Today is April Fools Day!

I was going to blog about gardening today, but since it is April Fools Day, I thought I would cover some of the jokes, pranks, and other items that I have seen and read about today.  First of all, I get into work this morning, just settled in to some serious programming and the fire alarm goes off.

Thinking it is a prank, I continue working until our wonderful building administrator comes by, in her equally beautiful fluorescent fire drill suit and rather energetically demands that we leave the building.

So we leave.  However, today is a most beautiful day, so I had no problem going outside.  We ended up staying outside for at least half and hour while the building inspectors did their thing.

When we were finally allowed back into the building, I sat and wondered if this was a real fire scare or just somebodies silly April Fools joke...

Google is always good with their April Fools jokes.  One of my favorites was aimed at people who like to print out their e-mails to read.  They could print their e-mail to a service which would send it back to you via US Postal service with minimal advertising included to cover postage.  This year they did a take off of the Microsoft Kinect where they created Gmail Motion.  The advertised it when you logged in to your Gmail account as a Beta product.  Basically it allowed you to use the camera in your laptop or computer to track different body motions to interact with your Gmail account.  When you selected the button to Try Gmail Motion, you would get an April Fools pop-up window.

Another good April Fools joke occurred when I was working for a fledgling, small, software company.  My co-worker came and told me that there was a fire and to look out this window to see it.  When I did, this very scary monster appeared in the window, which caused me to jump a mile.  The sad part about this was that they were videotaping my reaction and posted it on a company server.  (They did this to several employees.)

Yesterday my oldest son modified my daughters mobile phone to make it display Justin Bieber whenever he texted her.  He plans to send her a few texts today.  Now if there were only some way to have Justin Bieber's image come up with the text!

But I think the worst April Fools joke that I actively participated in was physically moving a fellow workers office.  We were working in a sub-set of the building that had two doors that entered a smaller common area that had six offices in it, three on each side and a conference table in the middle.  One office was vacant due to an Engineer leaving the company.  The night before April Fools several of us moved a colleagues office into that vacant office.  We setup everything we moved a closely as possible to how it was in the original office (this Engineer had a LOT of stuff in his office).  When he came in April Fools morning and unlocked the door, his face just dropped.  He didn't say anything.  We all started laughing.  It was Great!

Have a exillerating April Fools day and make someone smile!
Till next time,
Bill