Driving me Crazy

By Courtney P
July 21st, 2005 @ 1:57 PM Uncategorized

Got SMTP?I spend a lot of time in traffic on Hwy 101, unfortunately, when I choose to drive to work (which these days, I hate to admit, is most days). This means staring at a lot of bumpers, and in turn, a lot of license plates. I have noticed quite a few vanity plates in my travels.

The Silicon Valley, in particular, is notorious for its abundance of geek-themed vanity plates. Pictured with this entry is a “GOT SMTP” plate that I was behind near Sunnyvale last week. This plate was housed by a Hotmail license plate frame, so I assumed they were on their way to Microsoft in Mountain View. Buzz Andersen noticed a very clever programmer’s plate within his first days of working in The Valley.

Others that have been spotted ’round these parts:

  • XML GIRL
  • URL GURL
  • NET DUDE
  • WEB GURU
  • IMG SRC
  • 1GOTO1
  • 0X2A (this one is incredibly geeky, try to figure it out)

Have you seen any other vanity plates of note driving around your neighborhood?

Related posts:

  1. GR8 Commute
  2. If I were a kid on summer vacation driving on 101, sending an SMS to other kids on summer vacation driving on 101, clogging traffic with all the extra vehicles
  3. Crime Blotter: Downtown
  4. Driving School
  5. What’s all the Buzz about?

8 Comments so far

  1. B (unregistered) July 21st, 2005 2:44 pm

    I saw a plate that was:

    I(heart)FSTNG

  2. George. (unregistered) July 21st, 2005 3:05 pm

    I still like the plate I saw in the City the other day: “YOR MOM”

  3. Alex Choi (unregistered) July 21st, 2005 3:54 pm

    *spoiler alert*

    good god this is ultra nerdy.

    0X2A is the hexadecimal equivalent of “42″.

    hexadecimal is another numerical system, base 16 as opposed to base 10 in the decimal system that is usually used. You have 16 characters to express a digit instead of 10. (ie you have 0123456789ABCDEF instead of 0123457890)

    0x just tells you it’s in hex, 2A tells you it’s 2*16^1 + A*16^0 (where A is 10)

    42 is significant because it’s the “answer to the life the universe and everything” according the the supercomputer built in the “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

  4. courtney (unregistered) July 21st, 2005 4:02 pm

    Alex, you are the master of the universe.

  5. And (unregistered) July 21st, 2005 4:10 pm

    The best one I saw went: “MY 401K”

  6. mach (unregistered) July 21st, 2005 5:16 pm

    “WHILE1″

    People are…wow.

  7. Bob (unregistered) July 22nd, 2005 10:03 am

    I usually only think in hex for dealing with Unicode, so my immediate reaction on seeing 0X2A was to look it up in the tables: *. *? Just who does this plate-owner think is an a-hole? A programmer friend then pointed out that I probably oughtn’t have bypassed the middle man. Oops.

  8. Jacob Appelbaum (unregistered) July 24th, 2005 3:33 am

    I have the plate “Memetic” on my motorcycle. We’re all so creative and we love to share that with the driving world.


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