[insert false statement here, only to be refuted in the post's first line, since it's April Fool's day]

Just kidding! I would never [false statement]. I can't believe you fell for that! (Hardy-har-har.)

It has been far too long since I've written, and I do intend to properly update this blog sometime in the near future - that's what the weekend is for, right? But because it is April Fool's Day, I thought I'd share a few great April 1st pranks from around the Cloud. (Hey, maybe we'll look at this as an "Another Lazy...Thursday Evening" post? Does that make up for my absence?) Since I am, by all accounts, addicted to Google - how true it is - I will start there:

Google, Kansas? Topeka Search?: Perhaps you haven't heard that Topeka, Kansas has decided to change its name to Google, Kansas for a month in hopes that Google will choose them to be a part of their new high-speed internet network. But today, it seems that Google was so flattered they decided to return the favor (see picture above). According to the Official Google Blog:

We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

Of course, this is not the first time Google has played a prank like this - and, as evinced by the few entries to follow, it won't be the last - which has included Google Gulp (Google's new energy drink), Google Romance (search for true love), or CADIE (The Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), a computer program capable of learning and interacting intelligently with other beings. This year's list continues:

Google Translate for Animals: Perhaps you've used Google Translate before when you've been in a linguistic pinch - I know it helped me when my uncle switched his Chrome's default language to Italian - but Google has gone and taken it a step further. You can now use your Android-enabled phone to record and analyze what animals are saying to you - we've needed a technology like this for years!

Watch YouTube videos in TextP: And if you ventured onto YouTube today, you would've had the opportunity to view videos in a "TextP" format (similar to the one shown here). What's fascinating is that, apparently, showing videos in this format saves them $1.00 a second in bandwidth cost per viewer. Nuts, right?

And now, for a non-Google contributor...

ThinkGeek's Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock: I've recently become obsessed with Lost, so when I saw this YouTube video from ThinkGeek for a Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock, I nearly lost it (no pun intended). Seriously, though, punching in a code in place of a snooze button? Brilliant.