fun in life

Perfectly Timed Photos

2008-07-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

Perfectly Timed Photos

Kittens

2007-10-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Kittens

Part of Pete Bevin's web site. I have no idea who originally took these, but hey, they're kittens.

Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

2007-10-23T06:52:00.000-07:00

[Note: This list of Einstein quotes was being forwarded around the Internet in e-mail, so I decided to put it on my web page. I'm afraid I can't vouch for its authenticity, tell you where it came from, who compiled the list, who Kevin Harris is, or anything like that. Still, the quotes are interesting and enlightening.]

Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
"Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever."
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

I DNT HATE MOZILLA! ORKUT IS BANNED!!

2007-10-20T05:53:00.001-07:00

I was asked by my friend that he is the only user in his computer, his account is having administrative rights, but he is not able to open Orkut, and it says Orkut is banned. Another friend had told that he is not able to use Mozilla Firefox and it asks him to use Internet Explorer. I just told it must be some virus, but really didn't care much about that. But none of the antivirus software could detect or remove this malware.

My friend had given me a pen drive. I remembered it while browsing net on Firefox. When I put that in my PC and double clicked, it didn't open. I knew at once: I had activated a virus. But I didn't have any idea about the kind of virus that might have come to my PC, until I switched back to Firefox. Immediately a message box was displayed: I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE... with title as USE INTERNET EXPLORER U DOPE. I just remembered the experiences of my friends. I tried to locate the virus by running the Task Manager. But there were no suspicious entries there. I had to bow the owner of the virus. I used Internet Explorer to search about it. The first entry in Google took me to the Mozilla Forum page, and after going through some pages, I came to know that the same virus also displayed another message when you opened Orkut. Orkut is banned you fool, The administrators didnt write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!! with title ORKUT IS BANNED. Well, a similar message was displayed for YouTube also. So I went through all the posts, and finally found a solution given here:

Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and go to the processes tab
Look for svchost.exe under the image name. There will be many but look for the ones which have your username under the username
Press DEL to kill these files. It will give you a warning, Press Yes
Repeat for more svchost.exe files with your username and repeat. Do not kill svchost.exe with system, local service or network service!
Now open My Computer
In the address bar, type C:\heap41a and press enter. It is a hidden folder, and is not visible by default.
Delete all the files here
Now go to Start --> Run and type Regedit
Go to the menu Edit --> Find
Type "heap41a" here and press enter. You will get something like this "[winlogon] C:\heap41a\svchost.exe C:\heap(some number)\std.txt"
Select that and Press DEL. It will ask "Are you sure you want to delete this value?", click Yes
Now close the registry editor.

Now the virus is gone. But be sure to delete the autorun.inf file and any folder whose name ends with .exe in the pen drive.

UPDATE
It seems that they have named this malware as w32.USBWorm and according my friend, Avast is able to detect and remove it. I hope the other antivirus software will also be able to remove it soon.

This virus is not responsible for disabling Folder Options in the Tools Menu and not allowing hidden files to be shown. It is some other virus, and the solution is explained in the post Hidden Files Not Shown

Get Paid to Digg: Subvert & Profit

2007-10-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

Do you want to earn quick money. Then this is right place for you. We have just found a great site called Subvert and Profit where you get for just doing stumbles and Diggs.

How Much Can I Earn

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Subvert accepts all the voting parties. Just you must have Paypal or Credit card to accept payments from Subvert. So don't waste time and Join Subvert and Profit Today

Google 2.0 “Will Google Change?”

2007-10-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

It’s a fact that Google was the leader of the Web 2.0 Era, setting many standards that forced the used to be market leaders to silently follow and imitate what they are doing.
Lately Google concept in email has showed the old companies’ greed, Microsoft for instance had been charging for only one Gigabyte of storage what they called premium, and even yahoo’s plus account was poor. Google gave users a quality 2 Gig plus of storage along with incredible features like POP3 and many others for free, but our old fellows felt the threat and just caught Google’s back.

The competition is getting hotter more & more; Google’s new line of Office web applications is also a tough challenge for the web 1.0 masters, but Microsoft Live is also a strong response by the Redmond monster, and promising to be significant and popular. Yahoo is striving to update their entire architecture, and they have just added integrated messenger in their website just like Google did (long time ago!), they have acquired many Web 2.0 hot stuff like Del.ici.ous and many others. But Google seems to be a little bit calm nowadays, what are they making?

Rumors are talking about a complete upgrade in Google business services model, Google is preparing an all in one small businesses service package, a domain name centered service that allow sellers to establish their services while entirely relying on Google’s services, any can use his customized email at Google’s Gmail, other endless services ranging from organizing and collaboration through Google’s Office, to marketing through Adsense & Adwords, while new unexpected services may hit the market and make a big difference like small accounting application for Google business subscribers, a PayPal like service for online payments (other than Google wallet).

But will that be enough for Google to catch more and more market share?
No matter what Google is preparing, it is facing a critical situation; the aggressive response of Web 1.0 gurus will make it a hard job. The current problem is Google regular users , those who won’t make online businesses nor have interest in Adsense or Adwords.

Google has a significant layout but seems dull when compared to the new sleek Web 2.0 styles; Yahoo for example has revamped their layout to be very wonderful & eye-catching. Microsoft has also varnished their live interface recently. Compared to the new Yahoo mail; Gmail looks very classic and even poor, something that requires a serious follow-up by the Googsters .

Some of old Yahoo, Hotmail & AOL users turned back to use their old emails as they are powerful, sleek and most of all same to Gmail, no body will be loyal to Gmail. Today’s consumers are convinced that all companies are evil and that they should pick the best offer every time.
The bottom line is Google should update their look to be more Web 2.0, acquire or cooperate with some web 2.0 entertainment vendor to compete with Microsoft and Yahoo in the entertainment field. However, it looks that the web will be a bloody battle field for a along time, and the only winner is the consumer.

The Limits of Love

2007-10-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

After the divorce, her teenage daughter became increasingly rebellious.

It culminated late one night when the police called to tell her that she had to come to the police station to pick up her daughter, who was arrested for drunk driving.

They didn't speak until the next afternoon.

Mom broke the tension by giving her daughter a small gift-wrapped box.

Her daughter nonchalantly opened it and found a small piece of a rock.

She rolled her eyes and said, "Cute Mom, what's this for?"

"Here's the card," Mom said.

Her daughter took the card out of the envelope and read it. Tears started to trickle down her cheeks.

She got up and gave her mom a big hug as the card fell to the floor.

On the card were these words:

"This rock is more than 200 million years old. That's how long it will take before I give up on you."
--Author Unknown

Is Future Intimacy with Robots Inevitable?

2007-10-16T11:04:00.001-07:00

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," claimed artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships.

He admits that sex with robots might be a little geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said.

The idea of romance between humans and their creations dates back to ancient times. According to Greek myth, the sculptor Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue he made named Galatea. Luckily the goddess Venus eventually granted the statue life so they could be together.

In more modern times, science fiction explored this idea. But it’s been known to happen in reality as well. Forty years ago, scientists found that students were becoming unusually attracted to ELIZA, a computer program designed to ask questions and mimic a psychotherapist.

"There's a trend of robots becoming more human-like in appearance and coming more in contact with humans," Levy said. "At first robots were used impersonally, in factories where they helped build automobiles, for instance. Then they were used in offices to deliver mail, or to show visitors around museums, or in homes as vacuum cleaners, such as with the Roomba. Now you have robot toys, like Sony's Aibo robot dog, or Tickle Me Elmos, or digital pets like Tamagotchis."

In his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners," Levy conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them.

"It may sound a little weird, but it isn't," Levy said. "Love and sex with robots are inevitable."

Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, "and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."

As software becomes more advanced and the relationship between humans and robots becomes more personal, marriage could result. "One hundred years ago, interracial marriage and same-sex marriages were illegal in the United States. Interracial marriage has been legal now for 50 years, and same-sex marriage is legal in some parts of the states," Levy said. "There has been this trend in marriage where each partner gets to make their own choice of who they want to be with."

"The question is not if this will happen, but when," Levy said. "I am convinced the answer is much earlier than you think."

Levy thinks Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize human-robot marriage. "Massachusetts is more liberal than most other jurisdictions in the United States and has been at the forefront of same-sex marriage," Levy said. "There's also a lot of high-tech research there at places like MIT."

Since robots aren’t capable of feeling, wouldn’t a marriage to one be pretty empty and one-sided? Cynthia Breazeal, associate professor at M.I.T. and director of the Personal Robotics Group. Breazeal says trying to figure out whether the “social” robots she has helped developed are capable of “feeling”, is a very complicated subject.

“Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,” she said. “The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don’t have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, what are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?”

Although roboticist Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta does not think human-robot marriages will be legal anywhere by 2050, "anything's possible. And just because it's not legal doesn't mean people won't try it."

But who would want to marry a robot instead of a real person? Levy says it would give extremely shy, geeky, ugly or disturbed individuals a chance to be with “someone”.

"People who find it hard to form relationships, because they are extremely shy, or have psychological problems, or are just plain ugly or have unpleasant personalities," Levy said. "Of course, such people who completely give up the idea of forming relationships with other people are going to be few and far between, but they will be out there."

Perhaps keeping a robot for sex could reduce human prostitution and the problems that come with it. But "in a marriage or other relationship, one partner could be jealous or consider it infidelity if the other used a robot," Levy said.

"But who knows, maybe some other relationships could welcome a robot. Instead of a woman saying, 'Darling, not tonight, I have a headache,' you could get 'Darling, I have a headache, why not use your robot?"

treat them are something we'll have to consider very seriously, and they're very complicated issues," Levy said.

Humans to marry robots in future

2007-10-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

Trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners

United Press International | Oct 11, 2007

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands, Oct. 11 (UPI) — The University of Maastricht in the Netherlands is awarding a doctorate to a researcher who wrote a paper on marriages between humans and robots.

David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher at the college, wrote in his thesis, “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners,” that trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners.

Levy’s conclusion was based on about 450 publications in the fields of psychology, sexology, sociology, robotics, materials science, artificial intelligence, gender studies and computer-human interaction.

The thesis examines human attitudes toward affection, love and sexuality and concluded that the findings are just as applicable to human interaction with robots of the future as they are to the relationships between humans of today.

Girls are equal to evils !!.

2007-10-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

A funny relation..........

Leave Letters (Jokes)

2007-10-16T03:31:00.000-07:00

Infosys, Bangalore: An employee applied for
leave as follows:
Since I have to go to my village to sell my land
along with my wife,
please sanction me one-week leave.
*
Another gem from CDAC. Leave-letter from an
employee who was performing his daughter's wedding:
"as I am marrying my daughter, please grant a
week's leave.."
*
From H.A.L. Administration dept:
"As my mother-in-law has expired and I am only one
responsible for it,
please grant me 10 days leave."
*
Another employee applied for half day leave
as follows:
"Since I've to go to the cremation ground at 10
o-clocks and I may not
return, please grant me half day casual leave"
*
An incident of a leave letter
"I am suffering from fever, please declare one day
holiday."
*
A leave letter to the headmaster:
"As I am studying in this school I am suffering
from headache. I request
you to leave me today"
*
Another leave letter written to the
headmaster:
"As my headache is paining, please grant me leave
for the day."
*
Actual letter written for application of
leave:
"My wife is suffering from sickness and as I am
her only husband at home
I may be granted leave".

10 Power-Packed Ways To Spark Your Sales

2007-07-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

1. Spend money on targeted advertising instead of
mass media advertising. You don't want to waste
your ad dollars on people who aren't interested.

2. Increase your profits by concentrating on small
details. Improving small things like text size, color,
or graphics can really make a positive difference.

3. Keep your offers flexible. If you offer a set price
for your product, you could offer the people that
can't afford it an optional payment plan.

4. Offer your knowledge or consulting as a bonus
product. You could offer a free 15 or 30 minute
consultation. This will add value to your product.

5. Personalize all your e-mail messages so they get
read. Include the recipient's name in the subject line.
This will grab peoples attention quickly.

6. Keep your web site consistent. You don't want
to keep things on your web site that are unrelated
to the theme of your web site.

7. Attract more subscribers to your free e-zine by
giving them free bonuses like e-books, software,
online services and other incentives.

8. Sell advertising space in your e-zine and on your
web site. This will create an extra income stream
for your business.

9. Make your web site ready for the public. Have
an "About Us" page and clear descriptions of what
actions you want your visitors to take.

10. Don't just start advertising everywhere, plan out
your marketing. Locate places and publications that
your target audience would congregate around.

Quote of the Day:

"The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to
other persons." -- Aristotle

Robot

2007-07-07T09:29:00.001-07:00

A robot is a mechanical or virtual, artificial agent. A robot is usually an electromechanical system, which, by its appearance or movements, conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own. The word robot can refer to both physical robots and virtual software agents, but the latter are often shortened to bots.^[1]

While there is still discussion^[2]^[3]^[4] about which machines qualify as robots, a typical robot will have several, though not necessarily all of the following properties:

Is not 'natural' / has been artificially created.
Can sense its environment.
Can manipulate things in its environment.
Has some degree of intelligence, or ability to make choices based on the environment, or automatic control / preprogrammed sequence.
Is programmable.
Can move with one or more axes of rotation or translation.
Can make dexterous coordinated movements.
Appears to have intent or agency (reification, anthropomorphisation or Pathetic fallacy^[5]).

Carlos Slim Helú

2007-07-07T09:09:00.001-07:00

Carlos Slim Helú (born January 28, 1940 in Mexico City) is a Mexican businessman born to Lebanese parents.^[2] Slim has a substantial influence over the telecommunications industry in Mexico and in much of the rest of Latin America as well. He controls Teléfonos de México (Telmex), Telcel and América Móvil companies. Though he maintains an active involvement in his companies, his three sons Carlos Slim Domit, Marco Antonio Slim Domit and Patrick Slim Domit and his son in law Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, head them on a day-to-day basis.

On July 3, 2007, a report by Mexican financial journalist Eduardo Garcia indicated that Slim's wealth had exceeded that of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, making him the world's wealthiest person. Recent gains in his shares in the America Movil group are largely responsible for his recent increase in wealth, boosting his fortune to an estimated $67.8 billion dollars compared with $59.2 billion dollars for Gates. ^[1]

Family

His father, Julián Slim Haddad Aglamaz, a Lebanese native from Jezzine, moved to Mexico City as a teenager in 1902. Julián established a dry goods store called La Estrella del Oriente (Star of the Orient) in 1911 and purchased real estate in the city center. Julián married the daughter of another prosperous Lebanese merchant. They had 6 children, of whom Carlos was the youngest.

Achievements, directorships

He has been vice-president of the Mexican Stock Exchange and president of the Mexican Association of Brokerage Houses. He was the first president of the Latin-American Committee of the New York Stock Exchange Administration Council, and was in office from 1996 through 1998.

He was on the Board of Directors of the Altria (Previously Philip Morris) Group (resigned in April, 2006) and Alcatel. He was on the Board of Directors of SBC Communications until July 2004 to devote more time to the World Education & Development Fund, which focussed on infrastructure, health and education projects. He is also the Majority Shareholder of CompUSA. In 1997, just before the company introduced its famous iMac line, Slim bought 3% of Apple's stock, which has skyrocketed over the years.^[3]

He built an important Mexican financial-industrial empire, Grupo Carso, which owns, among other companies the CompUSA electronic retail chain. After 28 years he became the Honorary Lifetime Chairman of the business. He is also Chairman of Teléfonos de Mexico, América Móvil, and Grupo Financiero Inbursa.

Telecom leadership

Slim gained notoriety when he led a group of investors that included France Télécom and Southwestern Bell Corporation in buying Telmex from the Mexican government in 1990 in a public tender during the presidency of Carlos Salinas.

Today, ninety percent of the telephone lines in Mexico are operated by Telmex.^[4] The mobile company, Telcel, which Carlos Slim Helú also controls, operates almost eighty percent of all the country's cellphones. These operations have financed Mr. Slim's expansion abroad. Over the past five years, his wireless carrier América Móvil has bought cellphone companies across Latin America, and is now the region's dominant company, with more than 100 million subscribers.

Slim was once MCI's largest shareholder, with 13 percent ownership. On April 11, 2005, The Wall Street Journal announced that he had sold his stake in MCI to Verizon Communications of the United States.

Awards

Slim has been awarded the Entrepreneurial Merit Medal of Honor from Mexico's Chamber of Commerce; he received the "Golden Plate Award", granted by the American Academy of Achievement, and the Belgian Government awarded him the Leopold II Commander Medal. Click here for a photo of Slim accepting the award. http://www.achievement.org/achievers/fue0/large/fue0-011.jpg

In the year 2000, Carlos Slim Helú organized the Fundación del Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México A.C. (Mexico City Historic Downtown Foundation), whose objective is to revitalize and rescue Mexico City's historic downtown, for more people to live, work and find entertainment in this area. He is Chairman of the Executive Committee for the Restoration of the Historic Center since the year 2001.

Additionally, as part of his philanthropic work, he heads the Latin America Development Fund project.

2007-07-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

Family

Achievements, directorships

Telecom leadership

Awards

Additionally, as part of his philanthropic work, he heads the Latin America Development Fund project.

Carlos Slim edges out Bill "Fatty Fat Fat" Gates as world's richest person

2007-07-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

It was probably inevitable, with Bill Gates handing out his cash right and left, and Microsoft's stock in pretty much a holding pattern for most of the 2000's, but it's still sad to see our man Bill get knocked off the top spot on the "world's richest" list. His replacement is no stranger to tech though, Carlos Slim built his fortune in the Mexican telecom biz, and has amassed an estimated net worth of $67.8 billion, thanks to a surge in the shares of America Movil. Slim's fortune represents 8% of Mexico's gross domestic product, and whatever he lacks in geek cred he more than makes up on the streets with that entirely gangster name of his.

April Fools Jokes

2007-03-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

April Fools Jokes

Sunday is April Fools Day. It’s time to scheme. I’ll tell you some of my favorite pranks. You tell me yours. There’s a good chance we’ll all get something new we can use. (Too bad it falls on Sunday this year. Maybe you can get some ideas for next year.)

A classic prank for the workplace involves the fake e-mail notice announcing that the phone company needs to clean the built-up dust out of the phone lines. Your e-mail should tell people to unplug their phones because a burst of concentrated air will be sent through the phone lines at a certain time, and if the phone is not unplugged, the cubicle will fill with dust.

One of the best practical jokes ever played on me took me years to figure out. I still don’t know who did it, but it was a beauty. It won’t work if your victim has caller ID, unless maybe you block your number. It works like this: Find someone who has two phones – say a work phone and a home phone. Pick a time when you know the target is near one of the phones and no one will answer the other. Call the phone that won’t be answered, then use three-way calling to call the phone that will be answered. When the target answers, say nothing but connect the three-way call. He’ll hear his own answering machine at home telling him to leave a message. Trust me when I say this will freak a person out. It took me about five years to figure out how my home answering machine called me at the office.

I haven’t seen this prank done, but I think it would work if you have a secretary who is unusually clueless about technology. Tell the secretary that some other department is out of copier paper and ask him/her to fax some blank pages, just enough to hold them until their paper shipment comes in.

Send a department-wide e-mail telling people that a once-in-a-century alignment of Pluto and Venus will cause gravity on earth to be 20% less for about five minutes starting at 9:47 AM. Suggest that people test the phenomenon by jumping straight up and down at that time. I stole this idea from here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070329/od_afp/lifestyleaprilfoolmediaholidayoffbeat;_ylt=AoTVC4N.0t6cqXq9w25MVBkDW7oF

When I left my first job at a large bank, personal computers were so new that there was only one in the entire department. Everyone shared it. I was the only person who knew much about how computers worked. Before I left for another company, I wrote a program in Basic that started whenever the computer was booted. It offered a multiple choice test that had to be answered before the user could continue. The question was something like:

Scott Adams is a wonderful human being because of his…

a. Sex appeal
b. Gigantic brain
c. All of the above

It didn’t matter what the user picked. All answers worked. But the computer couldn’t be used until the quiz was completed. I heard later that no one ever figured out how to remove it, and the question was dutifully answered every morning when the computer was booted.

I heard this prank that happened in a typing class. (Or keyboarding class if you prefer.) The prankster switched keyboards with his victim and when she tried typing, he would type messages to her screen as if her computer was a sentient being. Apparently she started asking it for advice, thinking it might be God. This prank would work even better with a wireless keyboard. You could control your co-worker’s computer from across the next cube.

What’s your best prank?

March 30, 2007 | Permalink
Comments

A single white thread stitching up the fly front on my husband's jockeys. He was caught cutting it in the men's room at work.

Posted by: susan | March 30, 2007 at 08:59 AM

In junior high, there was a kid who was both extremely annoying and very gullable. So one day, as he was annoying me about Batman Returns, which had just come out, I casually dropped in the conversation that Tim Burton was my dad. He and my mom had divorced and my dad had adopted me which is why my last name was different. He said he didn't believe me at first, but over the next few weeks and months, as we continued to talk about it, I could see him buying in. That is, until he wrote the Tim Burton fan club telling them that he was friends with Tim Burton's son. They wrote back informing him that Burton had no children. That was fun.
More recently, a friend of mine purchased her first house a year or two ago. She's not very handy or anything so she's asked me to help out from time to time. There was a part of her yard where the grass was very sparse and she asked me how to get the grass to grow there. If it hadn't been April Fools Day, I would've said go to the hardware store and pick up some seed. Instead, I told her "some guy told me" that if you put powdered milk on your grass at night, it'll help it grow. But you want to put it all over your yard to make it uniform. So she did it later that night. And the next morning, after the dew had set in, she went outside to her yard, and found it smelling like sour milk.

Posted by: Russell | March 30, 2007 at 08:59 AM

My daughter lives for jokes. She resolved to do an early joke on her friends today. Since most of them eat the crappy school lunches they always look foward to her sharing whatever goodies she has in her oversized lunch bag. Last night she carefully removed the filling out of several oreo cookies, replacing the filling with toothpaste. She placed the refurbished treats in the freezer to keep them firm. She plans to cover the smell with the story that they are simply mint oreos.

The only other that I know was when my husband was out one night with some teenage friends. He was explaining about the full moon to them and the optical illusion of it looking bigger when it comes up, etc. He convinced both these kids that it looks especially large when you bend over forward and look at it between your legs...they actually fell for it!

Posted by: sunflower | March 30, 2007 at 08:58 AM

Before email was widely used, my friend had a girlfriend that lived in another state who he would write letters to frequently. My friends and I got on his computer and in the auto correct feature in Microsoft Word, we changed it so every time he typed his girlfriend's name (Annie), it would automatically change it to "Annie has big thighs" He didn't think it was very funny, but the rest of us did. This is a great office prank too.

Posted by: Collin | March 30, 2007 at 08:54 AM

I like to tape down the button of the kitchen sink sprayer and aim it toward the front of the sink. The next person to use the kitchen sink gets sprayed with water.

Posted by: Chris | March 30, 2007 at 08:50 AM

Locate the phone number for your local Health Department's STD Clinic.

Text page your victim with the number an urgent "Please Call"

Classic.

Posted by: MO'B | March 30, 2007 at 08:46 AM

Here's a fun one I pull every year:

Find the co-worker that everyone hates. Go into her cubicle, stand behind her chair and say, "I'm having a hard time pulling up the forecast data sheet. Can you get into it?" When she turns to her computer, club her over the head repeatedly with a heavy, blunt object. Remember to hit her hard and often enough that she doesn't remember what happened when she comes to.

Posted by: Doug | March 30, 2007 at 08:45 AM

When I worked for a large publisher, we used all Mac computers, and there were two shifts. I was on nights, and so the night before April fools, we went into the lead person's computer, opened the Mac splashscreen in Photoshop, turned the image over and resaved it. Then, we added a little script to add a "Help" button at the bottom of the screen, and when it was clicked, it said "Turn monitor over."

Sadly I wasn't there the next morning, but legend has it that he turned his monitor upside down.

Posted by: Incredipete | March 30, 2007 at 08:44 AM

Some random guy once pulled over and asked me and a friend for directions. After I finished telling him where to go and just as he started to drive away, my friend yelled at me (loud enough that the driver could hear) that I "should have told them the truth".

The same friend would always yell "MY WALLET!" anytime a jogger would pass us.

Posted by: wklink | March 30, 2007 at 08:43 AM

This is the most simple and successful prank I've ever pulled...

Most cell phones have a banner that you can change to say whatever you want. So I changed my wife's phone to say "Low Battery". She started off just mentioning that she couldn't get her phone to charge all the way and it slowly escalated over a few weeks until she was becoming furious at her phone. I finally had to tell her when she demanded we buy her a new one.

Then, she decided to do it to her brother while he was in town for a weekend (he lives a couple hours away). Two months later it's Thanksgiving and everybody is at our house and he starts telling this story about his piece of crap phone that won't hold a charge. He took it into the Sprint store and they couldn't figure it out. He bought a new battery for the phone. Etc etc.

Meanwhile my wife and I are dieing laughing. Finally at the end of the story we told him...

Seriously, the best prank ever.

Posted by: Tim Grahl | March 30, 2007 at 08:41 AM

Here's a prank I pulled that stemmed from a PHB-like recognition program. One of our directors came up with the idea that employees could reward each other by giving out pieces of construction paper with keys drawn on them that said "Thanks for being 'key' to our success". When you saw someone doing something good for the company, you were supposed to give them one of these keys. I was a night shift cube dweller so I gathered up all of the keys I could find in the managers' cubes (since none were being given out as it was pretty much agreed this was pretty lame), and I completely covered the director's cube with them... including the conference area that the directors shared. I even glued them to the outside of her trash can.

That just brought to mind a prank from college... Sophomore year in the dorms, I lived below a girls' floor. The RA up there just freaked out over anything we did that may the slightest noise. So we had every guy on our floor crank up the volume on their computers as loud as we could and coordinated to play the same hip-hop mp3 file at the exact same moment.

Oh... we also tp'd her car and wrapped it in saran wrap. It rained that night so the toilet paper got all gross. Someone had also torn out naked pictures from Playboy and had taped them under the saran wrap. She quit being an RA before the year was done... (I did feel a little bad about that, but it was one of those things that just sort of snowballed...)

Posted by: RM | March 30, 2007 at 08:40 AM

Playing a prank on someone with no free will is exactly as exciting as starting Excel, and for the same reason.

Posted by: guntherothk | March 30, 2007 at 08:40 AM

When I was in the Air Force a few years back, this guy named Captain Bender played a prank on a secretary by leaving her a written phone message that she needed to call the base police about a speeding ticket. She didn't actually have one, so she got the run-around when she tried to clear it up.

The secretary and I decided to get back at him by sending him to Clear Air Station in Alaska (Clear is a real facility, about 8o miles south of Fairbanks, in the middle of absolute nowhere.) At the time, Captain Bender was waiting for orders to move to Vandenberg AFB in California. The secretary and I got hold of an orders package from another airman that had recently moved to the base where we were stationed, and used a photocopier to modify the documents to suit our needs (this was before scanners were widely available.) We also found an envelope that had come from the personell center, and had canceled stamps, to make it look real.

In the end, Captain Bender got a package in his mailbox containing orders transferring him to Alaska, with a letter attached from Master Sergeant Benjamin Dover explaining the last minute change. The orders were signed by Col Seymore Butts.

Bender and the commander actually called somebody at the Pentagon before they figured out that an accounting code on the orders was in an incorrect format. That's right- Benjamin Dover didn't give it away, but an improperly formatted fund cite did. What a dork.

Posted by: kromagon | March 30, 2007 at 08:38 AM

in one of my meaner moments in the early days of PCs I wrote a little (DOS) program that abruptly warned the user of an imminent failure of the hard drive's containment field that would result in a vacuum breach and that they had roughly 30 seconds to reach minimum safe distance (which of course it didn't specify). combine that with some random low frequency sounds from the internal speaker and (in the late 80s) you got a (apparently too) convincing enough effect for someone to try calling the fire dept to say their computer was about to explode - it kind of lost the funny part after that (at least for a few months)...

Posted by: jakesdad | March 30, 2007 at 08:38 AM

Wow, a lot of the "screen shots" suggestions, I thought I was pretty clever 10 years ago when I did it first, but apparently everybody had the same idea.

When I was ten, I bought chewing gum cigarettes (not even sure if they still sell them) and walked into my house as my father was watching TV in the living room. With this gum, if you blow on the end, the sugar poofs out the front, looking like smoke (wasn't sure if that was intended or not when they made it.) I was just barely able to show my father it was gum before he leaped out of his chair to smack the "heck" out of me.

A good one now, perhaps a little mean though, is *76. I'm pretty sure I have the number right, its the reverse of whatever phone code blocks caller id (which I think is *67). *76 is a code that will forward any incoming calls intended for the number you're dialing from to the number the punch in after the *76.

For example, borrow a buddy's phone, dial *76 976-Hot-Stud and you are done.

Posted by: Joshua | March 30, 2007 at 08:37 AM

Saw this one online somewhere- it's a great harmless prank- Take a paper clip and put it on the copier window. Make copies. Reload the paper in the copier and/or shared printers and ensure that it feeds correctly so the paper clip image shows up. Drives cow-workers up a wall. I do this occasionally to liven things up around the cube-a-torium. Occasionally I get a "hit" when a cow-worker overreacts and curses. I really enjoy the confused looks when the get thier copies or printouts. (These people rarely seem to learn. They can be such easy targets!)
Another one I like, when a cow-worker is out of the office for an extended time, call thier phone and leave a message asking if they're back yet. Do it every day their gone and fill up thier message box! But use an unkown line, and not your own voice. Better yet, use a recording of muzak or hip-hop. Fun!

Posted by: Zzyzxmo | March 30, 2007 at 08:37 AM

Switch the elevator button wiring for two adjacent floors of a building, and switch the entire contents of all the stuff hanging on doors or in the hallway. [Credit to unidentified culprits at University of Rochester Computer Science Department, circa 1980.]

Post notice in mailroom (of graduate academic department) that all students and staff would henceforth be classified as independent contractors, would need to rent their offices and buy their own office supplies. But they'd have all the advantages of deducting business expenses! Gave pointers to obtaining quarterly estimated tax forms. [That was me, really had some foreign grads students going, as a sudden nee to fill out more forms is a normal event.]

Lock the bathroom doors at work, post notice saying that due to budget cuts, bathrooms will be open only one hour/day, employees should provide their own toilet paper, and should remember to go before they arrive at work. [Credit to Jim Roche]

Lock the kitchen door at work, post "closed until further notice" note from County Health Department. [Credit to Jim Roche]

Posted by: LB | March 30, 2007 at 08:34 AM

Pretty common one was to tape down the telephone receiver so when the phone rang and the phone was answered the phone kept ringing, take a while to figure out the first time it is done

A real funny one a friend of mine (who is sweet but wonderfully irresponsible) was to call her parents and say that she was Pregnant ant that she was knocked up by (you favorite ethnic). She did this every year for several years before they stopped reacting.

If I was younger and had a classmate or coworker that was pregnant and different racial make up than mine I would get her to pretend she was my girlfriend and that "something happened".

Posted by: Danny V | March 30, 2007 at 08:31 AM

Once a student, Pete Aiello, stole my mouse ball. Took me ages to figure out what was wrong with it (that was back in the early days of mice).

In residence at university, I once lived on a floor with one hallway of girls and two hallways of guys. We used to play pranks on the guys and they'd always think it was each other so retaliated on the other guys and never tried to get us back. The best one I remember was putting clear tape across their doors, about six inches from the bottom. Guys came barelling out of their doors and tripped. Unfortunately we couldn't lurk around to watch, just had to hear about it afterwards.

Posted by: Christa Bedwin | March 30, 2007 at 08:31 AM

I have the best prank ever:

Step 1: Don't read any other pranks on this board

Step 2: Copy word for word, (or with some modifications) a prank described explicitly in Scott's Blog entry in which he is asking for different pranks

Step 3: Let the hilarity ensue!

PS. Oh look a couple of people took this advice before it was given! Do they own time machines? Discuss.

Posted by: Jason Smith | March 30, 2007 at 08:28 AM

Here's a good one: Publish your cow-orker's desktop and then create, delete and move files around remotely. Great fun! Another: Create a folder on their desktop. Hit printscreen and save the screenshot as the background. Watch them try to delete the folder! Removing the mouse ball or tape on the bottom of the mouse is good.

One of the best was I had a friend write a program that ran invisibly which we installed on the victim's PC. It would look out on the network in a certain directory every N minutes. If it found a wav file there it would play it. Woohoo! What fun! I think the police siren sound was the best but the white noise at full volume was good too.

Posted by: AndyT13 | March 30, 2007 at 08:26 AM

At a decidedly geeky company in the 1980's the Electrical Engineers liked to play tricks on the Software Engineers. A typical trick was to open up the VT100 terminals (remember those?) and reverse the horizontal and vertical inputs to the CRT, which was easy because there were convenient connectors. The result was that the text was upside down and backwards.

Since fiddling the high voltage circuits of a monitor is a kinda exciting thing to contemplate if you're just a software guy, we had to ask them if they would please turn them back around.

Posted by: guntherothk | March 30, 2007 at 08:26 AM

We had a guy in our IT department who would surf over to eBay and spend HOURS there doing a whole lot of nothing while we worked the day away picking up after him. It wasn't April Fool's or anything but we had heard him muttering something about a large purchase he was trying to make on eBay. Something like a boat trailer or motorcycle. We, being IT folk, messed with his HOSTS file to make eBay.com resolve to a rather "inappropriate for work" website. He got a little nervous and asked us to try out eBay.com on our computers. Ours were fine but his was doing something it shouldn't. We suggested he had been surfing for porn and caught cyber-crabs or some other of electronic STD and it was hijacking his browser. We never let him in on the joke but let him sweat for a while before correcting the issue. We've used it periodically since then too. Works every time!

Posted by: Chris | March 30, 2007 at 08:26 AM

One of the classics, at least in my part of the country, is to catch a (some) carp and place them under the victim's truck seat, then roll up the windows. This is best when the fish have at least a few hours to steep in the hot sun.

Posted by: Roberto | March 30, 2007 at 08:25 AM

When I was a sysadmin, I changed the text of the login prompt to read "System Down" instead of "login:".

Posted by: Scott Pakudaitis | March 30, 2007 at 08:25 AM

At most grocery stores, you can get clear, instant gelatin that will set up and stiffen in any cold water. You take some of this into your victim's bathroom, flush their toilet a couple of times to make sure the water is good and cold, then poor in a packet of the gelatin. Stir it a bit with the toilet brush, then leave it overnight. By morning, the toilet will appear normal at a glance, but will be filled with a semi-solid toilet-shaped Jello. Any additional biological waste will simply pool up on top. And, of course, flushing will require more than the normal amount of suckage.

Posted by: Nick | March 30, 2007 at 08:24 AM

http://www.zug.com/pranks/printer/

The "Fake Love Letter" is especially effective. It was wonderful when somebody decided to read it aloud to the whole room, like they were the world's greatest for making the discovery.

Posted by: fred ipsum | March 30, 2007 at 08:22 AM

http://cashloan2007.bravehost.com

Posted by: mxaisuybs | March 30, 2007 at 08:22 AM

Two best senior pranks when I was in high school:

1) Some guys released 4 large greased pigs into the building, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 5. (skipping #4). They sent everyone home and looked for the missing #4 pig all day. Classic.

2) My buddy hacked into the automated calling system, and called in a snow day. None of the students came to class.

Posted by: Matthew Kovich | March 30, 2007 at 08:16 AM

My best prank went WAY farther than I thought it would. I worked for a small software company and one of our tech writers left to work for one of our competitors. There had always been talk of our company going public or being acquired.

So, on April Fool's day (early, because that's when I came in) I sent this friend at the competition an e-mail saying that our company had been acquired by a large silicon valley company (which shall remain nameless because I later went to work for them). About 2 hours later, I sent an e-mail saying, "April Fools!"

Well, before reading the second one, my friend forwarded the first e-mail to everyone in his company!!! When he read the second e-mail he said, "Oh well" and just let it go.

This ended up as a rumor in the San Jose Mercury News. We had a company meeting to deny the rumor. In fact, they denied any acquisition rumors. Two weeks later we acquired another company! So, the reason management was so panicked was that they thought someone was actually on to them and had just gotten the rumor wrong.

This happened over 11 years ago, and I'm hoping the statute of limitations is less than that, because I've only told 4 people in all that time.

Posted by: mac | March 30, 2007 at 08:15 AM

Some of last year's pranks:

1) Work: Removed all the key caps from a coworker's keyboard and rearranged.

2) Work: Make 100 copies of a paper clip. Remove paper clip and place copies into copier paper hopper. Watch as people search for that paper clip that must be stuck in there somewhere.

3) Work: Shorten someone's handset receiver by joining it 3 inches from each end with a paper clip (maybe the one from #2?) and wait for them to answer the phone.

4) Home: Rubber-band kitchen sink sprayer to open position.

Posted by: nick | March 30, 2007 at 08:12 AM

Hey Scott,

can you get rid of the deterministic "free will machines" that keep runing around your blog and post spontaneous comments about attributing their own comment on every story to free will.

Thanks.

Posted by: Steve Talbot | March 30, 2007 at 08:11 AM

We had two remotes that worked on both TV,s. I had one of the remotes and was pretending to be asleep on the couch with a blanket covering me. I kept changing the channel or turning it off and on and turning the sound down. My husband was going crazy trying to figure out what was happening. He was having a very interesting conversation with the TV. I got caught because I was laughing so hard the couch was shaking.

Posted by: L. Silva | March 30, 2007 at 08:09 AM

And one more...
6. Forward office phones. This may not work so well anymore, but you used to be able to use call forwarding to forward calls from one phone to another (without all of the wonderful digital displays). At night, go to each phone and forward it to the boss. They will have to go in and reset each phone manually.

Posted by: -drew | March 30, 2007 at 08:08 AM

I once convinced a guy in my IT class that the printer wasnt working because it had run out of white ink, he didnt believe me at first but i convinced him printers needed something to fill the middle of O's and 0's etc with.

The funniest part was when he went to ask the teacher if it was true.

http://ramblingsofanofficeworker.blogspot.com

Posted by: Oli | March 30, 2007 at 08:08 AM

I ran a second keyboard (with mouse attached to the second keyboard) through the cubicle wall and into the USB port of my buddies PC. I then controlled his computer from the adjacent cube. When the guy was working we would either alt-tab or lock his pc. Once it was locked we would type random characters to prevent him from logging back in. Once he was logged back in we left a lunch bag on the keyboard (to hide it from him). However, the lunch bag was placed so the "j" key was repeating. He thought he had a virus. It was pretty good especially since he was rushing to make a deadline.

Posted by: Anthony | March 30, 2007 at 08:08 AM

One of the best took me a week to figure out. A guy I worked with went into my registry and changed the desktop sort order to descending.

Posted by: Brian | March 30, 2007 at 08:08 AM

simple but effective. I grew up in a house of women fighting for the bathroom in the morning. I woke up at 4 am and took every towel, wash cloth, tissue, and toilet paper in the house and stored it safely in the shed...the one place none of the women in the house had never been to. hysteria ensued. Same day i put a .bat file on my AP English teacher's computer to count down a self destruction from 1000...and saved it as "winrun.bat," the only way she knew how to boot. after it got to "0" it read April Fools, but she was so hysterical by then I never admitted my guilt...Sorry Ms. Murphy.

Posted by: Matty | March 30, 2007 at 08:02 AM

Here are some that I have collected:

1. Uses for disconnected phone numbers. A particularly annoying cow-orker was trying to buy a boat. Everyone had to hear the pitch for his boat loving. Other workers would start putting ads in the large company newsletter for a perfect boat at a really cheap price and give a disconnected phone number. The greatest was the time when one phone number was disconnected and gave you a new listing for the new phone number that was also disconnected. Every week for years, the guy would call these phone numbers, hoping for his boat.

2. Confusing passwords. The EPA lets companies submit data using their computer programs. Sometimes you need to edit the data using an administrator type password. The password is “secret”, as in the letter “s”, the letter “e”, the letter “c”, the letter “r”, the letter “e”, the letter “t”, followed by the enter button. Try explaining that to a large group; “If the password is secret, how am I supposed to do my job?”
3. For obnoxious vegetarians. Tape meat and bacon smelling air fresheners to the back of their cubicle drawers.
4. Cows walk upstairs but not down. Use this fact to put a cow in an upstairs office, like the company president. They will have to remove windows and use a crane.
5. Water. Large trash cans can be filled with 30 or more gallons of water and tipped precariously onto a door. When the door opens, the water runs out, flooding the carpet and usually the floor below.

Posted by: -drew | March 30, 2007 at 08:01 AM

Putting Post-It notes on the bottom of computer mice. Mouse won't work until user (or tech support) investigates problem by looking a bottom side of mouse.

Posted by: Dick | March 30, 2007 at 08:00 AM

Most simple but damn funny prank I played -

Stand by the road near the house pretending some work and shout out 'Oh My God!! Your wheeel..your wheel!!" poniting at the wheels of the car/bike your neighbour/sibling is driving.Make it look as if you have seen something surprisingly horrible.When they stop or get down to ask, say " Your wheels were rotating!" ( maintain the same surprised look).

There were some who even responded with a 'Is it?!" and bent down to look at the wheels ! LOL!

Posted by: Aishu | March 30, 2007 at 08:00 AM

Okay, here it is:

If someone in your office uses Microsoft Word a lot, get onto their computer while they're away, and set up the auto-correct feature to automatically replace the word "if" with the phrase "if only I could concentrate". (Of course, any number of other auto-correct replacements are also possible, but I like this one because it's not rude, damaging or defamatory in any way, but really freaks out the "victim").

I saw this done once and the beauty of it was that the "victim" didn't even notice it until she had typed her entire document and was proofreading it.

Posted by: ND | March 30, 2007 at 07:59 AM

We had a single male quaker parrot at the time I pulled this prank on my husband. We live in Seattle, WA, and there was a news story one morning, conveniently about a week and a half before April fool's, that a neighboring small town had a cell tower that needed to come down. The problem was that the tower had been colonized by a sizeable community of feral quaker parrots. But because the parrots weren't native animals, the company who owned the tower was under no obligation to take care of the birds. So I waited until April fool's day to call my husband at work and tell him that I had volunteered with people in the small town to act as foster homes for the birds after they were captured and hold them in quarrantine until new homes could be adopted. I said I had volunteered to host as many as 8 birds. The clincher here is that we live on our yacht, so these 8 birds would be crammed into a room that is only 15 ft by 18 ft that also housed our own bird, the couches, and the only TV. At first he was excited to help out, and I was crushed that my scam had fallen flat. But I played through anyhow. It took him about 4 hrs to think the plan through and realize that it was a very bad idea- do you know how loud quakers can be? and messy? In these 4 hours he and I told all our extended family about the plan- he was thinking aloud and I was getting mileage out of the joke. When he called me back to say 'uh, honey? this is a BAD idea' we had a good laugh. But my youngest brother believed it for about 6 months!

Posted by: Rachel Life | March 30, 2007 at 07:59 AM

I have seen several good ones.

One is to take a screenshot of a person's desktop and then put that photo as the desktop wallpaper. Then slide all of the real shortcuts as far over to one side off the screen as far as possible. When the victim clicks on one of the "shortcuts" on his now fake desktop, nothing happens.

Another one is to change the default font color, the font background and the "hover" color to the same color. All the dropdown menu items will seem to have disappeared!

And one time, my boss's network connection wasn't working and I told him that we had a token-ring network and that the token had fallen out and was in his office someplace. Later I told him that it must have gotten caught in the ethernet. HA HA HA!! (No wait, that was a Dilbert cartoon. Sorry.)

One time we had a cow-orker who was very anal about keeping the overhead bins closed in his cubicle. The bins had little "garage-door" style doors that lifted up and slid back. over the top. One day when he was at lunch we gathered up all of the pennies in the department (everyone has a stash of pennies in a desk drawer or a coffee cup, right?) We took all the pennies and spread them out on top of his opened overhead bin doors and waited for him to return from lunch. Sure enough, as soon as he saw his doors opened, he cursed under his breath about people messing with his stuff and closed both doors, thus showering his desk with pennies. The roar of the pennies hitting his desk was deafening, and the roar of laughter from the department was even louder.

Posted by: Mr. Wampus | March 30, 2007 at 07:54 AM

Once I replaced the ball in my co-worker's mouse with a large black jelly bean. It took her FOREVER to figure out what was wrong, but she was told right before she filed the help desk request.

Posted by: Gabriel | March 30, 2007 at 07:53 AM

Things I know have been done...

- Spit-shine only one of your roommate's shoes.

- Put Saran Wrap tightly stretched across the toilet bowl, then leave the lid down.

- Dye your neighbor's dog's hair a strange color.

Posted by: Glen | March 30, 2007 at 07:51 AM

Not only on 1st April: grab a screenshot of someone's desktop, set it as the wallpaper and hide any real taskbars and stuff. Looks as if the system was permanently frozen. :->

Posted by: kura | March 30, 2007 at 07:50 AM

At my last job you were able to send messages across the network using the "netsend" command in DOS. All you had to know was the persons user-id which was easy enough to figure out if you knew their name.

One lady I worked with was relatively clueless when it came to technology. Our cubicles were a row apart but if I peaked through the cracks in the cube wall I could see her desk.

I looked over to see her playing a game on the web (not uncommon for any of us at this place) so I did a netsend across the network that read "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING". If you hit any key these messages disappear and rid you of any chance of seeing who sent it. She was clueless about the netsend function so, initially she looked around trying to figure out where the camera was, but went back to playing her game (and simultaneously talking on the phone). I then sent a follow up: "JANE - GET OFF THE PHONE AND GET TO WORK!" At which point she involved our boss and I lost it laughing.

Posted by: Sarcasmo | March 30, 2007 at 07:49 AM

My old supervisor lived for April Fool’s day. As a new hire I had just missed this one, but it was legendary in our department.

My supervisor had scheduled a meeting for April 1st. She baked a batch of muffins for everyone to enjoy during the meeting. The muffins were deliberately awful, with pepper and such. My supervisor watched everyone’s faces and was waiting for someone to ask her what was in the muffins. EVERYONE just said they were delicious and somehow managed to choke them down.

I should note my supervisor had a good, even warm relationship her staff and was not “feared” by anyone. Turned out people kept quiet not wanting to hurt feelings, rather than because she was the boss. As the story goes, everyone had a good laugh about it.

Posted by: CLB | March 30, 2007 at 07:47 AM

A friend of mine convinced the class "genius" that she could engage her computer in a diolog by typing questions into MS word. He had a wireless keyboard accross the room to answer the questions. She was looked very sad for the next couple of days becuase there was now a flaw in her record of being the perfect genius.

Posted by: Bryan P | March 30, 2007 at 07:44 AM

Install a mouse tracker software, and record the movements of your mouse, as it opens up programs, moves around, etc...

Then install the software with the recording into your victims computer, and have it play on startup by putting it in the startup folder.

You can have lots of fun by the people looking terrified what the computer does on its own.

Michael
http://www.poetry-central.net

Posted by: Michael | March 30, 2007 at 07:40 AM

Either the BBC is pulling a prank or someone finally decided that easter and rabbits don't really have any connection. here is a link to a story about a 200lb Chocolate JESUS.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6509127.stm

Posted by: Charles | March 30, 2007 at 07:39 AM

Take a snap shot of the desktop with no programs running using the "Print Screen" key.

Paste the screen shot into MSPaint and save it. Under the file menu in MS paint, set it to desktop background.

Proceed by deleting all of the icons on the desktop, and hiding the task bar.

It appears that the task bar and icons are all still there, so they try repeatedly to use them, to no avail. They think the computer is frozen and reboot it, only to find that it still will not work.

They call IT, and try to explain it. Very amusing.

Posted by: Andrew | March 30, 2007 at 07:39 AM

Years ago, when windows was pretty new, I did a screen capture on a buddies computer of his desktop. I then brought up the image and it filled the entire screen with it. It looked exactly like his desktop - except he couldn't figure out why his icons no longer worked.

Posted by: DanW | March 30, 2007 at 07:37 AM

I have two great pranks. One played on my family the other I played at the office.

The first one took place when I was in middle school. April Fools is always over spring break. I grew up in a town where you don't lock the doors. This gave my brother's friends a whole week to slowly rearrange our entire house. Walking in with my bedroom in the living room, the TV in the back closet caused quite the immediate alarm. They left notes for us to figure out what had happened.

The second: By the end of my time at my last job I was desperately looking for ways not to kill my boss or myself. My co-worker and I figured out how to make our computers talk out loud via IM. With our boss out the office for a morning we set up and hid IM on his computer, activated the voice and had a great afternoon with him. He's never figured out who did it.

Posted by: Mrs. B | March 30, 2007 at 07:36 AM

A group of students in my high school got into the school over the weekend (the 1st was a Monday). They removed all the furniture from a particular teacher's room, and then proceeded to lay down plastic tarp and, on top of it, grass sod. After this they replaced all the furniture. They even put a little mountain in the corner with a flag on top of it.

Imagine that teacher's surprise when they walked in their room and found the floor replaced with a nice, lush lawn...

Posted by: Ben Chambers | March 30, 2007 at 07:36 AM

We once pulled an elaborate double-prank on a friend, "A".

First, another friend, "B" and I play-acted a fake prank in front of A, where I was the pranker and B the, er, prankee.

The next day, B took A aside and they "thought up" a prank on me, where A would shake up a 2-liter bottle of soda and B would manuver me into opening it.

Come the following weekend, we were all gathered together again. I took every opportunity I could to turn my back on A, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him vigorously shaking a bottle, hardly able to restrain his laughter. This went on for an hour or so. When A went to the bathroom at one point, though, we switched the shaken bottle for an ordinary one.

When A returned, B asked me to pour him a drink. I made an elaborate show of it, almost opening the bottle several times but interrupting myself to say something, etc. I could see A lean forward each time only to sit back disappointed. Meanwhile, though I had started on the other side of the room, with each interruption I moved myself closer and closer to A, to the point where I basically had him pinned behind a chair in a corner of the room.

Then I opened the bottle. He literally vaulted over the chair in his haste to get away. As I calmly poured the drink, I expressed great concern as I inquired after my friend's well being.

Posted by: Dan W | March 30, 2007 at 07:35 AM

One of the oldest, but still one of my favorites:

Take a screenshot of someones desktop. Go into the desktop settings and remove My Computer, etc., then transfer all the other icons to a folder and move them elsewhere on the computer. Minimize the taskbar. Remove any programs that show on the screen from startup (google desktop, the office toolbar, etc). Then, set the screen as the background. Sit back, and watch the fun=)

Posted by: Randy | March 30, 2007 at 07:34 AM

A friend of mine played a prank on his coworker. Each night, he took down all the cubicle art- cartoons, memos, etc.- and replaced them with photocopies.
After a few weeks, the coworker was seen frequently checking their glasses and complaining that their prescription wasn't good anymore, because everything looked slightly blurry...

Posted by: Rob | March 30, 2007 at 07:32 AM

From an early Dilbert newsletter (I think). If any co-workers are still running the SETI@home thing, you can create an "Evidence of alien life found....Contacting SETI" screen-saver that will probably freak them out...

One I did do once was to take apart an office telephone and swap the "*" and "#" key. Again, it works particularly well since most of the time you don't look at the phone keypad, you just remember where the keys are. On the one time you are looking (probably an important call), you will screw up.

Posted by: None of the above | March 30, 2007 at 07:31 AM

Exchange numbers and names on target's mobile phone (e.g. store your number to his girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse's name and vice versa .... assuming you are not the target's spouse, of course). Lots of possibilities then on ..... only difficulty is in getting access to the target's phone while he/she aint watching

Posted by: Dunbar | March 30, 2007 at 07:30 AM

Scott, it is much more likely an executive would fall for the "faxing blank pages" prank than a secretary. Give secretaries some credit please - knowing how office equipment works is pretty vital to their job. Executives on the other hand can't tell the difference between a paper jam and a hole in the ground.

Posted by: Emily | March 30, 2007 at 07:27 AM

How can we forget the classic:

Do this at work. Glue a quarter to the ground using construction adhesive. Setup a web cam in a window and broadcast the coin prank to the company. The fun and joy to watch one co-worker after another fight to get that coin off the ground is priceless. It is even funnier if you get a few executives to participate as victims.

Posted by: Rob Henry | March 30, 2007 at 07:26 AM

Back when I was a tester at a software company, running Windows 3.1, we rebooted our machines about 12 times a day. So I wrote a small program that would increase the "border" size of a user's desktop windows by 1 pixel every time the computer booted (it was an INI file setting), and installed it on the machine of a particularly clueless tester. He noticed them at first, but then he got tired of having to manually decrease them back to a normal size, so he just let them grow really fat. He ended up with like 50-pixel-wide borders on his desktop. I would almost die laughing inside when other people came to use his computer - they'd be like, "Vince, what is it with you and these huge window borders?" He'd just go, "I dunno, it's all screwed up."

Posted by: Squiggy | March 30, 2007 at 07:23 AM

This has nothing to do with April Fools, but I came across this article and thought you might be interested. It presents an alternative to your donut theory.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL

Posted by: mattc | March 30, 2007 at 07:20 AM

The one prank that gave me joy all day is the following:

Find a dolt, I mean a real cocky SOB who is ignorant about technology but is not a quitter.

In Windows go to the video settings and set his monitor to a red hue, removing blue. Most video cards have this color correction ability.

Tell the dolt, er...I mean manager.. I mean victim, that the monitor is low on blue dyes but that the local Radio Shack carries what he needs and it is cheap and quick to fix.

In my joke, the victim called Radio Shack. The guy there was on to the joke and passed him on to another store, like Best Buy, who in turn knew the joke and passed him on to another store, and so on.

This went on all day! The victim finally gave up and ordered a new monitor later in the day.

Posted by: Rob Henry | March 30, 2007 at 07:19 AM

A rubber band on the kitchen sink hose trigger is a classic. Be sure to aim the sprayer at the user.

KY on door knobs.

Changing some ones computer keyboard settings to Dvorak.

Posted by: ryan | March 30, 2007 at 07:18 AM

The plastic wrap covering the toilet trick always works. Messy but funny as hell. Then there was the time that we filled a guys cubicle full of packing foam. The popcorn type. We got in trouble for that one. My other favorite is the Detective Phone call. This involves calling a person you know that likes to live on the edge. Call stating that you are Detective so-and-so and that you need to ask him a few questions. Being evasive about the reason of the call is the most effective. Ask the person who they were with the previous evening. Stuff like that. It's priceless. It's best done while on a speakerphone with friends listening. Evil huh?

Posted by: Mike | March 30, 2007 at 07:16 AM

A former employer of mine -- also my best friend's dad -- called me one year to inform me that they had made a mistake in accounting and they owed me quite a bit of back-pay. As a poor 18-year-old, I was ecstatic that I was getting some surprise extra cash (kind of the same feeling of finding a folded up $20 in an old coat pocket that you didn't know wass there... but better). After he had me totally convinced and I had already planned on what I would do with the money, he smugly said -- "April Fools!"

Posted by: Ann-Marie | March 30, 2007 at 07:16 AM

The only prank I can remeber falling for was when I was about to get some sugar for my tea in the morning and wasn't watching. Someone pointed out there was a beetle in the sugar and I believed them for a moment.

Posted by: chris A | March 30, 2007 at 07:15 AM

I am the webmaster at my school. It's a nice simple little site - http://www.whms.jordan.k12.ut.us with a horribly complicated URL.

I am also the band director. (The server is in the band room. That way if the history teacher who runs the network kills the whole building, I'll still be able to live-edit the server.)

So, one April Fools a few years back, I made a version of the home page that shakes. (It's done with a simple bit of javascript in the header.) Just before early morning jazz band I renamed the non-shaking version index2, named the shaking version index and loaded the non-shaking version in my browser.

And I told the jazz band what was going on.

For the next hour the teachers arrived, turned on their machines, opened their browsers and then came to the band room in mild panic. Then I'd go over to my machine so they could show me. My browser didn't shake so I'd say "maybe I have to refresh." Refreshing loaded up the same non-shaking page.

And then I said,"Maybe it's that earthquake virus. It's supposed to shake for three minutes and then erase your hard drive. Did you unplug your machine before you came down here?"

Then they'd leave, and the next victim would arrive.

That was fun, but my all time favorite was much more simple. I got it off the old DNRC proto-blog.

I rushed into my non-pointy-haired but also non-techy principals office, felt the back of the CRT and said, "Some April Fools prank has backed up the firewall. Put your hand back here and feel the heat this thing is giving off."

She did and called district IT support. They played along for about two minutes until she figured it out.

Posted by: tubaguy | March 30, 2007 at 07:14 AM

I did my B.S. (in many senses) at Drake University, which at that time was one of those really obnoxious pro-Apple schools. My roommate was a world-class computer geek and had the latest and greatest Mac, a IIci (one of the first Macs with an external color monitor.)

The week that the first version of VirtualPC (an emulator that let Macs run PC software - sort of the great-granddaddy of BootCamp) came out, I was working after class at ComputerLand, and scored a store copy.

Now my roommate had so much crap on his computer that it took several minutes to boot, so he had a ritual where he'd come home from class, power on the machine, go downstairs and fix a snack, and come back upstairs to Geek Nirvana. So the day after I got the VPC, I snuck into his room, installed it along with a copy of Windows 3.0, and set it to launch at startup.

Keep in mind that this was a house full of physics/math/computer geeks of the HIGHEST order: MacGuyver would have felt right at home. (Of the four people living in the place, one is now corporate counsel for the largest arcade game maker on Earth, one designs nuclear weapons, and one retired after inventing a feature for Photoshop and selling it to Adobe.) Nothing was impossible.

So my roommate comes home, powers up, and goes downstairs. He gets back up to his room JUST in time to see the blue "Windows 3.0" bootup screen.

I heard the scream quite distinctly through his closed door.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO MY COMPUTER???"

He was *convinced* that we had removed the guts of his Macintosh and somehow installed the guts from a PC in it. Now don't get me wrong: if anybody could have, we probably could have. But the beauty of it was I hadn't actually done *anything* to his computer at all other than to install a program, but it took several minutes for him to calm down (and for me to stop laughing) to the point where I could explain what was going on.

M

Posted by: StMarc | March 30, 2007 at 07:11 AM

Keep watching the web. You'll see this Sunday.

Posted by: John Armstrong | March 30, 2007 at 07:10 AM

We once put a small speaker grill onto a copy machine, and a notice was posted that the machine was now voice-activated and would respond to spoken commands,...

Posted by: CG | March 30, 2007 at 07:09 AM

One more...
I lived in a fraternity house in college for a few years and this prank takes a lot of work, but would be priceless:
One night, one of the residents/brothers had a hot date with a girl he'd been going after for months that took him out of the house for around 4-6 hours. The other guys on the hall thought it would be great if they took the molding off around his door in the hallway, removed the door, and filled in the gap with extra drywall sheets they had around. They filled in the seam with putty and painted over the "repair", making it appear as though there was no room 10 between 9 and 11. It was an understatement to say that he was very confused (as was his date) when they tried to come back to his room later that night.

Posted by: Reedy Creek | March 30, 2007 at 07:08 AM

An easy prank for home - swap out the bags in cereal boxes. So for example the box for Captain Crunch now contains Cherios. It's even better if you do it with a new box and re-glue the top. For a second the victim will think the factory screwed up.

Posted by: Diana W | March 30, 2007 at 07:08 AM

20 years ago when I worked in the Advertising Dept of a newspaper, we all got an interoffice memo that the police busted up a big drug ring in the press room. It was April Fool's Day but it wasn't a joke.

I had only been working there for a few weeks but I couldn't resist - with a totally straight face, I walked up to and told my Dept Supervisor that my uncover assignment was over and I'd be cleaning out my desk now and returning to the Police Dept - it was nice meeting and working with her.

She totally bought it and started asking me questions about the bust. I faked it as best I could until it got so ridiculous I cracked up.

We bonded over that and she is one of my best friends. Of course, that drug bust story never made it into the paper. No joke.

Posted by: Real Live Girl | March 30, 2007 at 07:06 AM

One thing I have found works surprisingly well is (physically) exchanging two letters on the keyboard, say "E" and "Y" (as they are frequent and located in the top row on a US keyboard). An incredibly large amount of people actually look at the keyboard most of the time while they type (me included) and seeing the wrong letters will often automatically make them adjust for the change, thus completely screwing up their typing.

Since a lot of people also don't really know the layout of a keyboard well enough by heart, it will take them ages to realize that their keyboard works just fine, it's just the letters that are mixed up (the computer-savvy will know the "QWERTY" expression so they may not be the best target). Most will become agitated and say things like "My PC is Broken, every time I press 'Y' I get 'A'."

It's then that you suggest they call the IT-support line, and the prank moves on to the support guy, who usually will have no clue what the first guy is talking about, and no way of helping him until he does.

You can pop most keys out with a regular letter opener, so it's a quick job during someone's coffee break. Obviously it's primarily an office joke, so not really for this year.

Posted by: david | March 30, 2007 at 07:05 AM

Coworkers pulled this prank on one of our managers. The manager has a long drive and rarely bothers to wash his car, so there's usually a pretty good coat of dirt on it. Two guys went out at lunch and used painter's masking tape to tape tarp to the passenger's side of the car (so the tape ran right down the middle of the car). They then proceeded to wash, wax and detail the driver's side. The manager drove home with one side filthy and the other sparkling, causing lots of pointing and laughing from other drivers. It took 3 trips through the car wash to get the sides close to evenly clean.

Posted by: Diana W | March 30, 2007 at 07:05 AM

One of the best pranks I've ever seen was carried out by one of my hallmates back in college. My friend, Chris, had a rather annoying, anal-retentive, self-important, fundamentalist Jehovah's witness roommate. Normally, he would just go about teasing him casually, nothing unusual really. During that school year on April Fool's day, he had arranged a great series of events to completely mess with the roommate:
1.) He placed a remote desktop program on both of their computers, so he could run programs on the roommate's computer from his own in the room.
2.) On the day, he logged onto the roommates laptop while he was on it and executed an audio file he had created weeks earlier explaining in a very computery monotone voice how the world was going to end in 7 days. The genius was that he meticulously researched mythology, biblical history, and customs regarding the end-times that he subtly filled the entire message with messages he's recognize, allusions, numeric references to 3 & 7, etc. The message was creepy even for us to hear, but was way worse for this fundamentalist guy.
3.) After he heard the message, he began talking to his computer, convinced that it was "the Lord God Jehovah", asking him for advice.... to which the computer replied "Go and save as many souls as you can"
4.) He was so scared of his laptop at this point that he locked it in a trunk he kept by his bed and proceeded to run outside. He ran around campus shouting at everyone he saw that the world was going to end and that he was a prophet. He was desperately trying to convert every person he saw that afternoon in the most flustered fashion. It was the most awkwardly funny thing i've ever seen in my life... I'm just glad we on the hall were all notified ahead of time, so that we could arrange to watch the whole thing from a distance.

Posted by: Reedy Creek | March 30, 2007 at 07:04 AM

This wasn't a prank I played myself but the telling of it was hilarious.

Some of my coworkers had at one time managed to switch the screen saver of another coworker to the windows 'It is now safe to shut off your computer' screen.

Every time this guy would get up and leave his workstation for 10 minutes or so, he would come back to this message, groan about idiot technology, and reboot his computer. It took several such reboots and the repeated frustration of lost work before he cottoned on.

Posted by: spandabulosso | March 30, 2007 at 07:04 AM

When in the bathroom, reach down underneath the stall and steal people's belts. Not only will you have the advantage of time as they finish their business quickly, you will have the advantage of speed as they try to chase you while holding up their own pants. Even better, hit the lights on the way out. :D

Another good one is to get a baby seat from the local thrift store, put a play doll in it, and walk out of a bus store with it. Set it on top of your car and "accidentally" leave it there, watch the expressions on peoples faces as they cringe in horror at your terrible parenting. :D :D :D :D

Posted by: Jonathan | March 30, 2007 at 07:03 AM

I have already posted "101 ways to fool a friend on April 1" on my site, www.churumuri.com. So all ye out there have some real catching up to do.

Posted by: Krishna Prasad | March 30, 2007 at 07:02 AM

Here's a slightly complex one for in the office:

Modify a keyboard layout to swap the M and N keys. This can be easily done on Windows (for example) with the Keyboard Layout Creator from MS. Load the driver and physically pop out and swap the M and N keys on the machine's keyboard.

This really messes with people as most of us have a mental blind-spot regarding M and N. When they touch-type it will all go horribly wrong but when they look at the keyboard they will still get M and N from the respective keypresses.

When they go to lunch, swap it all back for yet more fun...

Posted by: Mike Short | March 30, 2007 at 07:01 AM

When I started taking my daughter to the supermarket to help shop, I would send her to get a dozen eggs. I asked her to open the carton and hold each egg to her ear to listen for cheeping.

She believed me for a while.

Posted by: Cheeper by the Dozen | March 30, 2007 at 07:00 AM

One of my favourites that I've heard about, but haven't seen sadly, probably is best suited to offices with older phone equipment.

Specifically, it requires someone with two identical phones on their desk - simply switch the handsets. When they "answer" the phone that's ringing, all they hear is the dial-tone, and as they're muttering and replace the handset, they cut the caller off. Simple but brilliant!

Posted by: G | March 30, 2007 at 07:00 AM

I left a VIC-20 in Kmart running a ``I can guess your age'' program, whenever I passed it.

I can guess your age!
Is it 0?
n
Is it 1?
n
Is it 2?
n
....

A columnist elaborated it a little to a story of one that intercepted a quit and said ``Okay, that's enough fun, let somebody else have a turn! I can guess your age! Is it 0?...''

but that would be a little much to type in.

Posted by: Ron Hardin | March 30, 2007 at 06:59 AM

You know those spray hoses that some sinks have? I once carefully taped the handle down on ours so that it would come on when someone turned on the sink, then pointed it at exactly the place where you would be most likely to stand when turning on the sink.

First my dad thought maybe it was broken, then he noticed the tape...

This was less dramatic than the time I made my dad think his tire had exploded. When I was a kid I used to stockpile those things called "pop-its" or "pop pops" or something, they're just pieces of paper with explosives in them that you throw on the ground for a mildly satisfying bang. I put a whole box of them behind one of my dad's tires, so when he backed up it made a pretty terrific noise. This might have worked out better for me had I not been in the car with him when it went off, even more so if I had not immediately started laughing hysterically after the bang.

Neither of these would work particularly well in an office, unless maybe you were actively trying to get fired.

Posted by: factorial | March 30, 2007 at 06:59 AM

Send Scott an empty e-mail like this one. Oh crap, I forgot that I can't show you how to do it and explain it at the same time. Ignore this, it's just free will at work.

http://boskolives.wordpress.com/

Posted by: jerry w | March 30, 2007 at 06:59 AM

Normally I don't care to much about grammar, but saying computers were knew instead of knew was so horrible it caused my brain to hemorrhage and bleed out through my ears.

Posted by: Jeff | March 30, 2007 at 06:57 AM

ealry PC using Windows days, my coworker knew almost nothing about his pc except what to click to start his programs. I changed the excel icon so it went to a dos program I wrote, when he clicked it the screen went black and the words "please be patient while hard drive is reformated", then a 15 second delay and it went back to the main windows screen. he screamed like a 12 year old girl looking at a mouse.

Posted by: Dale | March 30, 2007 at 06:51 AM

2007-03-28T10:03:00.000-07:00

Sum of two powers is a square?
by nickh@qbyte.org (Nick Hobson)
Is 2^n + 3^n (where n is an integer) ever the square of a rational number?

Triangle in a trapezoid
by nickh@qbyte.org (Nick Hobson)
In trapezoid ABCD, with sides AB and CD parallel, angle DAB = 6 degrees and angle ABC = 42 degrees. Point X on side AB is such that angle AXD = 78 degrees and angle CXB = 66 degrees. If AB and CD are 1 inch apart, prove that AD + DX - (BC + CX) = 8 inches.

JOKES

2007-03-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

Clinton and the Beer Cans
Back when Bill Clinton and Hillary got married Bill told her, "There's one thing
I want you to know. There's a box under my bed and I don't want you to look in
it until I die."
Hillary agreed to this but, over the years, the curiosity got the better of her
and she finally looked in it. She found three beer cans and 1.5 million dollars
in cash.
When she asked Bill what the beer cans were for, he replied, "Well, those are
for all the times I've cheated on you."

Hillary said, "Well, that's not bad after all these years and you being a
politician and traveling and all."

She was about to leave, but then she said, "Hey, Bill, what about the 1.5
million dollars?"

Bill replied, "That's for all the times the box got full and I had to cash the
cans in."

American in Mexico

There was this American tourist in Mexico, and he was getting tired of walking
around, so he went up to a donkey rental place and said, ''Can I rent a donkey?'

The guy said, "We don't call them donkeys here, we call them asses. This is the
only ass I have left, and you have to scratch him when you want to make him
stop."

The guy rides his ass for a while, sees a hotdog stand, and asks for a hotdog.
The vendor replies, "We don't call them hotdogs here we call the wieners."

Meanwhile his donkey is wandering away, so he goes up to another tourist and
says "Will you hold my wiener whille I scratch my ass?"

Mmmmmmmmmm...

How is a soyburger like a dildo?

They''re both substitutes for meat.

Holiday Feast

A woman walks into a tattoo parlor. She gets into the chair and tells the tattoo
artist, "I want two tattoos, one on each of my inner thighs. I want a turkey on
one thigh and a Christmas tree on the other."

The tattoo artist begins his work, but is a bit confused, so he says, "Lady,
I'll do anything my customers want, but I gotta ask, why would you want a turkey
on one thigh and a Christmas tree on the other?"

"Well, if you really want to know," she firmly answers, "I'm sick and tired of
my husband telling me that there's never anything to eat between the holidays."

Park Politics

A man is sitting on a bench in the park reading a newspaper. Suddenly he throws
the paper onto the ground and yells, "All politicians are *ssholes."

A man sitting next to him in a finely pressed suit says, "I take offense to
that!"

The pissed-off guy asks him, "Why? Are you a politician?"

"No," he replies, "I'm an *sshole."

Holy Shot!

One Sunday morning, a priest wakes up and decides to go golfing. He calls his
boss and says that he feels very sick, and won't be able to go to work.

Way up in heaven, Saint Peter sees all this and asks God, ''Are you really going
to let him get away with this?''

''No, I guess not,'' says God.

The priest drives about five to six hours away, so he doesn't bump into anyone
he knows. The golf course is empty when he gets there. So he takes his first
swing, drives the ball 495 yards away and gets a hole in one.

Saint Peter watches in disbelief and asks, '' Why did you let him do that?''

To this God says, ''Who's he going to tell?''

Diver Meets Guy Underwater

One day, a diver was enjoying the aquatic world 20 feet below sea level. He
noticed a guy at the same depth he was, with no scuba gear on whatsoever.

The diver went below another 10 feet, but the guy joined him a minute later. The
diver went below 15 more feet, and a minute later, the same guy joined him.

This confused the diver, so he took out a waterproof pad and pencil, and wrote,
"Amazing! How are you able to stay this deep down without equipment?"

The guy took the pencil and pad, erased what the diver had written, and wrote,
"I'm drowning, you moron!"

Desert Island Rescue

A man was stranded on a desert island for 10 years. One day a
beautiful girl swims to shore in a wetsuit....

Man: "Hi! Am I ever happy to see you."

Girl: "Hi! It seems like you've been here a long time. How long has it been
since you've had a cigarette?"

Man: "It's been ten years!" With this information the girl unzips a slot on the
arm of her wet suit and gives the man a cigarette.

Man: "Oh thank you so much!"

Girl: "So tell me how long its been since you had a drink?"

Man: "It's been ten years" The girl unzips a little longer zipper on her wet
suit and comes out with a flask of whiskey and gives the man a drink.

Man: "Oh... thank you so much. You are like a miracle!"

Girl: [Starting to unzip the front of her wet suit.] "So tell me then, how long
has it been since you played around?"

Man: "Oh, my God, don't tell me you've got a set of golf clubs in there too?!"

An APB on God

A couple had two little boys, ages eight and ten, who were excessively
mischievous.

The two were always getting into trouble and their parents could be confident
that if any mischief occurred in their town, their two young sons were involved
in some capacity. The parents were at their wit's end as to what to do about
their sons' behavior.

The parents had heard that a clergyman in town had been successful in
disciplining children in the past, so they contacted him, and he agreed to give
it his best shot. He asked to see the boys individually, so the eight-year-old
was sent to meet with him first. The clergyman sat the boy down and asked him
sternly, "Where is God?"

The boy made no response, so the clergyman repeated the question in an even
sterner tone, "Where is God?"

Again the boy made no attempt to answer, so the clergyman raised his voice even
more and shook his finger in the boy's face, "WHERE IS GOD?"

At that, the boy bolted from the room, ran directly home, and slammed himself in
his closet. His older brother followed him into the closet and said, "What
happened?"

The younger brother replied, "We are in BIG trouble this time. God is missing
and they think we did it!"

Devil in the Church

One Sunday morning, everyone in one bright, beautiful, tiny town got up early
and went to the local church.

Before the services started, the townspeople were sitting in their pews and
talking about their lives, their families, etc. Suddenly, Satan appeared at the
front of the church. Everyone started screaming and running for the front
entrance, trampling each other in a frantic effort to get away from evil
incarnate.

Soon everyone was evacuated from the church, except for one elderly gentleman
who sat calmly in his pew, not moving... seemingly oblivious to the fact that
God's ultimate enemy was in his presence. Now this confused Satan a bit, so he
walked up to the man and said, "Don't you know who I am?"

The man replied, "Yep, sure do."

Satan asked, "Aren't you afraid of me?"

"Nope, sure ain't," said the man.

Satan was a little perturbed at this and queried, "Why aren't you afraid of me?"

The man calmly replied, "Been married to your sister for over 48 years."

Who Runs the Human Body?

In the human body, which organ is in charge?

All the organs of the body were having a meeting, trying to decide who was in
charge.

The brain said: "I should be in charge, because I run all the body's systems, so
without me nothing would happen."

"I should be in charge," said the heart, "because I pump the blood and circulate
oxygen all over the body, so without me you'd all waste away."

"I should be in charge," said the stomach, "because I process food and give all
of you energy."

"I should be in charge," said the rectum, "because I'm responsible for waste
removal."

All the other body parts laughed at the rectum and insulted him, so in a huff,
he shut down tight. Within a few days, the brain had a terrible headache, the
stomach was bloated, and the blood was toxic. Eventually the other organs gave
in. They all agreed that the rectum should be the boss.

The moral of the story?

You don't have to be smart or important to be in charge... just an *sshole.

Computer Diagnosis

One day Bill complained to his friend that his elbow really hurt. His friend
suggested that he go to a computer at the drug store that can diagnose anything
quicker and cheaper than a doctor.

''Simply put in a sample of your urine and the computer will diagnose your
problem and tell you what you can do about it. It only costs $10." Bill figured
he had nothing to lose, so he filled a jar with a urine sample and went to the
drug store. Finding the computer, he poured in the sample and deposited the $10.
The computer started making some noise and various lights started flashing.
After a brief pause out popped a small slip of paper on which was printed: "You
have tennis elbow. Soak your arm in warm water. Avoid heavy lifting. It will be
better in two weeks."

Later that evening while thinking how amazing this new technology was and how it
would change medical science forever, he began to wonder if this machine could
be fooled. He mixed together some tap water, a stool sample from his dog and
urine samples from his wife and daughter. To top it off, he masturbated into the
concoction. He went back to the drug store, located the machine, poured in the
sample and deposited the $10. The computer again made the usual noise and
printed out the following message:

"Your tap water is too hard. Get a water softener. Your dog has worms. Get him
vitamins. Your daughter is using cocaine. Put her in a rehabilitation clinic.
Your wife is pregnant with twin girls. They aren't yours. Get a lawyer. And if
you don't stop jerking off, your tennis elbow will never get better."

Evidence of Early Political Humor

How many Whigs does it take to light an oil lamp?

One, and that person shall be President Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of
New Orleans and Friend to the Common Man!

Trivial Pursuit

A sad man walks into a bar, and the bartender asks him what the problem is.

"My life is awful," the man says. "Every night, I play Trivial Pursuit with my
wife, and every night she beats me."

"Well, why don't you just stop playing Trivial Pursuit?" the bartender asks.

"I love the game," the man says. "I'm a genius. I never lose."

The bartender is confused. "I thought you just said your wife beats you."

"Well," the man says, "she's a sore loser."

The Treason of Illumination

Q: How many bleached-blonde, boney, right-wing, political pundits who resemble
transvestites does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Just the one.

Little Old Lady Knows How to Gamble

A little old lady went into the Bank of Canada one day, carrying
a bag of money. She insisted that she must speak with the president of the bank
to open a savings account because, "It's a lot of money!" After much hemming and
hawing, the bank staff finally ushered her into the president's office.

The bank president then asked her how much she would like to deposit. She
replied, "$165,000!" and dumped the cash out of her bag onto his desk. The
president was, of course, curious as to how she came by all this cash, so he
asked her, "Ma'am, I'm surprised you're carrying so much cash around. Where did
you get this money?" The old lady replied, "I make bets."

The president then asked, "Bets? What kind of bets?" The old woman said, "Well,
for example, I'll bet you $25,000 that your balls are square." "Ha!" laughed the
president, "That's a stupid bet. You can never win that kind of bet!" The old
lady challenged, "So, would you like to take my bet?" "Sure," said the
president, "I'll bet $25,000 that my balls are not square!" The little old lady
then said, "Okay, but since there is a lot of money involved, may I bring my
lawyer with me tomorrow at 10:00 am as a witness?" "Sure!" replied the confident
president.

That night, the president got very nervous about the bet and spent a long time
in front of a mirror checking his balls, turning from side to side, again and
again. He thoroughly checked them out until he was sure that there was
absolutely no way his balls were square and that he would win the bet.

The next morning, at precisely 10 am, the little old lady appeared with her
lawyer at the president's office. She introduced the lawyer to the president and
repeated the bet: "$25,000 says the president's balls are square!" The president
agreed with the bet again and the old lady asked him to drop his pants so they
could all see. The president complied. The little old lady peered closely at his
balls and then asked if she could feel them. "Well, Okay," said the
president,"$25,000 is a lot of money, so I guess you should be absolutely sure."

Just then, he noticed that the lawyer was quietly banging his head against the
wall. The president asked the old lady, "What the hell's the matter with your
lawyer?" She replied, "Nothing, except I bet him $50,000 that at 10 am today,
I'd have the president of the Bank of Canada's balls in my hand."

Blonde and Picture

Q: Why did the blonde keep a picture of herself in her room?

A: So she could use it as a mirror.

Mickey, Minnie and Goofy

One day Mickey Mouse woke up and Minnie wasn't there. He went to look for her
and, as he stepped outside, he saw "Mickey Sucks!" written out in a yellow
liquid in the snow. He investigated and realized there was good news and bad
news.

It appeared to be Goofy's urine, but Minnie's handwriting.

Get Away From my Deer!

It was Saturday morning and Jake, an avid hunter, woke up ready to go bag the
first deer of the season. He walks down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee,
and to his surprise he finds his wife, Alice, sitting there, fully dressed in
camouflage. Jake asks her, "What are you up to?" Alice smiles, "I'm going
hunting with you!" Jake, though he has many reservations, reluctantly decides to
take her along.

They arrive at the hunting site. Jake sets his wife safely up in the tree stand
and tells her: "If you see a deer, take careful aim on it and I'll come running
back as soon as I hear the shot." Jake walks away with a smile on his face
knowing that Alice couldn't bag an elephant -- much less a deer.

But not 10 minutes pass when he is startled as he hears an array of gunshots.
Quickly, Jake starts running back. As Jake gets closer to her stand, he hears
Alice screaming, "Get away from my deer!" Confused, Jake races faster towards
his screaming wife. And again he hears her yell, "Get away from my deer!"
followed by another volley of gunfire.

Now within sight of where he had left his wife, Jake is surprised to see a
cowboy, with his hands high in the air. The cowboy, obviously distraught, says,
"Okay, lady, okay! You can have your deer! Just let me get my saddle off it!"

Johnny Big Head

Johnny comes back from school crying and says, "Mommy all the kids in the school
say I have a big head."

His mother replies, "No you don't Johnny. You have a hideously deformed head.
The other children are merely hiding the truth to protect your feelings."

Third Opinion

Three Doctors are dicussing which types of patients they prefer. Doctor Watson
says, ''I prefer librarians. All their organs are alphabetized.''

Doctor Fitzpatrick says, ''I prefer mathematicians. All their organs are
numbered.''

Doctor Ahn says, ''I prefer lawyers. They are gutless, heartless, brainless,
spineless, and their heads and rear ends are interchangeable.''

Three Drunk Men

These three guys got together one day and were talking about how drunk they got
at a party the night before.

The first guy said, ''''Man I was so drunk last night I went home and blew
chunks.''''

The second guy said, ''''Man that was nothing I was so drunk last night I was
driving home and I got my DWI.''''

The third guy says, "Man that was nothing. I was so drunk last night I was
driving home and I picked up a prostitute and my wife caught us in bed.''''

Then the first guy said, ''''No -- you guys don''t understand! Chunks is my
dog!"

Senile... Like a FOX!

One sunny day in 2008, an old man approached the White House from across
Pennsylvania Avenue, where he''''d been sitting on a park bench.

He spoke to the Marine standing guard and said, "I would like to go in and meet
with President Hillary Clinton."

The Marine replied, "Sir, Mrs. Clinton is not President and doesn''''t reside
here."

The old man said, "Okay," and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same
Marine, "I would like to go in and meet with President Hillary Clinton".

The Marine again told the man, "Sir, as I said yesterday, Mrs. Clinton is not
President and doesn''''t reside here."

The man thanked him and again walked away .

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very
same Marine, saying "I would like to go in and meet with President Hillary
Clinton."

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said,
"Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mrs.
Clinton. I''''ve told you already several times that Mrs.Clinton is not the
President and doesn''''t reside here. Don''''t you understand?"

The old man answered, "Oh, I understand you fine. I just love hearing your
answer!"

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, "See you tomorrow.

DORMCHECK

2007-03-27T06:29:00.000-07:00

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2007-03-27T06:11:00.000-07:00

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