As you probably have guessed, I spend a whole lot of time running The Daily WTF when going through submissions, writing articles, and sending out free stickers. While I do this primarily for fun and hobby, it does tend to interfere with my day job at Inedo and, as a result, I tend to earn much less than I could otherwise. But I don’t mind. All I have to do is sacrifice a few, small things. Things like a decent lunch.

Normally for me, lunch is all about getting as much nutritional value for the least amount of money possible. This means my lunch-time staples include things like sticks of butter ($0.23/ea), discarded military MREs (free… if you know where to look), and grocery store free-sample binges (free… if you have no dignity). Today, however, I decided to treat myself, so I scrounged up a dollar and headed on over to the Dollar Tree. After an exhaustive search through bins of expired food items, I stumbled across a wonderful treasure: the Chow Mein “Quick Meal”.

Everything was lined up for some seasonal specials at Chotchkie's (as we'll call it), a mid-size chain of family restaurants. Starting just in time for the weekend on Friday, there would be specials on Pizza Shooters, Shrimp Poppers, and Extreme Fajitas.

The special had been promoted, ads circulated, table cards and menus updated — everything was ready to go. That is, aside from setting up the discount in the PoS system on their antiquated Panasonic 7000-series cash registers. Because of the old architecture and a confusing interface, what should be a simple change for restaurant staff to update item pricing actually required the involvement of a developer; in this case, Mike L.

"I wonder if it's possible to change the text of the sensibility of the message," pondered Adam, "if the message having sensibility cannot have text... or something like that."

"This is how you set up the monitoring?" Shawn G. looked down at the system in disbelief. There was a watchdog connected to a power relay to ensure that it was always running. The power relay sat right next to the power switch in a sealed environmental enclosure.

Oh well, Shawn thought, this is what I'm here to work on. I'll get this set up right. He reached into the dark enclosure for the power switch to reboot the system. And missed the switch.

"Some years ago I was looking for a job and did a lot of online résumé form filling," Gustavo S. writes.

"One of those many sites had a form that took about a second to uppercase my name when I hit Tab, before putting the focus on the next field.

Through the much of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Cambridge-based Thinking Machines was ahead of its time. As innovators in parallel computing, they developed a massive, 65,536 processor supercomputer known the Connection Machine. Visually, it made Cray’s distinctive look seem like a piece of outdated furniture, and was even stunning enough to star as the “impressive blinky-light server” in Jurassic Park.

Of course, that’s just about all it was good for. The Connection Machine was an AI researcher’s dream that no AI research lab could afford. Its inability to run FORTRAN – and every other programming language aside from a specialized Lisp dialect – made it pretty much useless for business and scientific purposes. Its baffling inability to even do floating-point operations mostly guaranteed that no one would buy it. But, hey – who needs customers when there’s lots of money from daddy!

"Between 11AM and 2PM tomorrow, we have a -93% chance of rain, followed by 113% chance later in the day," Matt writes. "Quite a shift over 6 hours."

Originally posted by "Corona688"...

We run an old text game built on an ancient and mysterious codebase. It occasionally does strange things for reasons that've been lost to the mists of time.

"While exploring a rather large PHP codebase at my new job," Anthony C writes, "I kept coming across a rather curious pattern from the previous developers:

src="content.php?NoCache=<?php $random = make_random_code(); echo("$random"); ?>"

Jacob S. apparently wandered away from the line and wasn't even in the right city anymore.