Well-formed birthday cake

Best wishes to Sean McGrath on the occasion of his 0x28th birthday!

For a time I was using hexadecimal exclusively for my age, as it seemed better than Botox for general age-reducing. My dear hubby Eli threw me a wonderful party for my 0x28th, and even commissioned the creation of a cake that looked just like a full-size computer monitor. We were remiss in not capturing a picture of the thing before it started getting dismantled for consumption, but we did get one shot of the “screen”:

Well-formed birthday cake

Eli, being a technical professional with a good grasp of XML, agonized over the correct information model for this, along with managing space constraints and wondering whether the cake decorators would make it ill-formed somewhere along the way. But they really came through. The cake was a bit hit with my geeky friends, and with me.

Now, (mumble) years later, my age in hex just looks weird and will unfortunately remain so for a while. Maybe it’s time to switch to vigesimal…