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What happened to originality?

barbie on 2006-04-04T09:03:32

Over the weekend April Fools Day came and went. I wasn't online over the weekend, so largely missed all the reports. However, can I point out that the BarbieOS 0.99 story is now REALLY old. Like October 2003 old. As in this is the third April Fools Day that I've seen this being reported. It was a good parody (it wasn't even an April Fools story in the first place) when it first came out, but it gets a bit lame when it's the best you can do to get people falling for it on 1st April.

Several lame takeovers and mergers seemed to be the bandwagon for jokes this year. I can't actually remember the last hoax story on 1st April that I actually fell for. I guess when you get to my age, you view everything with a degree of suspicion anyway ;)

However, the following non-hoax story amused me:

"Radio 538 awarded a select group of listeners who would come with their bags packed to a train station in Rotterdam, a major city in the Netherlands, with a weekend trip to a yet-to-be-revealed destination. Only three people showed up at the event."

I guess the Radio station were banking on not many people turning up. I hope they gave the 3 people a good weekend break, as I think they deserved it for making the effort to ignore the boring jokes and take a chance on having a decent weekend.

SQL on Rails

Dom2 on 2006-04-04T10:27:06

Actually, I kind of liked SQL on Rails. It's probably funnier if you've been using Ruby on Rails though. But the screencast video they did was hilarious.

-Dom

Derivatives rock

Alias on 2006-04-04T11:33:55

Derivative April Fools are always the best ones, because you have some chance of not being suspected.

One of these years when I actually remember April 1 is coming up, I want to expand on the fool I did at work one year, when I forged an email from the CEO saying that the company's IPO was being cancelled, and as a result we'd have to fire 1/3rd of the staff.

Not only did I score the original fool, but then the CEO came in at 10am, I got to watch 10 or 20 people congratulating him on his April Fool, and he had no idea what the hell they were talking about. :)

Of course, in the ultimate irony, 6 months later they cancelled the company's IPO, and fired 1/3rd of the staff, including me :(