I have a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University and I'm currently working on Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines. You might now be thinking, "Wow, that sounds impressive but I have no idea what the heck a chemical engineer is so I'll just smile and nod." To be honest I didn't know what a chemical engineer was until my third year in undergrad. I knew I was good at chemistry and math and I liked to solved problems. Chemical engineering sounded like a good choice..

So what is chemical engineering? The simple classical answer is its designing and maintaing chemical plants. "Wow, what a bummer, that sounds awful." At least that's what I thought when I first figured it out. However I stuck with it and found out I really like chemical engineering. In addition chemical engineers do other things besides designing chemical plants (e.g. food science, pharmaceuticals, fuel cells, superconductors, polymer processing, water purification).

Chemical engineers do many similiar things to chemists but tend to focus on the larger scaling up. This means chemical engineers tend to be more worried about how fast chemicals dissolve and flow, and how fast heat gets into and out of a process. In addition the chemical engineer worries about the economics and will look for the safest economical path way. An example I found that sums up the difference between to the two fairly well:

"The difference between chemical engineering and chemistry can be illustrated by considering the example of producing orange juice. A chemist working in the laboratory investigates and discovers a multitude of pathways to extract the juices of an orange. The simplest mechanism found is to cut the orange in half and squeeze the orange using a manual juicer. A more complicated approach that is found is to peel and then crush the orange and collect the juice."

"A company then commissions a chemical engineer to design a plant to manufacture several thousand tons of orange juice per year. The chemical engineer investigates all the available methods for making orange juice and evaluates them according to their economic viability. Even though the manual juicing method is simple, it is not economical to employ thousands of people to manually juice oranges. Thus, another -- cheaper -- method is used (possibly the 'peel and crush' technique). The easiest method of manufacture on a laboratory bench will not necessarily be the most economical method for a manufacturing plant."

Below are some links that I find useful as a chemical engineer:

Google - Google is great for miscelaneous searches, as I'm sure you are aware. However, it is also great for unit conversions. Ever wonder what the speed of light is furlongs per fortnight? Just type in "What is 2.99*10^8 m/s in furlongs per fortnight?"
NIST Chemistry WebBook - The NIST Chemistry WebBook has a lot of information about most chemicals you can think of.
Matches' Process Equipment Cost Estimates - Great site for cost estimation of different process equipment.
GNU Octave - A high level language program good for numerical analysis (very similar to Matlab but free).