Are you ready for April Fools Day?

April Fools Day is only 2 weeks away. I've seen some well-executed pranks played at work, and some that ended up in people getting fired.

The times people got fired often involved violating corporate policies, such as forging email from important people. I once saw a person forge email from a manager... oh, I won't finish the story, that's enough of a "no no" at most companies. Of course, if they had warned the manager he could have been involved and it would have been even funnier.

We once convinced a manager to email out a new data storage policy: Since the voice mail system deletes messages that are more than 10 days old, why not do something similar on our NFS servers? Certainly a file that hasn't been used in 10 weeks can't be too important. Imagine how convenient it will be to have your home directory automatically cleaned this way? Most everyone thought it was funny, except one person that was very embarrassed when he took his complaint to the VP, who had a much better sense of humor.

The RFC documents that define how the internet works includes many fake documents that are hilarious. www.rfc-humor lists them all. This includes the famous RFC for how to send TCP/IP packets over carrier pigeon.

Peter H. Salus and I compiled all the funny RFCs and put them into a book. Why sell something that you can get for free online? Well, first of all we added commentary, some of which is written by famous industry folks. Secondly, it's nice to have all the RFCs in one place. It looks great on a coffee table or in your office. (Oh, and you get to see the brilliant cover design that I did.)

You can still order it in time for April 1st. Makes a perfect give for the geek that has everything. Order today!