Today is November 1st, 2010. The way I write this is 101101 (yymmdd). This can be viewed as binary, and converting to hex the byte 00101101 is equal to 0x2D (that’s 45 decimal). As an ASCII character this is -. A hyphen, a minus. Clearly negative.

Now the funny thing is that Sullivan asked me what this day would be next year: 111101 -> 0x3D which translates to an =.

Today is a single horizontal dash in ASCII, this day next year is two horizontal dashes. It’s trivial down to the bone, but it’s fun nonetheless.