Humph! Electronic Engineers!

Electronic engineers are dirty minded.

Well, that's not surprising, because most engineers are blokes, and blokes ARE dirty minded. Besides, when they're engineers-in-training, for the entire, say, 5 years, they're deprived of some inter-gender relationship in class. You think it'll be better when they graduate, but hell, no. It's actually worse.

Yes, so here we are, arriving at the conclusion - electronic engineers are dirty minded.

See here. You plug in your thumbdrive into a USB port. Few seconds later, it's ready to be used - no manual configurations needed. What is this feature called?

Plug and Play. I didn't quite noticed this until one of my friends actually pointed it out to me.

OK. Let's move on.

There's this thing in my toolbox, called the sucker.

This is a bigger and more powerful sucker.

They suck!

So you have a rubber-coated copper wire. But rubber doesn't conduct! You have to remove a small portion of the rubber to reveal the copper in order to establish connection.

This de-skinning action is called... stripping.

Unstripped (left) and stripped wires. Revealing!

Stripping can be done using a pair of scissors or wire cutter, but there's a tool specially designed for stripping wires.

It's called stripper.

And no, I don't have one in my toolbox. Don't need one.

I remember going to an electronics shop with my friend few years ago.

"I need a connector. The, you know, the one with the pin, for this type of connection..."

While I rummage around my bag looking for a sample, my friend simply told the guy, "he meant male".

I looked up, "these things have genders? How could you tell?"

The shopkeeper simply said, "oh, the ones with the sticks are male, the ones with the holes are female."

Damn. How could I be so stupid?

Can you tell the genders of the following parts?

Pin connectors.


More pin connectors.


Old school serial port.

If you have no idea what this post is all about, perhaps you'd better not be an electronic engineer.