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Vanity License Plates

Vanity License Plates

Mike Hall blogs about vanity license plates around Redmond. I’ve already mentioned Bruce Oberg’s “OTTFFSS” (One Two Three...). Tom Saxton, another former Mac Word developer, still has a vanity plate that reads “FE06,” which is a single-instruction infinite loop in MC68K machine language. Unfortunately, the equivalent PowerPC instruction requires 8 letters.

I had once considered getting a license plate that read “EFUN,”but it involves such an obscure bit of Hungarian Notation that even the vast majority of Microsoft developers wouldn’t get the joke. The “e” prefix stands for “element in the domain of” whatever follows the prefix—in this case, element in the domain of fun. Arguably, any cool toy is an EFUN.

But, to date, the best vanity license plate I’ve ever seen, by far, was on a VW beetle. It read, “FEATURE.”

 

Rick

Published Friday, April 16, 2004 3:29 PM by Rick Schaut
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Comments

Friday, April 16, 2004 4:17 PM by Anonymous Coward

# re: Vanity License Plates

Around the VS buildings, I've seen "RUNTIME", "HTTPDEV" and "VCROCKS". I've also seen "MSN 808" which probably isn't intentional, but I like to think of it as a vehicular homage to Microsoft Bob...
Friday, April 16, 2004 4:46 PM by Charlie Kindel

# re: Vanity License Plates

My 1988 Porsche 911 has a license plate that reads 038F. Why?
Friday, April 16, 2004 5:42 PM by Rick Schaut

# re: Vanity License Plates

038f hexadecimal equals 911 decimal
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 10:06 AM by B.Y.

# re: Vanity License Plates

Does Gates have WINDOWS ?
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 2:58 PM by Bruce Oberg

# re: Vanity License Plates

Tom Saxton's license is actually 60FE, and this is indeed an infinite loop in the 68K instruction set. The funny part is that his wife, Cathy, has the equivalent instruction for the 80x86 instruction set (EBFE, i believe). He was a long time Mac Word guy while she was a long time Win Word gal. But love knows no such distinctions :).
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 3:20 PM by Rick Schaut

# re: Vanity License Plates

Hm... I could have sworn that Tom's plate was FE06. Perhaps I've spent too much time looking at byte-swapped data...

Forgot about Cathy's plate, but, that's correct. The Mac vs Win dev connection made it funnier still.
Friday, April 30, 2004 12:17 PM by KC on Exchange and Outlook

# Geeky vanity license plates

Thursday, May 27, 2004 3:44 PM by Greg Baker

# re: Vanity License Plates

Catching up on everyone's blog and couldn't help chiming in on this one. My Florida 2000 New Beetle tag is Y2KBUG
Regards,
gsb
Monday, May 31, 2004 11:00 PM by Ronnie G

# License plate 911

I had this oakte issued as I was a finishing my 27 years with the deparment. Who coulf know that it would take up a new neaning. Imgoing back to my 666 license plate.
Thursday, December 28, 2006 3:20 PM by b00giep0p » Blog Archive » Basic Geek Tests

# b00giep0p » Blog Archive » Basic Geek Tests

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