Well, April Fools day just passed a week ago and I thought I’d recap a few more favorable happenings and stories from first of the month. As they do with just about everything that happens in the world, the people who contribute to the Wikipedia created an interesting write up about the day and the pranks pulled.

For starters, I learned that April Fools Day was most likely the backlash from when France decided to move from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar system and a few of the people in France decided to prak other people into thinking it was still New Years (which it was on the previous calendar system). More on that can be found on Snopes.com

One of the more interesting pranks was a rumor that Google was going to take over the Mozilla foundation. MORE INFO HERE. Even though that wouldn’t be too bad considering a few of the main developers for the foundation already work for Google, it would still cause quite a stir in the world of computers.

Another prank pulled was from a software group that I’m quite familiar with. The gallery that I use on this website was developed by a group called tonicmedia and is called Gallery. One of the other leading picture displaying and management packages, Coppermine, posted that the two companies were merging into one larger company just because they felt left out that a bunch of other companies were having all the fun merging. A website was put up to back that prank and help fan the flames (I’m not sure how long it will be up, so HERE is a Google cache of the site).

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6452_7-5840040-1.html?tag=nl.e404


Those silly cNet hardware reviewers decided to trump up the recent rumors about Apple working with phone companies to create an iTunes enabled cell phone and design one of their own.

I’ve been doing some work around the website recently. One of the biggest changes I’ve made is making everthing dynamic so that work on the sidebar, header, and footer will carry through all of the other pages. I also wrote a php database look-up script to take advantage of all of the quotes that were in the database of my old web site so that I can use them on my sidebar here. They are picked “randomly” from the list and displayed as common text. This web site is just now starting to feel lived in.

This past weekend, I purchased Moby’s new 2-CD set entitled Hotel, which was released on March 22nd. It’s quite a bit different than his last few CD’s, but is quite a beautiful collection of mellow and soothing songs. This CD is a must-have for any Moby enthusiast.

The first CD is has powerful vocals by female singer Laura Dawn (creative director for MoveOn.org, a Democratic Party website), lead singing by Moby, and background vocals by Shana Steele; while all of the instruments are performed throughout are done by Moby himself. On the second CD, named Ambient after the style of electronica used throughout all of the tracks, Moby returned to his true mix-master and DJ origins by spinning together a web of beats and harmonies that truly deserve the name Ambient. The album reminds me a lot of Moby’s older work mixed with a touch of Tricky’s mysterious vocal stylings to create amazing aural works of art.

An interesting interview with Moby about his new album can be found on HERE on MixOnline.com’s Website

Macs are coming back strong with software hackers; and I’m not talking about hackers in the sense of 1995 movie HACKERS. Software hackers are people who are REALLY good at coding and can hack together just about anything they put their mind on doing with any language they want. See Paul Graham’s (author of a number of computer books) description of what it is to be a hacker here. Many articles have been posted by both pro-Apple web sites and pro-Geek websites alike, but Paul Graham’s essay on the topic is one of the best I’ve read.

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