If you can’t trust Science, whom can you trust?
I installed a picture of the blue screen of death as the screensaver on a coworker’s Mac. Yeah, I know, it’s old. Whatever. It’s still funny. Describe your plans for April 1st in the comments.
***Update***
Darn you, Cole. Consider this my entry in the post below.
dmsilev
Heh. I know where I’m sending my next article submission. Anything endorsed by Rick Rolling has to be good.
-dms
Bill In OH
They almost had me right up to the quote from Rick Rolling. Whew! It could be a long day. My outrage-o-meter is on a hair trigger these days.
Edit: I guess “Aima Jouk” should have been a clue. Like I said…long day.
soonergrunt
I blew right through the Rick Rolling quote and then stopped like “wait, what?”
DanF
Windows NT 3.51 blue screen of death has been my screen for years. I’m amazed that it still fools people from time to time.
gbear
The cover for that ‘new’ magazine is pretty funny. Favorite teaser headline: “Evolution: When Will It Stop?”
jurassicpork
You probably know by now that Google has changed its name to “Topeka.” In the spirit of reciprocity, Yahoo, Inc. also changed its name.
Chad N Freude
You guys are slow. I got it at
folkbum
I’m running for Congress against Paul Ryan!
Tim F.
@Chad N Freude: Seriously? They lost me at “team up”.
Chad N Freude
@Tim F.: Zing!
Wag
I love me some April 1
drew42
There’s one I did in 2nd grade that I’m still proud of today. This was back in the early 80’s, when the school “computer room” had two computers. One of ours was a TRS-80.
I wrote and ran a (surpisingly simple) program which displayed:
READY
>
so it looked like the command line, waited for the user to enter something, then displayed “READY >” again, rinse and repeat. So no matter what the user entered, nothing happened.
I couldn’t get it quite right — it actually displayed:
READY
>?
(the question mark prompts user input when a program is running) but even the teacher monitoring the room couldn’t figure out the problem. Not bad for a 7-year old punk.
dmsilev
When I was in grad school, I helped start a tradition of fairly elaborate April Fools pranks in our department. One year, we built a ten or twelve foot diameter UFO and hung it in the central rotunda of our building, complete with a set of crop circles on the floor underneath and various notes scattered throughout the building alluding to an X-files-ish conspiracy between the aliens and the faculty. That was a hell of a lot of work, but worth it once we saw people’s reactions.
-dms
Tom Levenson
@drew42: And what have you done for me lately? ;)
Linda Featheringill
A collection of April 1 hoaxes:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/blog/2010/mar/31/april-fool-round-up-hoaxes
Cute.
PaulW
@folkbum:
I’m running for the Senate in Florida! Why not, I’m unemployed and got nothing better to do, and after all the hours are good and the benefits are great!
NobodySpecial
Today I spread the rumor that the Bears fired Jerry Angelo and hired Matt Millen as their new GM, making it seem realistic with cackles of glee, seeing as how everyone who knows me knows I’m a Lions fan.
Computer related, the best I ever did was keep my sister off my computer by starting my Commodore 64 emulator, fullscreening the main screen, and shutting off the monitor. I came home from work to her in tears endlessly repeating that she didn’t do it and she didn’t know what happened. I finally told her a couple of months later.
PaulW
@drew42:
Are you kidding? Everyone does that the first time they programmed in BASIC (create a fake command line).
You should have done what my brother and three of his buddies did: they went and rewrote the entire OS for the TRS-80, making it operate like a real program but tweaking it to require different commands (instead of INPUT they worded it GIMME) and give different responses to command prompts (TRON THIS M-F-).
His buddies went to Ivy league schools. He went to Annapolis. Eh, my brother was the slacker of the group… ;)
Tim F.
@NobodySpecial: Pretty good. Back in the Mac Plus era, Macs included a little program that made it easy to create dialog windows to plug into programs you were writing (Apple has made easy app-ing a priority at least since the early 90’s).
Naturally in comp lab I made a little window that read, “WARNING. This computer has been infected with the doomsday virus. Click ‘ok’ to permanently erase the hard drive. Please do not turn off the computer or the motherboard will catch on fire. Have a nice day.”
I will probably pay for that one in the next life.
scav
I rather loved the simple changes to .cshrc files that tweaked tiny and critical behaviors. redirecting ls to list the directory above.
mem from somerville
Last year Google had scratch-n-sniff e-books. Must remember to see what they are up to this year.
Heh.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Okay TimF, or whatever your handle really is.
GReynoldsCT00
Cute Overload is Rick-Rolling us today
Jeff R.
I think there’s an April Fool’s joke in Google books. I don’t go there that often, but I haven’t noticed this before (and it’s marked NEW!). So, go to books.google.com. Pick a book (I picked “The Divided Democrats”). Then click on the “View in 3D” button.
Remember November
Once I installed a 20 minute empty sound file on a friends Mac in the Startup Items. Oh the look of panic on his face.
mem from somerville
@Jeff R.: FTW! Good find, Jeff–thanks.