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April 2007

Haacked

brilliant. simply brilliant.

April 2007

Foxyshadis

What, no spyware scan popups? :stuck_out_tongue:

3 the kitties!

April 2007

Miabug

Awww your cats are adorable! I’m not a programmer, but my boyfriend is! He gave me the link to this blog when he saw you were talking about your cats. I Love cats (and all animals, but I find cats suit my personality better!) We also own two cats, both are long haired so I hear ya about vaccuuming! And like Elsie, our Tiana loves to open cupboards, closets, wardropes and hide in them! I laughed when you talked about child locks! We bought them too (but have yet to install them!).

April 2007

Mr_K1

Cute cat! I like this cats. =]
hehe, It’s Best April Fool Joke that I seed today.
(Sorry my english, I’m to tired to remember how to spell some words…)

April 2007

Justin_G

I am an animal lover too, especially cats. I think I love cats the most when they are tenderly cooked in a crock pot, bathed in zesty seasonings and smothered in my favorite barbeque sauce. I guess I would avoid eating them if I had a problem with rodents, because at that point they would be somewhat useful. Other than that, they are pretty much large rats. If I had a choice between eating a cow and a cat, I would probably choose the cat because cattle are SOOO cute!

April 2007

Rick_C

Sorry Jeff, I read your blog regularly, and the ads not only pissed me off, they were crashing my preferred browser. I figured you were hacked, or were making some sort of traffic point and completely missed the April Fools aspect until reading the comments. Hope you take the ads out of this entry tomorrow.

April 2007

tcliu

Pets are amazing companions. I encourage you to visit your local
animal rescue shelter and adopt a pet of your own.

Too dangerous:

http://www.xkcd.com/c231.html

April 2007

Shaun

cute. I have a dog (from a rescure home) a cat. The cat came first and I sometimes wish that I’d just stuck to the cat! It’s not much fun taking the dog out for a walk and getting caught in a downpour :frowning:

Off on a tangent: was your site hacked or was it an April Fools joke? If the latter, it had me fooled.

April 2007

codinghorror

If you came to this entry directly, be sure to visit the main page today, too.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

April 2007

Alex

Haha cice selection ! I think the Condoleza Rice poll tops it all by its absurdity.

April 2007

Stevo

What’s with all the adds Jeff?

April 2007

Juha

Yeah, i thought you had forgotten to renew your domain name and someone managed to stole it or something.

Yup, got me fooled too.

April 2007

DavidL

Looks like your new ads are trying to spoof Adblock Plus. When I try to Block Link, it shows something like the Wikipedia address with “/April Fool’s Day” tacked on. I had to block all of them with just Block Image.

Sorry to see you had to add ads.

April 2007

MyKey

great article as usual. Made my day.

Btw, first ads if seen since using AdBlockPlus.

April 2007

engtech

yay cat posts.

Now you just need to lolcats them up:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/04/01/how-to-create-lolcats-aka-memecat-aka-kittah-aka-cat-macros/

April 2007

Frank_Rizzi

lol, great prank Jeff :slight_smile:

April 2007

Matt

It’s April 1st folks. You know, “April Fools Day”. The ads are obviously a prank.

April 2007

YourMom

…so for April Fools you decided to mirror CuteOverload? :wink:

April 2007

Ben_Kruger

TMI, not about the cats but about you only vacuuming once a month!

April 2007

David_Muir

I was expecting some sort of April Fool’s joke on my various regular Web sites and Jeff’s was the only one that came through for me.

Way to go! This was funny stuff, Jeff; I am amazed at how people’s hatred of advertising almost made them miss the joke.

April 2007

Beefcake

I like some of the articles that you post, however I must remove this site from my favorites, and never again visit. The problem comes from you having far too many adds. Yes I know you want to have the site pay for itself, and maybe make a buck. However there is a huge banner on the left hand side offering me a free tv. It flashes black and white like a strobe, I can’t even begin to take any of the information seriously because that makes your site look like total trash. Any site with this many adds I usually disregard as garbage. I suggest you pick and choose who you advertise for, the adds you choose represent who you are, and what you are presenting to the public.

April 2007

DavidL

After writing my earlier comment about your ads and Adblock Plus, I got up and performed my morning ablutions. During the process, my brain cell finally fired and I figured out that it was an April Fools joke. But, Jeff, for a joke to be funny, it has to be sprung. Most people will either passively ignore an ad or actively defeat it. Only a very small minority will be “caught” by it. After all, when Bart Simpson put Homer’s beer into the paint mixing machine and then put it back in the refrigerator as a prank (darn, that was funny), the resulting nuclear explosion made it obvious that a joke had been sprung. If he had done something with liver or broccoli instead, Homer would have just ignored it and the joke would have fizzled.

Anyway, “ha, ha.”

April 2007

NJBrad

as my wife will want to know, are the cats fixed?

April 2007

Onlooker

hahahaha!!
Good one! :slight_smile:
Man, I hope some of these people realize it was April Fools day… maybe they are playing a joke too! optimism

April 2007

l_belk

Can’t talk now, Mr. Man says I need to buy this miracle belt thingy to tone my abs.

April 2007

Steve

Very funny with the ads. Except i almost bought something. LOL, i just noticed another commenter with the same problem.

April 2007

Jim

It was an obvious April Fool’s Joke, because it lacks the btrademark, passive agressive bolding/b.

April 2007

Dave

… you have to be careful with jokes, my first reaction was - crap, he’s gone to the dark side, guess I can knock this one off the bookmarks list - I’m out of here.

glad I decided to read the comments, I’d hate to have to give up my daily read :frowning:

adds really are ugly.


Dave

April 2007

Jack59

were do I go to pick up the plasma I won? mail me the $20 I caught that monkey,I have adopted dog’s and a cat and the 8 lbs cat boss’s the 165 lbs mastiff and they both go for walks together.

April 2007

Jack60

It should have stayed in bed but I just had read your blog now I feel so ashamed?? were are all fixed.Thanks for asking.

Keep up the Great work,

April 2007

Jeremy

No, you don’t understand… have you not been paying attention to his previous few posts about bandwidth… THIS IS REAL!!! The ads are taking over! twiddles thumbs while wearing an aluminum hat

April 2007

squid

Last night (this morning I guess) after midnight I navigated here and got a 404 not found. I thought that was the joke :slight_smile:

April 2007

TM141

Haha april fools very funny.

You had me for a minute or two with the ads and all.

April 2007

Cam_Soper

That’s pretty clever. :slight_smile:

So was the post about the cats true? I used to think cats were attention starved when I was trying to use my computer. Then I had kids…

Proud owner/parent of…

4 shetland sheepdogs - 2 of which are rescues
2 cats
4 guinea pigs - 1 of which is a rescue, and 2 of which were gestating in the rescue when we adopted her
2 turtles
1 toddler boy
1 infant boy

April 2007

Tim_Elhajj

Wait, it’s a joke? But I really do want firm, tight, strong, toned, abs! Where do I send my money?

April 2007

Gabri

What? An april fool’s prank? You mean those abs aren’t yours Jeff??

April 2007

Freiheit

“as my wife will want to know, are the cats fixed?”

Fixed? They seem to be working just fine to me!

April 2007

Stephen

How successful were the adverts? Did you make much money? I’m worried that they could come back!

Fish are the ultimate pet for the truly lazy. Bob and Cornelius Maximus Wilmington the 4th, our goldfish, rock!

April 2007

MaS3

Your cats are beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

And the joke with advertising was cool too.

I can’t overestimate how much ad-killers of the firewall and browser help! Sometimes for special very rare occasions I switch them off, and when I forget to switch them back on and go to the web, it’s a real shock!

April 2007

5h4m

People seem to have to have missed the joke.

Look at the screenshot, and check out the last add for Dice.

There’s an assignment being done in the if statement!! It means that the salary will always suck! Hilarious! :slight_smile:

April 2007

Sosuke

kitties!!! kawaii!!!

do cats cause malfunction in pc’s? 'cuz i heard their fur can damage some parts of the pc’s…

April 2007

Shaun

Was I the only one who saw the site hacked?
When I went to the /blog url I got a 404 - File Not Found. Going straight to the codinghorror url took me to what looked like a server setup website (all the links worked to setup screens) and in the middle of the screen was a login box that said something like:

Username: hacke*d
Server: Choose a better password :slight_smile:

I thought this was the april fool but there’s been no mention of it at all? I’m in the UK and it was around 10am - Midday (ish) that the site was like this.

April 2007

LKM

Get a Roomba for the hair :slight_smile:

April 2007

Jae

You know, I didn’t even care that it was April Fool’s Day until about ten o’clock at night, and then I realized that I’d completely forgotten about it. I had like ten opportunities to royally prank someone. Oh well.

April 2007

codinghorror

I do have a USB CueCat as well… :slight_smile:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

April 2007

Jim

Hey, great cats! But, where’s your CueCat?

April 2007

Ryan

Jeff,

Great April Fools. I will admit I was gulled for a bit by it [though without the advertising which would have set me right].

Your post is my cats to a “T”, btw. Cats are definitely A+ for coders, IMO.

… now back to software engineering, please. =)

April 2007

MattT

I missed this on April Fool’s day, sadly, but I’m glad it’s stayed in the archive - the text was beautifully done in terms of the ‘oh no cat post’ style and more importantly your furry friends are damn cute - geeks and cats seem to be a common thing and given there’re four resident here I’m glad for a chance to see your pets.

Maybe we should start a ‘pictures only’ cat post meme or something :slight_smile:

September 2007

NRR

Hey Jeff,

My wife and I rescued a kitty from Snowflake in Raleigh, too. She’s a 15-lb beast, though.

-N

May 2008

Risetzu

Wow!! Your cats are really beautiful!!.. I remember when I had my first litter of four kittens [they were 4 days old, more or less] and the older kitty [Dora] had such a loud Prrr that she didn’t let my sister sleep until the little kitty did it first! The funniest is that she used to sleep in my face, next to my ear, but i got used to easily and generaly sleep before her [I’m talking about Dora, not of my sister! hahaha].

Now I have two little kitties and they have a “normal” Prrr… But you must see them!! They have to be stick together all the time! they can’t be separated!

By the way. Take care of them.

Nice story.

Have a Nice day!!! [Greetings from Mexico, huhuhu]

December 2014

codinghorror

I don’t know where else to put this, so I’m putting it here, in the software we wrote, on a blog entry I wrote so many years ago.

Elsie, one of the cats pictured in this post, died ten hours ago. The grief is hard for me to handle, and I don’t know why, it’s just a god damn cat and how can I feel so awful, and when I feel like this I want to write it down to understand.

Elsie developed an aggressive cancer in her belly and by the time we noticed and I got her to the vet her belly was developing a open wound and the cancer had spread to her lungs and everywhere else. This was no more than a few months time in total. I still regret not noticing the mass on her belly sooner. But it was an aggressive cancer, so very very aggressive.

We had her boarded at the vet for a week while they treated the open wound and diagnosed her further. She was in good spirits but the prognosis was simple: death.

So we scheduled a time to come in and have her euthanized.

My wife and I held her for a bit, loved her, fed her some treats from home and generally visited with her. She wanted to explore the room, I don’t blame her, after being cooped up in boarding for a week with a cone on due to the belly wound.

Then we called for the vet, and while we petted her, as she purred, the vet injected the overdose of sedative.

You know, it’s just a cat. But watching the animating force fall away from her face as she died … Elsie was so alive, and then she just… wasn’t. She became a lifeless, inert body. She became nothing in front of me.

It was a terrible thing, but better to go surrounded by people you love, feeling loved, and in no pain. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Goodbye sweet, fluffy girl. I’ll always remember the way you’d sneak up on me ever so slowly, never looking me in the face, so you could curl up next to me without being “seen”. Your awkward loping sideways run, skittering around corners. That time you got into the leftover spaghetti and your crest was stained red for days. The way, when we first got you, you were so crazy we had to put child locks on the kitchen cabinets, and then you ate the bread that was on the counter still in the wrapper. Your giant bushy tail, that perpetual soft motion machine, always playfully swishing to and fro, always brushing against us to remind us you are there, is finally still. Our clever little girl that was discovered living under a pizza dumpster in Durham, NC is gone.

I played this song for you after you died. Please listen to it, and feel love, only the constant love we shared over our 13 years together. It was a good life.

Drake vs Snow Patrol - Hold On We're Chasing Cars

I will always remember you, my sweet girl. I loved you.