Friday, April 13, 2007

Easter Egg

I inherited my affinity towards computers from my Dad. In the early 90's he used to program using Basic with a 386 machine. At times will write a .bat script blinking on the screen saying, "Vijesh go and study!" when I try to run Prince of Persia game. His inquisitiveness made him read lots of computer magazine (both English & Tamil). Once when I peeped into one such magazine, I read a column about "Easter Egg". I was wondering what does nutrition topic doing in a computer magazine. Only then my Dad told the history of Easter and cleared me what an "Easter Egg" in a digital term. Those time Microsoft Office suite is the best place to find one. Wiki says...

Finally today several years after, I guess I found some "Easter Eggs". This time in terms of Google. Today Google is celebrating "Yuri Gagarin" - who on 12 April 1961 became the first person in space and the first person to orbit the Earth. I don know if I can call them as Easter Egg but still I would go about doing so. Instead of telling what each is, I would leave it for you people to try out.

  1. Send a mail to your gmail ID but instead of using username[at]gmail[dot]com try using username[at]googlemail[dot]com
  2. If you have a [dot] in your user name remove them and try sending a mail. For example user[dot]name[at]gmail[dot]com as username[at]gmail[dot]com
  3. In your Gmail/GTalk chat window try putting text within [asterik] *hi Vijesh* see what happens
  4. Like the previous ones put text within underscore _Hello GM_ see what happens
  5. type this <3 [greater than followed by three]
  6. try this smiley B-)
  7. this smiley x-(
  8. this :'( - but don use it often
  9. this one :(|) [they call it as a monkey]
  10. finally this one \m/ - Rocking out
Also Google has its own Easter Egg home page here...
P.S: [at] means @ / [dot] means . This post will be frequently updated since its "Easter Egg" :)

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Really Too Good...
I too saw the Google Home page to be different but didnt know the history of it!!!..

Nice Blog...

Antony Vincent Pandian.S. said...

Really a nice and lovely topic..

Thanks..........

Varunkumar Nagarajan said...

have a look at this....
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=10313

they have given a reason for eggs 1 & 2

Vijesh said...

Yup, read that already!
When you use such an ID, Gmail says "this is also ur ID" near the email address. [:)]
Also there are solutions to other eggs, all matters is finding them. [;)]