...the need... for speed!

Optimise. Only friend people who eat their children.

If you have the time (and if you're at work, of course you have the time!), I recommend The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble. One guy gets his last goat killed by an aircraft so he can claim twice its value from the airport, and it all goes wrong from there.

Soon the shortage of actual goats led to a booming market in goat futures, goat options and increasingly arcane goat derivative products. This trade in young, unborn, and even theoretical goats allowed yet more money into a market whose only bottle-neck or brake up to this time had been the physical shortage of actual goats.

...until the whole thing comes crashing down.

Please tell me you BSOD'd the thing and got a photo...

My first day here, I had a desk but no chair, and had to run power and network cables to the desk myself (as well as hunt down an extension cable when I refused to run power straight across a door at floor level). I also went monitor-shopping with the sysadmin, which involved a long cycle ride through the forest.

Took three days to get it all set up, and another three hours to work out that I couldn't do a damn thing with five other people bouncing about in a room built for two.

I wrote parts of an aviation photo database while sat under a tree by the airport fence. (Keepin' it real, yo.) Naturally, I picked days when it looked like this, not like this.

OUL isn't the busiest airport in the world, so it's actually a really peaceful place most of the time, especially if you walk round to the south side. You're right on the edge of the forest, and you hear far more birdsong than jet noise.

"It's just the glasses that are a pain. They dim the picture and flicker against other light sources, especially cheap LED bulbs."

Like the ones in the local cinema's fire exit signs. That was downright annoying, having that at both edges of your field of view for the whole tedious Hobbit movie.

Over a few months of play, I conditioned my regular opponent with flare, flare, Mega-Missile. Eventually it got so that just lobbing a flare at him would send him running away screaming. I'd watch him thrashing about in a panic for a little while, maybe taunt him with another flare, before putting him out of his misery.

Yeah. Gotta have flares.

Chain-link, I believe...

Why are you surprised?

"Why would anyone want the hassle of piecing together a phone anyway?"

I'd have said the same thing about teddy bears, but there's a damn Build A Bear Workshop everywhere I look these days :)

When I worked in McJail, we once had a promotional chilli burger. God only knows what was in that sauce, but if you breathed at the wrong moment while cleaning the gun you'd quickly find yourself curled up on the floor gasping for air. Each burger was meant to get one shot of the stuff. Some of the hardasses on shift claimed to have eaten one with four, but nobody could remember having seen any of them actually pull it off.

Anyway. Customer comes up to the counter with a mostly-eaten burger - funny how the only ones worth complaining about were always mostly-eaten - and proclaims loudly and profanely that it's not hot enough. Demands a better one. Now.

The customer is always shite, I mean right. Yes sir. Right away sir.

Fourteen shots, we put in that thing. We had to build it in the box to stop everything from sliding off everything else, and fifteen just wouldn't fit. What a mess. We quickly squashed the lid shut, handed it over to Front before it exploded, and then rested our folded arms on the production bin to watch the show.

His first mistake was licking up all the sauce that ran down to his elbows. Bad call. Before he'd even taken a bite his eyes were streaming and his large Sprite was gone. A quarter of the way in, he noticed us watching and grinning - as he rushed to the counter to buy another Sprite. We were still grinning as we gave him three more Sprites after that. To his credit, he finished the damn thing. He left without saying a word (largely because he couldn't), suitably chastened.

Damn, I miss that job sometimes.

Forget Pizza Hut drones, where's my pork chop cannon?

The new beta uses JQuery for the comment threshold selector, and changes that on the fly. This means all the comments are loaded...

Oh wow. If that's true, my corporate overlords' naughty-word filter is going to love all those -1 posts, and it can't tell whether the words actually show up on the screen.

Of course, Slashdot is owned by Dice, who make their money out of finding jobs for people and people for jobs, so maybe getting us all fired is part of the plan.

I think that's "combines" as in "runs through a combine harvester".