Bad April Fool’s Day
April 1st, 2009 | Published in Personal | 21 Comments
This year’s April Fool’s Day jokes, the ones I have come across thus far, haven’t been creative at all. Thus far reading all of the news sites, I come across the same dead April Fool’s Day horse that has been beaten for years now. Where has the creativity gone? Windows and Linux joining, rewriting the kernel in another language, Windows creating a new Linux distro, KDE and GNOME combining, KDE to use GTK, GNOME to use Qt, site and distro theme changes, and the list goes on. Typically you will always find a good one from Google, but I didn’t. The best one I have come across today was PEP-401 (thanks to Daniel Holbach for showing me this one). It was funny and fairly original, though I didn’t get caught by it. I want to get caught by a good April Fool’s Day joke, I want to go “oh damn you got me good.” Now maybe I am thinking the way I am about all of this because I knew it was April Fool’s Day the entire time, which I am thinking has a lot to do with it because I will be on my toes when reading the news. But I have a feeling others feel the same way according to the various comments I have read to some of the jokes.
Quite a few people are saying us Open Source goofballs aren’t innovative or creative, so lets get out there and prove them wrong with some good April Fool’s Day jokes 
Also, if you have run across a good joke, please link it in the comments please.
EDIT: I was had! Mythbuntu got me big time last night, and I had congratulated Mario on IRC, then he just told me to click on the download link. That was a great one, very professionally done, so once again Mario, congrats, you got me
April 1st, 2009 at 09:54:57 (#)
Here are a couple of funny ones I just found:
Ubuntu HR LoCo Team Site Theme (now displaying all Fedora)
http://www.ubuntu-hr.org/
I have to admit, I really really like that theme
And Google does have a good one that goes along with their CADIE joke which I thought was no good, but they have redeemed themselves with this one:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/cadie/
April 1st, 2009 at 10:20:55 (#)
I liked the one from Opera as well.
Opera Face Gestures
April 1st, 2009 at 10:24:45 (#)
HAHAHAHAHAHA! OMG! Bookmark page was hillarious with that little smirk….hahaha, great find!
April 1st, 2009 at 10:29:19 (#)
Nick Carr has quite a nice one - http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/04/twitter_u.php
April 1st, 2009 at 10:34:04 (#)
That is a good one. If I would have read that without knowing, I would have definitely fallen for it. Though I have to admit, it would be an interesting idea to pursue
April 1st, 2009 at 10:43:22 (#)
Come on, one shouldn’t blame about others if he doesn’t try do to that himself !
These are the ones I found until now:
http://www.stefanoforenza.com/linux-april-fools-2009/
April 1st, 2009 at 10:51:04 (#)
sweet jesus Stefano, you hit pay dirt there, thanks for that one, there are some good ones there, and look at that, Mark is porting the kernel to Mono :p
April 1st, 2009 at 11:04:35 (#)
gmail: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html
metacity : http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2009/04/01/squib-of-the-day-read-your-email/
empathy: http://resiak.livejournal.com/60614.html
April 1st, 2009 at 11:09:05 (#)
@Nick: The Opera face gestures was hilarious!
April 1st, 2009 at 11:29:23 (#)
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0401/
April 1st, 2009 at 11:57:03 (#)
Your stepping down from from MOTU and MC (or should that be YADC? ) had me for a bit (at least I *hope* its a joke). Good on you for a genuinely funny one!
April 1st, 2009 at 12:04:18 (#)
This is a good one too: http://www.archlinux.org/news/440/
April 1st, 2009 at 12:05:52 (#)
PS: Although I use Ubuntu on my PC (of course) this one is owned by my employer and they refuse to install Ubuntu on it (just a disclaimer)
April 1st, 2009 at 12:40:43 (#)
This one struck me as being pretty funny http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Mastering-Cat/
April 1st, 2009 at 12:42:48 (#)
My buddy just sent me this one done by CNN, it is really funny.
http://www.cnn.com.news.donedev.com/Chiptune-composer-to-lead-Astral-Music-Project-become-first-hispanic-astronaut.html
@David - ya, it is a joke, thanks to Keybuk for really adding to it. It got a few people too on IRC which is funny.
@Alberto - Ya, I actually saw some of the reaction to the Arch story on IRC last night. It was hillarious. People took that hook, line, and sinker.
Thus far, I think the best one is the Mythbuntu one. It got A LOT of us and we have been talking and laughing on IRC about it today. Mario and the Mythbuntu folks did it perfectly. I was actually upset that only Time Warner and Comcast were on board when I read it. I wanted AT&T UVerse on there and I wanted to order new equipment for a Myth setup. Very good job. I just posted a new blog post too for the Ubuntu HOF Induction in response to Jorge’s post, and I think it is kind of funny too, but that is just me
April 1st, 2009 at 12:46:56 (#)
@etank - that is absolutely great! Mastering Cat!!! HAHAHAHAHA
April 1st, 2009 at 13:18:51 (#)
Enormous joke dedicated to it’s own side: QtOverload. Too bad the site redesign isn’t actually live, though.
April 1st, 2009 at 13:27:37 (#)
@Michael - oh man, I didn’t even look into that, I just read the blog post and thought “cool” then moved on. That is a good one.
@Mats - sorry, had to clear your email from moderation and it was awesome. All 3 were hillarious. I am laughing hard at the Empathy Privacy Mode stuff, love the cats
April 1st, 2009 at 21:43:09 (#)
The joke in http://www.blendernation.com was so good that a part of the parts involved asked them to take it down.
April 1st, 2009 at 21:45:06 (#)
*that one of the parts involved.
April 3rd, 2009 at 08:49:41 (#)
One of us compiz dev’s april fools joke.
http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/drop-everything/
Pokes fun at the recent (giant) code changes, and the flaky nature of the project to fork…