License Oddities
There's not a lot to look at on my commute to and from work. Several years back, when the NC license plate character color changed from blue to red, I determined that the switchover happened (appropriately enough) somewhere in the WTFs. I think I had it narrowed down farther, but I don't remember the digits anymore. Anyway, recently I started noticing new license plates are back to blue characters; so far I've narrowed the transition back to being somewhere from ZNC to ZNK. But then I noticed something else odd.
Regular plates are of the format ABC-1234. Only the place where I've got a 'B' there? It's never a 'B'. As far as I can tell, after confirming with probably a hundred more plates, the second character is never from the first half of the alphabet, A-M. It's always N-Z. I got tipped off when I started looking for the "first half" of the Z plates and realized there weren't any. This is kind of odd. Why are they leaving out half the namespace? (The first half of the alphabet is also a bit rare for the first character, but that's because those plates are really old at the moment. I have seen a couple starting with K and L. The newest plates are now up to the ZX's.)
I also saw an interesting custom plate today: "../0X2E". That's hex for "../46". Or if you convert the hex to an ASCII character, you get "../.". Hmm. Clearly geeky, but I'm not sure why their car is a file path to the previous directory.
Regular plates are of the format ABC-1234. Only the place where I've got a 'B' there? It's never a 'B'. As far as I can tell, after confirming with probably a hundred more plates, the second character is never from the first half of the alphabet, A-M. It's always N-Z. I got tipped off when I started looking for the "first half" of the Z plates and realized there weren't any. This is kind of odd. Why are they leaving out half the namespace? (The first half of the alphabet is also a bit rare for the first character, but that's because those plates are really old at the moment. I have seen a couple starting with K and L. The newest plates are now up to the ZX's.)
I also saw an interesting custom plate today: "../0X2E". That's hex for "../46". Or if you convert the hex to an ASCII character, you get "../.". Hmm. Clearly geeky, but I'm not sure why their car is a file path to the previous directory.