Is She Weird

April Fools has taken on renewed strength on the internet. Google has consistently had some sort of prank (last year they advertised Google Paper where they would print all your emails and mail them to you for free). This year they advertised Custom Time where you could decide on the time stamp of your email. In Australia they boasted GDay with MATE where you could search for internet content that doesn't exist yet. Youtube's featured videos all sent users to Rick Astley's video, thus RickRolling millions of people. (Rickrolling is tricking someone into watching a super cheesy Rick Astley 80's music video for "Never gonna give you up." Big-time internet joke). Firefox put out a plugin that works only for the day that does all sorts of random things to the web pages you're viewing. On Digg it added "whatever" to the end of every entry. It abbreviated all sorts of random things. Trying to go directly to a web site sent you on to random other web sites.

Since all but one of us were in our office yesterday morning, we pranked a coworker. We found a desktop background that looks like a cracked computer screen, set it as the only picture for the screen saver and unplugged the mouse and keyboard. When he finally came in at 2:00 it was just myself and the other Christian in the office. When he asked what happened I told him I was tossing a mouse and missed. He was fairly upset although he hid it pretty well. He shut the computer off out of frustration. I tried to get him to turn it back on (thus revealing the joke) saying "We liked the way it looked so we left it on all day." He spits back, "Well why didn't you do it to your computer!" Shane, Christian, and I just about died laughing (quietly behind is back). Eventually Christian turns it back on and reveals the joke. We eventually all got a good chuckle at his expense.

Also, three popular web comics traded sites. XKCD, Questionable Material, and Dinosaur Comics. If you typed one website, you got another comic. If you haven't heard of any of them, don't worry, it just means you don't spend enough time on the internet. They're pretty geeky.

Last night I also saw on Google's home page a link for Virgin Galactic's and Google's combined mission to mars. Web users can fill out an application for being a member of the first human mission to mars. They went through a lot of work for the site, and it's quite impressive with lots of humor.

So, in good taste, here's a link to probably the most popular video on the internet recently. Yesterday, they had replaced the original with an excellently dubbed muppet video of Beaker "singing" the song from the Muppet Show.

Here's an XKCD from a long while back: