Archives for October 2008

My Halloween 2008 Costume: Rick Astley

For Halloween this year, I decided to be Rick Astley. With a little bit of hair spray, spray-on hair color, and some make-up for a widow’s peak, it looks like this:

Rick Astley in blue jeans

Matt Cutts as Rick Astley in blue jeans

Rick Astley in trenchcoat

Matt Cutts as Rick Astley in trenchcoat

Rick Astley in suit

Matt Cutts as Rick Astley in suit

What fun. To make the costume complete, I took my Android G1 phone and bought a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up from Amazon for $.99. Then I put the song on continuous loop and turned on the external speaker. The G1 can really belt out music! Presto, not only do I look like Rick Astley, but I’m Rickrolling everyone who comes within ten feet of me!

In order for you to fully appreciate the experience, I’ve added an “embed” code into this blog so you can experience the costume for yourself. Let me know if it works for you. 😉 (Update: Apparently Firefox and Chrome don’t like embedded MIDIs and other Web 0.1 technology, so I’ll spare you the audio experience of getting rickroll’ed.) Thanks to my wonderful wife for the idea and for her help with the costume this year. She also made a special treat for people at work:

Mummy cupcakes!

Yummy mummy cupcakes!

Other Halloween fun from previous years.

Halloween easter egg: Google protects itself from zombies

You probably saw Google’s Halloween logo today:

Google Halloween 2008 logo

But you may not have noticed that Google made another change for Halloween. Check out Google’s robots.txt file today:

Google Halloween 2008 robots.txt

That’s right. Zombies are disallowed from accessing /brains on Google today. You can never be too safe! 🙂

Hat-tip to Google Blogoscoped spotting it first and to Search Engine Land for a round-up of Halloween logos.

css.php