{"id":2306,"date":"2014-04-01T21:39:17","date_gmt":"2014-04-02T04:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/?p=2306"},"modified":"2014-04-01T21:39:17","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T04:39:17","slug":"fooled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/2014\/04\/fooled\/","title":{"rendered":"Fooled"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today was a pretty good April Fools&#8217; Day.<\/p>\n<p>This morning, I received an email from my film professor who I had played a joke on nine years ago when I told him that I was quitting the film program to focus on pre-law. I haven&#8217;t spoken to him since graduation, and I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve even emailed, but today his one-line note was simply &#8220;I never forget.&#8221; That made me feel pretty good. I still have the voicemail that he left in 2005, and I don&#8217;t believe I&#8217;ve tried to play an April Fools&#8217; Day joke on anyone since.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight, my team got me. Someone from our team in Dublin is visiting, so we had decided that we were going to go out for dinner. As the workday ended, I asked where we were going. Knowing that I&#8217;m very particular (and some would say peculiar) about food, Eric told me that we&#8217;d be eating at a new Caribbean place that he had just discovered. I instantly got nervous. Trying new food is a scary thing for me. Of course the first thing that I wanted to know was if I would be able to find something to eat. I asked to see a menu. Eric informed me that the new location didn&#8217;t have a menu online yet, but the Palo Alto location did, and sent me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coconutsinpaloalto.com\/menus\/\">a link<\/a>. I started looking, trying to figure out what I would eat. I also asked why anyone would ever go to a restaurant that didn&#8217;t have its menu online. Why would one take that risk? I was told to check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coconutsinpaloalto.com\/menus\/di-big-tings\/\">Di Big Tings<\/a>. Research indicated that there were few menu options that didn&#8217;t involve coconut, beans, or meat on bones\u2014things that would cause me to avoid a dish. I looked at a bunch of photos of dishes and settled on\u00a0Chicken Shrimp Pelau as a candidate for my dinner. When it was time to leave, I admitted to everyone, &#8220;I&#8217;m so nervous right now.&#8221; Eric offered to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/nexus\/answer\/2781895\">beam<\/a> me the location of the restaurant, where we would all meet. I looked at the map, and started criticizing him for not linking directly to a place marker, and asked if the restaurant was even on Google Maps. He told me that they weren&#8217;t on Maps yet. This happens with new places, and I often add new restaurants to Google Maps via <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/mapmaker\">Map Maker<\/a>. Before we left, I decided that we needed to add the restaurant to Google Maps. I fired up Map Maker, and asked where the restaurant was located. When Eric showed me on the map, I was very familiar with the location. It was right next to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sushitomi.com\/new_english.html\">Sushi Tomi<\/a>, one of my favorite places to get sushi. I thought it was strange that I hadn&#8217;t noticed the new restaurant there, as I had walked down that street just last night after eating at Sushi Tomi, but I could have easily ignored that building. Eric started to hesitate, and I got the sense that he might not know\u00a0<em>exactly<\/em> where the restaurant was located. Not wanting to provide imprecise location data, I announced that I would add the restaurant to Maps after we ate. As we started to leave, and I forget exactly how this came up (maybe in the context of directions for our visitor), I mentioned that I had eaten at Sushi Tomi last night. Eric looked shocked and disappointed. I panicked, thinking that he had somehow expected to have been invited the night before, even though it was an impromptu dinner with the visitor after he asked for a recommendation of a sushi place after work. But then Eric told me that the joke was on me: the plan was to get me to the building next to Sushi Tomi, where there was no Caribbean restaurant that I needed to be worried about trying new food at, and then surprise me with a sushi dinner. I had no idea and was super-impressed. They really got me good, even down to how to pick a cuisine\u00a0that was right in that zone where it was different enough to make me scared, but not scared so badly that I&#8217;d veto the option. Well-played. In the end, we decided that there&#8217;s nothing wrong with getting sushi two nights in a row, and headed to Sushi Tomi.<\/p>\n<p>There were a lot of other good jokes on the Internet today that I&#8217;m about to catch up on, but here&#8217;s one that I did get to see: Google Translate on mobile Chrome <a href=\"http:\/\/chrome.blogspot.com\/2014\/04\/a-faster-mobiler-web-with-emoji.html\">translates English to\u00a0Emoji<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2309\" alt=\"screenshot of this blog with some words replaced by pictures\" src=\"http:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/emoji-318x500.png\" width=\"318\" height=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Update at 12:40 AM on April 2: And my favorite surprise of the day&#8230; there&#8217;s an update on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.homestarrunner.com\/\">HomestarRunner.com<\/a>, complete with a Webvan reference.\u00a0I <em>still<\/em> make H*R references at work, and fewer and fewer people are able to understand me. Now, maybe things will change for the better. Props to the HR Wiki folks for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hrwiki.org\/wiki\/April_Fools%27_2014\">keeping that going too<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today was a pretty good April Fools&#8217; Day. This morning, I received an email from my film professor who I had played a joke on nine years ago when I told him that I was quitting the film program to focus on pre-law. I haven&#8217;t spoken to him since graduation, and I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/2014\/04\/fooled\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Fooled<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}