Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

It’s gotten warm and spring-like around these parts, and little outbreaks of giddiness are occurring here and there. Last night, when I was driving home from work on the infamous 520 bridge, I briefly shared the misery with a bright yellow Honda convertible sports car with the license plate “FFFF00″. Before I was a blogger, I would not have known that those are the HTML hexadecimal code for turning text into exactly the color of the guy’s car.

It’s started me thinking that perhaps the world I perceive really is merely a gaggle of hex characters, and I’m looking at it through a cerebral browser. And maybe that guy’s license plate was really a piece of broken code, a chink in an otherwise seamless rendering that’s let me in on the secret. If I could, one night I’d sneak into the convertible owner’s garage, bolt on a license plate that read “FF0000″ and see if the car changed to this color.

Anyway, it was a bit of cleverness on the owner’s part that probably is appreciated in far greater numbers in Redmond, where I saw him, than in Seattle, where we were headed. And I can just see the license plate mullahs at the DOL rifling through their parchments trying to discover what filth or heresy the guy was trying to put over on them when he applied for the license.