I pulled off an epic rickroll today; it was a total success. Here's what I did:

• Grabbed an MP3 of Never Gonna Give You Up through flv2mp3.com.
• Using an audio editor, converted it to WAV format and added five seconds of silence onto the beginning
• Copied it to my buddy John's computer while he was out for a smoke
• Set the WAV file to be the sound played by Windows whenever a program is closed

He spent half an hour trying to figure out why he kept hearing Rick Astley… the five-second delay was enough to make it unclear what caused the music to start, and of course once it's playing you can't turn it off. There's no program to kill - the only way to make it stop is to turn off the speakers or shut down the computer. In the end he just restored his sound settings to the defaults.

I really got a taste for doing pranks on April Fool's Day this year. I'd never really done anything before, but this year I emailed the whole department, saying that I was going to go work for Microsoft, and professing my undying love for Internet Explorer. This is an obvious joke for anyone who knows how I really feel about Internet Explorer. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, although kind of nerve-wracking. On Facebook I pretended to be a conservative for a day.

I'm thinking that for a software developer and system administrator, there should be all kinds of ways to rickroll people that I haven't explored yet. So we'll see what else I can come up with.