[hinkley]

I was the accidental instigator of an incident where Mosaic for Windows ended up with April Fool's jokes embedded in it.

It was probably the first time I noticed what others have noticed since then, which is that I have a way of asking questions that causes other people to react (often more than my attempts to directly influence).

All I said was, "Isn't this going to be our last release before April 1?" Everyone got quiet for a minute, their eyes glinted, and we went from releasing at a reasonable hour for once to deploying at 1 am. Unfortunately the lead engineer (who ended up putting an audio clip of himself knocking on his CRT and saying, "hello? Is anybody out there?" on an idle timeout) and I had worked out all of the off-by-one errors on date calculations in Win32 early in the evening when we were still sharp, only for him to change the numbers in a crisis of faith later in the evening. So the whole thing fired on April 2. Which luckily was a Sunday, so few people using it at work or for classes were affected.

It was all fun and games until the emails started coming in informing us that we may have been hacked. I like easter eggs in my games, but I've only ever mentioned this to coworkers as a cautionary tale about impulses and judgement when tired.