Speaking of Easter eggs…

jeff powers

Thanks to George for this tip:

On the random side of things… Jeff Bezos turns 40 today. Curious? Search Amazon.com for old fart. (Only works on 1/12/04)… [The Chang Journal]

Since the item is going to disappear after midnight, I’ve taken the liberty of reposting the image and text:

Happy 40th Birthday, Jeff Bezos
January 12, 1964

Much better than most of the Easter eggs I’ve ever put in software. Most, but not all…

There was a hidden Easter egg in an old version of the procurement software I worked on that invoked a picture of our development manager, Mike Stopper, head back, snoring, exhausted after an all night coding binge in Saudi Arabia. (Which is another story.) What can I say? It was before we won our contract. The Easter egg was subsequently, unceremoniously, stripped out. But it was probably the best one I ever did, with the exception of the one that I nixed partway through, which would have translated every error message in the system to Pig Latin. Er, Ig-pay Atin-lay.