Since it's April Fools' Day, I decided to play a prank at my work.

Background Info
To give some background, there are several email distribution lists that you can sign up for at my company. Since I'm interested in Go, I naturally searched for one. I found a group that had a number of members and joined. I was a member of the group for awhile, and realized that there was no email activity. I sent a message to the group, and someone else noted that, since they joined the group, nobody used it. That being the case, I decided that the only way for there to be activity on the distribution list was to create it myself. I started giving out go problems every Friday. It was popular at first, but started to die down. So, I created a go problem solving competition starting last July-ish, and ending next July-ish. I've been giving sets of problems every Friday.

Note that the problems I give typically have the standard "letter-number" coordinates. So to give an answer to a problem, you specify coordinates (E.g. C-4, D-2, etc.).

Prank
Which brings us to today, April Fools' Day.

After a little bit of thought, I constructed the following email, and sent it to the distribution list:


Note that the solution to the problem here makes more sense using purely numerical coordinates than using the standard letter/number coordinates.

One person immediately realized the joke, but several others took the email seriously. Perhaps I should have made it more clear that it was intended for humor.

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be immersed

I did not even know it was April Fools Day until I got home and my wife asked if anyone had played a joke on me. If someone did, I missed the joke.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Yes... I was so excited to come up with an April Fools' Day joke, especially since I've been holding this competition.

After the fact, though, it's somewhat less satisfying than I had anticipated

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be immersed

Okay, I get the 4-1, althought it won't work in Britain. But what is John Oliver?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Uhm, I don't get why “4-1” won’t work in Britain

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Because it means the 4th of January (not that you'd write a date with a "-" but anyway) not April 1st.

Okay, so he is a comedian. I still don't see the connection to April 1st.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Click on the link in EdLee's post.

Dang, I had only connected it to the move … thanks

(But, BTW, I write dates mostly like this: 2015-04-02)

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I don't know about the UK but here you'd write that 2/4/2015 or 02/04/2015 usually (I presume you mean April 2nd since that's today not February 4th). Or with 15 instead of 2015. Writing "2/4" doesn't look like a date to me though you might find it, I don't know.

I also don't know what happens in the UK, or Europe, or in most other countries, actually.

Ed's pet peeve is one I share.

The most logical thing to do would be to write using order year-month-day (with some agreed on punctuation). In Finland (and most of Europe) write day-month-year, with varying punctuation (In Finland we use mostly '.', in other countries I've seen '-' or '/'), which is also fairly logical. Any other order is illogical to me (you dont write times hh:ss:mm or mm:ss:hh either, do you?)

The thing that really drives me crazy is people who put dates in filenames in any other order than year-month-day.

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Hi TJ,

While I was living in Japan, where addresses and dates are big-endian, I started writing dates in YY/MM/DD format (but not with the Japanese year numbering).

It makes it easier to sort files on the computer too.

Otherwise I write the month, such as 2 Apr 2015

I haven't thought about or heard of the terms big- and little- endians for over 10 years. Thanks.

( From how data is stored in computer memory. )

The term is much older... I was brought up on the classics, which is why debates on how dates *should* be written seem so familiar, except that there was no "middle-endian" faction originally.

The wonderful things one can learn from Go venues.

Endianness

That would always be March 2nd 2004 here, unless given the context you suspected March 2nd 1904.

Actually using the 4 digit format for the year became a lot, lot more common here after 1999. A lot of people felt 1/1/00 looked weird.