I think April Fools Day is my favorite holiday. Granted, it’s not a day that you get off from work (unless it happens to fall on your day off), but it is a day when people tend to take things a little less seriously.
For the past several years, my personal celebration of April Fools Day has involved some minor edits to the web site for the Shore Leave convention. For example, this year, Shore Leave is announcing the appointment of a new Web Maven, Ms. Sai Cadowlic.
I’d originally planned that particular modification for last year. April 1 fell on a Sunday that year and would have corresponded with the STAT club’s monthly meeting and given me a chance to see reactions on the day of the hack. Sadly, I instead spent that weekend at my aunt’s funeral and just wasn’t really in the mood to play the prank.
The original plan was to change the colors and add the background image of a certain hotel’s carpets. Giving the update another year to ferment allowed me to come up with the text announcing Sai and add the in-joke about her background as an interior designer for the hotel industry. (Said joke is a minor dig at what some consider to be the world’s ugliest hotel update.)
It’s not as clever as the time I announced Shore Leave was moving onto the Battlestar Galactica, but I doubt anyone’s going to be expecting such a broad palette of colors.
So what surprised me about it? It’s hard to make a web page look that bad.