Gnomish vs. GoblinFollow

I have an engineer who has been offered the quests to these two paths. I've turned them both down and am thinking about which way to go. I'm hoping some engineers can answer a few questions I have about this.

First off, do the gnomish devices truly tend to go haywire? Or are their funny descriptions just that, funny? If so, how often do they backfire?

With gnomish engineering are there plenty of items that are actually useful or mostly only interesting things?

For goblin engineers, are there some other kinds of fun things mixed in with all the things that go boom? What about other sorts of useful items?

And just for fun, if you shrink yourself can you still fight and do the same damage?

Sorry, Mike. Finally saw it later. Maybe I need new glasses.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm really enjoying my bombs as much as I did at first.

I do enjoy my gnomes and although I don't roleplay a lot, I think of them as what the game wants gnomes to be (love my mechanical chicken, etc). I'm just getting a little weird trying to decide between my two options.