April Fool's!

Today, April 1, is April Fool’s Day.  It is also the Chief Petty Officers of the Navy’s birthday, and no, that’s not April Fool’s joke.  It really is.  At my command they celebrated by wearing khakis (they usually wear DCU–desert camouflage uniform) and eating cookies that our OIC (Officer in Charge) bought them.  So Happy Birthday, Chiefs!

But what I mainly wanted to talk about was Google.  You see, Google does an April Fool’s joke every year for April Fools.  And I didn’t want you to miss it, so I am going to post links.  This year they did several.

This year, you can sign up to go colonize Mars.  Join Google’s Mars colonization project called Virgle.  Click on the link to go to the site and learn all about it.  “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.”  You can also take a test to see if you’re colonist material or join the Mission Control community, which is a place to leave your comments or read others’ comments.  (Warning: Some people have a serious lack of a sense of humor.)

If you have gmail–Google email–you can now send emails into the past.  That’s right, folks, never miss a deadline again.  “Just click ‘Set custom time’ from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox.  Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.”

 And if you have trouble getting up in the morning, Google has something for you too.  Now you can purchase the Google Wake Up Kit.  It uses Google Calendar and will send an SMS message to your phone.  If that doesn’t work it will use “more coercive” means: “The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.”

And finally today can be your lucky day.  Google added one of its famous “I’m feeling lucky” buttons to its Google Calendar, according to this source.  Clicking on it adds random events to your calendar like dates with celebrities.  I don’t have a link to it; when I opened Google calendar it didn’t have that link.  So, sorry.

Google has had a lot of fun with this.  I would really encourage you to go to Google Hoaxes, which is a wikipedia article which has the complete list of Google April Fool’s jokes.  It lists them for each year, starting in 2000.  Don’t miss MentalPlex (Google’s search engine can now read your mind), the Google Copernicus Center (known for its state-of-the-art deoxygenated living quarters), Google Romance (“Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.”), Gmail Paper (Google will mail you a hard copy of every email), or Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider).  Last year there were two, and this year there are a total of 11, some of them country specific, like the one for Australia: gDay–”a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.”

My favorite wasn’t listed, and that is the year where they let you type in a person’s name and it would email that person a search results page of news articles about that person.  Of course they were fake articles, but Google picked some funny article blurbs to use.  I don’t remember what year that was. 

So I hope you have fun with this.  I did.  Happy April 1st everyone!