If you belong to an organization which pays for your professional memberships, consider yourself lucky, but not all of us are so graciously fated. And there are a lot of professional groups out there, more than 1 for every profession, including:

• AIAA
• IEEE
• SWE
• ASME
• ACEC

A few years ago, when I was still a Rocket Student, I was the chair of the AIAA student branch. After graduating and starting work with my current employer, I was sent to a conference which included professional membership dues. This year I didn’t get sent to that conference, and so my membership renewal wasn’t paid by my company.

All of which brings me around to my current dilemma: Now that dues are coming out of my own pocket, what real benefit has my membership given me?

Sure, I get the magazine which I read on my lunch break; sure I make it most months to the local chapters meetings, but is it really worth my money?

One could easily argue that there is a sense of camaraderie involved with being a part of such groups. Another good reason is that it helps you keep up on current on events and trends in the industry.

As I lick the envelope containing my credit card information, I reflect on my own reason for continuing on with my professional organization: I’m still a new engineer, the education I got in school really only opened the door into the engineering world. There are still a lot of people, places, companies, technologies, and ideas that I haven’t seen or heard of yet. New or veteran, this industry moves too quickly for me, or anyone else, to risk falling behind. If I want to stay relevant, I’m going to need the knowledge and contacts these groups provide.

Here’s to one more year of magazines, conference invites, and not feeling guilty while staring at a letter on my desk.

Are you in a professional organization or still on the fence about joining? Which one? What have the benefits been? Drop a quick comment below and let’s discuss.

We may be several months behind on this, but back in April Science-Bookmarks did a really good post on the World’s Most Expensive Engineering Projects.

A link we’d like to dedicate to our friend, Craig the Rocket Scientist, we found this post on bitrebels.com today, and we’ve been itching to get home and try it ourselves ever since. Check out: How to Make a Paper Jet Engine.

And for our friends in the Chemistry Department, Philly.com has a feature on a new class being taught at West Chester University: The Chemistry of Beer.

And finally for this week, we bring you The Ultimate Productivity Blog, a great blog that your bosses will actually encourage you to visit.

Late last century, when I worked for another software development company, we tested our product in no less than 12 different ‘flavors’ of operating systems including UNIX, Windows, local area network systems, and Web browsers. Legacy support cripples product development and the thrill of releasing radical new functionality is laced with paralyzing fear of destabilizing the software.

A similar scenario is brewing today with Web browsers. Knovel is in a much better position because we develop Web-based software. But there, the picnic ends. Our software engineers generally use the latest browser versions, and our engineers typically prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer.  (Not a judgment, just my own informal survey and personal preferences.)  Our users, on the other hand, use browsers dating back to Netscape Communicator, and a majority of our users are still on IE6.  With the advent of IE 8, we are now mandated to test and support a minimum of 6 different browser versions:  IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, FF3.5. And not surprisingly, our defect list tracks more IE6 items than any other browser version.

The engineers say, “Why can’t they just upgrade?  and “These older browsers are far less functional.”

Tom Dahm, writing for NetMechanic, sums it up nicely: “The major difference between two versions of the same browser is their support for newer portions of the HTML language. A new browser is generally better at displaying Web pages than an old one.”

As keeper of the Knovel Product, I grapple constantly with the question of browser version support. We’re aiming high in the product functionality realm and, increasingly, the older browsers are simply not up to the task.

So, what’s the answer? I am painfully aware that most of our users are constrained by strict IT policies that govern what browser(s) are used in their organizations, and how and when upgrades are managed. I am not optimistic that this will change, nor am I under the illusion that Knovel has the clout to force a corporate browser upgrade. What I do suggest is that Knovel will soon add messaging to our product advising users that Knovel is optimized for use with certain browsers [for starters, IE7 and above, and FF 3 and above], and hope to influence customers who use older browsers to consider the benefits of upgrading.

But what do you think? Either from a developer or a user standpoint, what browser related frustrations have you encountered?