Two Software Developers Walk Into a Bar...

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I love technology. I find it fascinating, engaging, and exciting. But while there is so much interesting stuff to read and learn about the latest hardware, software, and tech trends, much of it is not the slightest bit funny...or is it? If you look carefully enough, you will find plenty of humor in technology.

Silicon Art
Chip designers will often sign their names or include a drawing or message in a microscopic area on the chip.   The following is from inside a Samsung Galaxy Tab as reported in Wired magazine in March 2011. The image is magnified by about 200x:


See this other Wired magazine article for more. Who says chip designers don't have a sense of humor?

Easter Eggs
In the world of software, Easter Eggs are interesting or funny "additional extras" hidden inside the program by software developers, not necessarily sanctioned by the software house. Only if you know the correct command or sequence of clicks or keystrokes can you reveal the Easter Egg.

Easter Eggs appeared in many of the Microsoft Office products and included games, like flight simulators and car racing games. Citing security concerns, Microsoft banned Easter Eggs from their newer products, except for the extremely lame "so-called" Easter Egg in Outlook: The default picture for a contact is the silhouette of Bill Gates. In my book, that's not really an Easter Egg.

Examples of (real) software Easter Eggs:

Google:
  1. In your web browser (I believe this works in almost any browser, but definitely in Chrome), navigate to www.google.com.
  2. Enter the search term "tilt" and see what happens
    or
    Enter the search term "let it snow"
Skype:

A Few Hidden Emoticons in Skype: Enter a chat session and type words like “drunk” and “ninja” with the brackets to view amusing emoticons.


Funny Gadgets
Sure, you can go through life perfectly well with a boring, mundane, terrifically unexciting USB hub, or you could use one of these:

Of course, there's the thumb drive:
USBThumbDrive2_640

And the Barbie Doll USB drive:


Blog Comments
You've got to love comments on blogs (I wrote about this topic some time ago), especially the ones that make you laugh. Often, the best ones are comments to comments.

For example:
Commenter 1: You are so stupid! IDOITS!!!!!!!!
Commenter 2: haha misspelled idiots bro...oh, the irony
And this comment about comments on YouTube from Barry841:
It's sad to see people think this is all so funny. You do realise YouTube comments are leading to a worldwide shortage of exclamation marks. There are whole generations growing up in Africa who will never get to use an exclamation mark in their lives because they have all been squandered by teenagers telling each other what they think of a dancing parakeet.
Humorous Videos
There can often be a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon between what one person thinks is funny and what another thinks is funny. So let me take a chance and share with you one of my all-time favorite funny tech clips. I think I saw it first way back in 2007 and it had me rolling on the floor. I still think it's pretty funny, even though it's as old as Heck (click to find out how old Heck actually is). Unfortunately, I could only locate a low-res copy of the video, but it is still worth a squiz.


Now check out My Tech Boss to learn the rules of technology - not the most hilarious clip ever, but very amusing. Here's an example, apropos the previous video: The Rule of Reboot.


So what are your favorite funny tech bits?
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