Yesterday, as I'm sure you are all aware, was April 1st, also known as "April Fool's Day". I'm not much of a prankster, so I didn't try to pull one over on anyone, but I did enjoy being on the other end of a few jokes. I didn't fall for anything in real life, but there were several internet pranks that were pretty good.
The biggest one that I thought might actually be real (I was skeptical, but thought there was a chance), was Google's announcement of "Autopilot" for Gmail. It was a new feature that used an AI system to automatically reply to emails that you didn't want to deal with. I know. Saying it like that sounds ridiculous, but the page that they had set up for it was pretty convincing. They had created screen shots and all kinds of stuff.
Foxnews had a pretty good list of the "Top 10 Internet Pranks". The Google Autopilot was one of them. I think my favorite though is Opera's Facial Web Browsing. It's another one that's fairly plausible at first glance.
I was also "Rick Rolled" several times. In case you're wondering, here's the Wikipedia page for Rick Rolling. I can sum it up for you though. Basically, someone posts a link and instead of leading to where it says it does, it instead leads to a video of the Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". Let's say I told you this link is for a great new video game and you have to watch the video. That's Rick Rolling. And I had that song in my head all day yesterday.
Have a good Thursday. It's supposed to rain again today, so hopefully we won't float away. As of last night, we still had a small pond in the back yard. Maybe it won't be a lake tonight.
--Paul
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