CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Ink, I like the way you think... I'll have to file that one away for a rainy day... but who to torment with it, hmmm....

bwa ha ha ha

PHIL

Yes, I've done that, before, lol, good trick! My favorite is the one where you take a clear piece of scott tape and cover the bottom of the mouse ball to stop the pointer from moving. Most, figure it out after the first few minutes, but it's funny to watch a , lol

Another one I've done to a live one (remember, people who use Windows should be encouraged ... sometimes less, um, overtly ... to switch), is screenshot all their windows open with the Taskbar, make the screenshot the background, and then minimize them and hide the Taskbar. Then, let them come back and try to do any work. Heh heh heh. Even relatively clueful users will take a little bit to figure this one out.

I'm proud to say I'm responsible for several computing practical jokes in my lifetime, chief amongst them the Cookie Monster and the Five Cent Printer Hack. I've told a couple people about these, but oldphilosopher can corroborate that I really did pull these (the last in particular was particularly well known).

Bahaha! This is great stuff to try on my stinkin' little nephew the next time he comes over....>:D

Okay, you asked! There are others but these are the two I was proudest of. Both of them were hatched at the University I used to work for, but before anyone asks, I quit -- I wasn't fired (and I still, technically, work for them as a consultant).

Prank #1 "The Cookie Monster"
This one wasn't an original idea. An old joke (I think it originated at MIT), it basically is a little program that sits in the background and periodically, asks

gimme cookie

Naturally, what are you supposed to do? You feed it, by typing in "cookie" of course!, and it goes away for awhile. If you don't, however, it asks again:

gimme cookie

and if you still ignore it, then it prints, over and over,

cookie cookie gimme cookie cookie cookie gimme cookie

and obliterates whatever you're doing on the screen, and then waits again to ask for another cookie. So, I wrote a suite of shell scripts that emulated this, and let them run in the background of the help desk terminal (where support calls are received). The guy at the desk that day was naturally totally unaware and went about his work for a few minutes, until:

(phone rings)
Herman: Hi, this is the {such and such} Help Desk, can I help you? ... Okay, then tell me --
Computer: gimme cookie
Herman: Huh? No, not you, the computer just did something weird. (Over his shoulder) Jordan! {the system administrator}
Computer: gimme cookie
Herman: What? ... No, no, I'm going to have to call you back. ... Sure, no problem. I'll have to ask Jordan why it's --
Computer: cookie cookie gimme cookie cookie cookie gimme cookie cookie cookie gimme cookie cookie cookie gimme cookie cookie ...
Herman: Argh, my screen! It's all messed up! JORDAN!!!

Unfortunately, Jordan had it figured out in two seconds and removed the Cookie Monster from the help desk terminal. There were only a few people in the department capable of this, and only one who would actually do it, so I was found out.

Prank #2 coming.

Prank #2 "The Five Cent Printer Hack"
This one landed me in a *lot* of trouble, but it was soooo worth it, and they still talk about this one. Heaven help me, though, I'll never do it again, but man, what a hack!

Anyway, this is how it worked. Every April Fools Day on campus, there was invariably someone who tried to pull a campus-wide prank. The best one to date was a guy from the admissions office who claimed that the guard shack at the campus entrance would be charging 10 cents (or some other ridiculous amount) a head, and sent this to the campus announcement E-mail list. The response was vigourous and vocal, and generated a huge amount of phone calls to the security department and general hilarity and confusion. Nevertheless, it was long my opinion that this could be easily topped.

Several months earlier, an acquaintance of mine who was a Hewlett-Packard printer repair tech told me about how you could change the READY message on HP laser printers and anything else that spoke PCL; it was simply an escape sequence you sent to the JetDirect printer box. I amused myself with making the printer greet people by name when they walked by it, but soon I got bored with this and looked for more ... exceptional applications.

A month or so before April 1st, it hit me -- the perfect solution to both problems. In those days, the campus network was not segregated into distinct VLAN zones (and no problem if it had been, since I launched the worm from a secured system anyway), so everyone could connect to everything. I devised a program to read through the printer spools on the master campus database server, find all the HP LaserJets on campus, and send them the control sequence to change the READY message to INSERT FIVE CENTS. I came to campus at 5am on April 1st, ran the hack (which found over 90 printers in just minutes), and then sent a message to the campus E-mail list explaning that all print jobs now required five cents per page, and that either you had to create an account with me, or wait for coin acceptors to be installed to print.

Now, several things must be remembered: 1) I just changed the READY message. The printers could still print, if anyone tried; it was just a different message that still meant "ready." 2) Five cents per page sounds plausible, but if you think about it, this would bankrupt every department on campus with any even medium-size mass mailing job. It's absolutely crazy. 3) I was one of the two campus database programmers, so people knew I had something to do with administrative computing, and it sounded logical that I would be in charge of a new printer charge account system. 4) Only about 30% of the campus knew who I was actually (but this 30% knew immediately it was a joke).

By eight a.m., when people started coming into work, I had already received several angry phone calls (which erupted into laughter when I told them "April Fools!"), some positively hilarious E-mail, and some even wilder voice mail messages, some of which I had saved.

(story continues)

Corroborated. And I may add, it's one of the funniest stories I've heard in my life. I still like the guy that campus mailed you a nickel taped to the page on which he had printed our your message.

My favs:

Yeah. Uh... Someone broke into our computer lab one night and stole all the internal PC speakers out of the computers, because this nutrition programs beeped everytime you entered any info into it, and the students in that class were all in the lab at the same time. Durring uh, er, the culprate's shift

For the screen shot background issue, when I was feeling particualarly evil, I moved my friend's (shooby knows him: CB) task bar when I did this one. I put it on the far right of the screen and set it to auto-hide. It wasn't until he rebooted the third time that he figured it out.

Another fun one was when I switched the mac backgrounds in the mac lab to have a "start menu" on them. Boy did I get in trouble for that one.

And then there was the time I... No that's enough for one day.

(continued)

By eight-thirty, however, absolute panic had started breaking out in some departments on campus. Remember that only 30% of the campus knew that there was a notorious prankster behind the E-mail, so 70% of the campus took me seriously, and there were several desperate phone calls about how to make up for the budget hit this "printer usage account" was going to cause them. Unfortunately for me, these people didn't follow the instructions in my E-mail message and these phone calls didn't go to my telephone -- instead, they went to the Vice President of Financial Affairs, my boss' boss' boss. While Human Resources, right next door, was all too familiar with my reputation and was laughing themselves silly, the Financial VP didn't ... and wasn't.

At this point I got an urgent and pointed E-mail from the Director of HR saying I'd better send out a retraction and fix the printers before I really caught it, and the joke ended barely 45 minutes after campus opened, having almost paralysed most of the academic departments from printing because they thought they would get charged. (On the other hand, from my friend Charlene in Student Development, I got a laser-printed copy of my E-mail with a nickel taped to it, which I still have somewhere.)

The greatly ironic part was that when I told the campus that there was no per-page printer charge account planned, I got in trouble again because there was! (Just not at five cents a page ... I don't know if it's ever been implemented, possibly because of the fallout.)

There were some other amusing little consequences, but that's the main story. Yours truly did get in quite a bit of trouble additionally from fallout over a week later, and several other people got in trouble for letting the joke proceed without stopping me immediately (these are all great stories in themselves), but the long and short of it is, no one has been able to top it. So help me, I'll never do it again, but it's the biggest prank I ever pulled, and I'll never be able to get bigger than that.

Well! That was certainly humorous!

As to the original prank: Yes, I've done it before. Except I also put all the unremoveable icons off screen, using some funky monitor adjustments. And I put the task bar away. It really seemed like the computer was frozen up.

A new prank (not mine): every computer on a certain small campus was interconnected to the same system. Do you know the keyboard setup in which all keys are in alphabetical order? The prankster managed to get every computer on campus to think it was in this format. Hilarity ensued.

One I've actually done: our school system has a login system, required your username and password. The username box is open for anything to be put in, with 255 character limit. Many people put messages in here. I, on the other hand...

First you fill it up with 254 spaces and something else, then you go back to the beginning of the bar. It won't let you type anything as long as there's a character at the end. Sometimes I add the message "Have a nice day!" at the end just for amusement. All the tech people know this one, but some other people get very confused...

Something tells me you are a geek in denial. No one in their right mind would wanna hang out with Shooby and I durning a normal day. Mainly because I annoy him for fun:

Shooby: So what are we gonna do now.
Me: I dunno, just hang out?
Shooby: GRRRRR! We have to do something.
Me: I'm not the task oriented one. YOU think of something.
Shooby: Fine. Let's...
Me: I don't wanna do that.
Shooby: I DIDN'T EVEN SAY IT!!!!

This used to happen all the time. It was great fun.

oldphilosopher wrote:Something tells me you are a geek in denial. No one in their right mind would wanna hang out with Shooby and I durning a normal day.

I hang out with you.... -_O

Do you claim to be 'normal?'

Q.E.D.

hmmm... you have a point there....

The Silence can testify about how conversations work between oldphil and I, and that conversation snippet is pretty much a direct quote.

I seem to be surrounded by non-task-oriented people. Do something, anything!!!! Stop sitting around!!~!!!!

That was quite an amusing read.

I remember the cookie monster... Think there was a "help I'm trapped..." one too.

I'm truely in the presence of greatness, I am in awe of the brilliance that shines from you guys

PHIL

I still like the guy that campus mailed you a nickel taped to the page on which he had printed our your message.

Uh, that was Charlene in Student Dev (she took over Michelle Ansuini's old position).

i once made my screen look like a BSoD. my dad saw it in awe in how i could manage to continue my work even if it was having that image in the background. now don't ask me how i screen captured it... because i didn't! i actually wrote down all that junk and typed it in later...

oh, and i modified few computers to display this message that pops up before you log on completely that says 'School Sucks'. school admins still can't get rid of it for some reason or another...

Would you believe that I was once the victim of a "prank" on my Commodore 64? As I've mentioned somewhere else on the boards, the C-64 I have is second-hand and it came with a whole bunch of programs of all different kinds. One of them does the following. (I haven't seen it in a while, so I'm just working from memory here.)

When you first load it up and run it, it returns you to the computer's blue start-up screen, as though it had just been turned on. However, when you press a key, the prompt which normally says...

Code: Select all

READY.

...changes to something like...

Code: Select all

WAIT A MINUTE, I'M NOT QUITE
READY.

Pressing another key, it changes again to something like...

Code: Select all

HOLD ON!  I'M STILL NOT
READY.

If you persist on pressing keys, the screen finally clears and the computer begins saying things like, "Stop touching me!" and so on. If you do it enough, it finally goes on to describe visually how angry it is and "clears out" all its ROM, RAM, etc. The ironic part is at the end it "calms down" and prompts you to press any key(!) to abort its own "destruction sequence". Even if you don't, it will ask you if you want to run the program again.

It's actually a rather humorous program, and almost had me fooled at first run. ^_^ (The source code is in BASIC, so it was easy to figure out afterwards.)

That's a famous program called ZOMBIES (or one of a billion other names). I have it on disk somewhere and someone tried to run it on me; I just turned off the computer and turned it back on.

Your memory is excellent; that's exactly the prompts it has.

No, I'm not really a prankster. I'm pretty serious most of the time. But that doesn't mean I don't like some funny things.

The "READY" prank is a good one. Hadn't heard of that before.

Now, for a prank I set up but never actually did. Last year I was in a programming class, and (like most computer classes) it was boringly slow. Since our computers had access to Visual Basic, I had the ability to create realistic looking programs effortlessly (on a side note, we figured out how to get an Internet Explorer open in a program that looked exactly like Word, and even said "Microsoft Word" in the taskbar. It was great). Anyway, I created a program which just made the screen black and printed letters that looked vaguely like DOS. It printed things like:

"Erasing Deepfreeze... [our school's security program]"

"Launching worm into school network..."

"Sending spam..."

etc.

and finally,

"Formatting C drive..."

I had task bars for these things, too...

Anyway, the plan was to leave it running "accidently" one day, but I never got up my nerve and then the entire system crashed and the program got wiped. Shame, really.

uc pseudonym wrote:"Erasing Deepfreeze... [our school's security program]"
...
Anyway, the plan was to leave it running "accidently" one day, but I never got up my nerve and then the entire system crashed and the program got wiped. Shame, really.

Does anyone else find this highly, highly ironic?

I did.

omputer related but for April Fools