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Easter eggs

In the digital world, the Easter Bunny doesn’t leave eggs around the house, but embedded into hardware and software, movies, music and games.

In the digital world, the Easter Bunny doesn’t leave eggs around the house, but embedded into hardware and software, movies, music and games. Easter eggs are hidden levels and characters, bonus tracks on CDs, added movie footage on DVDs, and so on.

Some Easter eggs are nearly impossible to find, and some are right in front of your eyes. Some are meant to be found, and some are jokes put into software by a programmer for the benefit of other programmers – secrets for the initiated.

C/Net ( www.cnet.com ) has put together of a list of the best Easter eggs to be found on the Web. Here are some of the best.

http://hackthematrix.warnerbros.com/

The Matrix was one of the top grossing movies of all time, and there are still two more sequels to come. The last two parts of the trilogy are currently being filmed in Sydney, Australia.

To keep the buzz alive, Warner Bros has put together a hacker Web site filled with Easter eggs at Hack The Matrix. Just click on the keyboard, and enter one of the following codes into the popup window:

Agent bullet time, bill, carrie, chrysalis, crash, darrow, déjà vu, geof, guns, keanu, Laurence, lobby, mirror mirror, morpheus, nebuchadnezzar, neo bullet time, owen page78, page98, page168, page 212, red, redpill, sentinal, site credits, skroce, steak, Tokyo, trinity, wrong number.

That should keep you busy until the next Matrix movie hits the big screens in early 2003 under the name The Matrix Reloaded. For more information, check out The Matrix Web site at

www.whatisthematrix.com .

www.eeggs.com

This is a database with thousand of Easter egg hunting tips, from how to find the copy of a driving game in Microsoft Excel 2000, and a crazy search menu in Internet Explorer 5. There are also examples of Easter eggs in movies, television, books and art.

You could spend weeks at this site, analyzing details in famous paintings, or looking for hidden tracks in your CD collection.

You can also find an unusual egg within the site itself. Type "funky camel" in the search window, minus the quotations, and you’ll get a weird, and pointless, camel animation.

www.google.com

The Web search engine Google is rapidly becoming the most important engine on the Internet. Because it’s an international site, you can choose from a variety of different languages for the main page, from Spanish to French to Norwegian.

There are also a variety of other languages to choose from.

On the main Google page, click on Language Tools to get a full list of supported languages.

On the list, nestled between Dutch and English is the little known language of Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. There are also sites for Hacker, Klingon, pig latin, and Bork, bork, bork, spoken by Swedish Muppet chefs.

www.lucasarts.com

Visit the LucasArts Web site, making sure that your browser is configured to accept cookies. Once you’re at the Web site, search your PC for the cookie that was planted.

Using the ‘Find’ tool, look for the cookie that the site planted. It should contain the term ‘@lucasarts’, and the full name should be something like ‘default@lucasarts(1).txt. Open the file in the text editor and enjoy the Wookie Cookie. I won’t spoil this one for you.

www.cnet.com

Go to C/Net and download Yahoo Messenger 5.0 if you don’t have it already. The Easter eggs are the sound effects you can make during a chat session. Enter one of the following codes, using the angle brackets, into the communication window; <snd=cowbell> for a cowbell, <snd=door> for a door slamming, <snd=phone> for a ringing telephone, <snd=yahoo> for a yodel, or <snd=yahoomail> for a voice that says "Yahoo mail".

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/specials/2002/eastereggs/g-excel.html

This is the famed Easter Egg within Microsoft Excel2000. Basically you open up an Excel document, click on "Save As", and opt to save it as a Web Page. Under "Selection: Sheet", tick the "Add Interactivity" box, and hit save.

Open the file in Internet Explorer and scroll down to row 2000. Press Shift and the space bar together to select the entire row, and hold down the Tab key until WC is the active column. Hold down Shift, Control and Alt, then click on the Microsoft Office logo in the top left corner of the spreadsheet.

You can steer and bump cars off the road with your arrow keys, press the space bar to fire, and the letter "o" to drop an oil slick. "H" turns your headlights on. Have fun.

www.dvdeastereggs.com

While I have yet to join the rest of the 21 st century in purchasing a DVD player, some of the Easter eggs hidden within the discs are almost enough to make me go out and buy a system tomorrow. At last count there were 609 eggs on the site.

For example, in the DVD for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Special Edition, you can find storyboards, drawings for monsters and equipment, renderings of Aki in a bikini, and another piece of animation that goes with Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

On the Mallrats DVD you can find a montage of Jay and Silent Bob singing "Build Me Up Buttercup," a la Something About Mary.