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If you run a blog and happen to have one of those days when you just don’t feel appreciated, we know what will cheer you up. Go check your comment spam.
No, seriously.
We all love the Internet, but using it also has its fair share of frustrations. This becomes fairly obvious when you look at the automatic suggestions that Google makes as you type in your searches…
Remember the recent discussion around Facebook’s “Face” trademark?
That whole discussion made us remember some rather funny or just plain strange examples of trademarks we’d seen from big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Google in the past. Companies do love their trademarks…
Here are a few of the stranger ones.
We computer geeks are a breed of our own, and as with any group of people with mutual references, we often make jokes and observations that are totally incomprehensible to outsiders.
So consider this post a litmus test. If you laugh at these jokes, then you are most definitely a computer geek. 
Considering that we here at Pingdom work with uptime issues daily (as you tend to do when you run an uptime monitoring service), we thought the latest XKCD comic strip was hilarious. 
For those who don’t know about it, XKCD is a very popular online comic by Randall Munroe about geeky subjects like math, tech, and so on. If you’re not already a fan, check it out.
This April 1st the guys at Wired Magazine put together a great April Fools’ joke: A dedicated mobile device for Twitter dubbed the Wingman.
Check out this video introduction to the (then) totally fake device.
Software piracy has been around basically since the inception of software, and copy protection methods almost as long, so today’s discussions around DRM really isn’t anything new. All the way back in 1976, a certain Bill Gates wrote an open letter to a computer hobbyist club complaining that “most of you steal your software.” Back in those days, however, even he considered copy protection to just be in the way and wasn’t an advocate for it.
There has been a huge number of more or less creative methods to prevent people from making illegal copies of games and other software, but the ones we think are the most interesting (and amusing to look back at) are the ones involving actual physical extras, frequently used in the 80′s and early 90′s. Here are a few gems from that era.
We stumbled upon this street sign on Flickr and just couldn’t resist putting this composite together.
No words necessary, really.
When talking about measurements, why be like everyone else and use the standard metric system or American units when you can stand out considerably by making almost no sense at all?
To help you with this, we at Pingdom have gathered up a whole bunch of highly unusual units for measuring distance, time, volume, and even geeky things like coolness, fame and smell.
Off we go…
You may remember our April Fool’s joke this year: SaveIE6.com. Want to hear something cool? The petition on that website now has more than 1,000 signatures.
