April Fools’

So it looks as though my promise of posting on my blog more often has really gone down the pan. Sorry folks, I’ll try harder, but I never seem to have anything to write about. I could bore you all about my new bike (it is cool after all), but that’s just showing off. I could bore you about how I think Linux has made leaps and bounds in terms of usability in the past few years and still manages to be just as crap, but nobody cares about this except me. I was even asked to write about search engines, but I must admit I don’t have a care in the world about them, other than Google actually being useful compared to others (don’t get me started).

I suppose I’ll go on about the masses of really stupid and boring geeky April Fools’ jokes that got posted on Slashdot a couple of days ago. I’m not so much bothered about April Fools’ in itself, it can really be a bit of fun sometimes, if you’re into practical jokes and, especially, you have a good sense of humour. Now I know geeks are not well known for their comic gift (ha ha), but other geeks (myself included) do understand why IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service actually manages to be funny (especially when someone tries it out), but this year I must admit simply being completely unamused, even bored by the sheer quantity of extremely poor gags.

I’m not so much disappointed with the gags this year, I know most of them are usually this poor quality. What I am disappointed by is that Slashdot, which several years ago was a great place to go to get some geek news (it is after “News for nerds, stuff that matters”), is simply going down the pan. The comments system has been overrun by trolls, the quality of the writing is deplorable, and probably the most annoying thing is how articles are repeated from one week to the next because the editors forgot they posted them. How do they manage to do that?!

So anyway, judging by April 1st‘s archive, it must either have been a really slow news day or the editors are just amused by such childish jokes as photographic proof of water on Mars and so on…

It would all be fine if it didn’t take itself so seriously…