Rumours of my career change have been greatly exaggerated

Whilst rumours of my career change might have been greatly exagerrated, it’s been another good April Fool’s Day worldwide as individuals and businesses have thrown off any seriousness of the rest of the year by turning to Newsbiscuit-esque stories and ideas everywhere.  April 1st is of particular interest to me as a web developer, as an opportunity to proudly display the more playful side of a company, attract new audiences, and to make people smile.

So here are some of my favourites (apologies if a lot of these links don’t work.  Chances are, it’s not April 1st any more).  If you’ve been following me on Twitter today, you’ll have probably seen a lot of these already.

• Google’s gBall
  Google Australia joined the Google party early with the new pay-per-kick GPS enabled gBall.
• Slashdot – IE 8.1 supports Firefox Plugins, Rendering Engine
  Not a particularly brilliant or engaging story, but the first one I found of the year.
• Google’s CADIE
  The world’s first AI, took over Google sites everywhere; YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail and Google Image Search and my personal favourite – a 3D-glasses enabled Chrome.
• Opera Face Gestures
  The natural progression from mouse gestures, with a priceless video.
• Gamespot’s Umbrella Corporation requests bailout
  One for the gamers fitting in nicely with today’s G20 protests, Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corporation have requested government bailout for its failing company.
• XBOX’s Alpine Legend
  Another one for the gamers, and worth it for the video alone, yodel with Franz the Manz Long on Xbox Live.
• Lastminute Spar days
  Expedia may have been offering flights to Mars, but Lastminute had a far more relaxing Spar Days on offer today.

And lastly, in the papers…

• The Daily Express invisible car
• BMW’s magnetic tow technology
• Waitrose Pinana’s

Do you have any favourites I’ve missed?  Don’t forget, it’s never too early to start planning next years pranks

Up until now, World66 had seemed my only option. But in the Age of Google, posting images for this sort of thing seems a bit of a letdown. Fortunately 29travels have just the thing with their Google Map version.

Pretty cool but it’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be an option to edit the map. But, a quick look at the iframe source, and you can see it’s pretty easy to hack in any new countries as you visit. Providing you know the right country codes of course.

http://www.29travels.com/getmap.php?j=ALATBACYCZDEESFRGBHRISITMKMTMENLPLSITRUSVAVN&c=cc41c9f2&w=575&h=300

That query string is a long list of 2-digit country codes. So, if you know the code for the country you want to add, just adding it to the string will provide all the highlighting you need. For example Australia = AU

http://www.29travels.com/getmap.php?j=ALATBACYCZDEESFRGBHRISITMKMTMENLPLSITRUSVAVNAU&c=cc41c9f2&w=575&h=300

Who wants to package this up into a WordPress plugin for me?