. Each building is made up of slabs, beams, columns and walls. I also put in the loads for the 'dead weight' elements inside the building such as tiles and stud walls.
Once the model is made, the computer solves it. Each element is assigned properties and the computer turns the model into a matrix of simultaneous equations to solve. One particularly large model was a 100Million x 100Million matrix. The computer solved it in about 1.5 hours.
Once the model is solved, I can find out any loads on any part of the building and design the elements from that to resist those loads (safety factor in there of course :) ).
Once the sizes of the members are decided, sketches are given to a draftsperson who turns the sketches into drawings that the builder can build off.
Inspections are pretty fun. You get to go out to some pretty cool sites such as the penthouse level of a beachfront block of units. It also changes up the day and getting out of the office is also good. Oh, did I mention that I get to drive the boss's brand new commadore as well. :)
That's most of it really. Not particularly exciting for the non-technical but I like it. It is challenging and no two days are the same. There are some interesting projects worked on as well, such as the new golf club house and the big block of units on the corner of Station and Crown St's.