Happy Programmers' Day

Today (13 September) is the 256th day of the year and is the unofficial international holiday, Programmers' Day.

Programmers celebrate the day (chosen because 256 is the number of distinct values represented by a 8-bit byte) by wearing white (because it represents the largest value 0xFFFFFF in the RGB colorspace).

As 2012 is a leap year, Programmers' Day will be celebrated next year on 12 September.

Some gift ideas from ThinkGeek for the friendly programmer in your life:

Glowing Keyboard Stickers Story time: one day a monkey was told by his boss that he was getting a new laptop. "It will have everything," the boss said, "including a fingerprint scanner and light up keys." Then the monkey got the laptop. Sure it was super fast, but did it have a fingerprint scanner? No. And did the keys light up? No. The monkey was sad. Then he found these Glowing Keyboard Stickers. He tried them out, and was happy. Yay! The Glowing Keyboard Stickers are not "glow in the dark." Instead, they are made of a high quality fluorescent print that reflects any ambient source of light. Sure they take a little while to put on, but not that long. And sure they don't work in complete darkness without any ambient light to reflect, but give them some light and watch them shine (literally). The goal of the Glowing Keyboard Stickers is to offer you an inexpensive way to make your computer keyboard as cool as the more expensive light up ones, all the while adding a bit extra reflective illumination to your key caps. 'But how do we know they really work?' you ask. Well, that's easy. The proof that the Glowing Keyboard Stickers really work is all the words you just read above. This product description was written in a dim room on that very same laptop mentioned in the first paragraph - surprise twist ending! Glowing Keyboard Stickers High quality fluorescent print reflects any ambient source. Eases eye fatigue while typing in lower-light levels. Matte surface that is pleasant to touch. Easy to apply - just peel and stick (yet allows for a clean full removal with no sticky residue). Can be trimmed to fit non-standard keyboards. Dimensions: (full sticker sheet) - 9.5" x 4"

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USB Memory Brick Thumbdrives Just about every geek out there spent his formative years building things with simple nubby plastic building bricks. They may later graduate to Erector sets, but then they branch out - carpentry, metal working, advanced nanorobotics using photolithography or positional diamondoid molecular manufacturing… but they almost always start with these venerable old bricks. Even so-called grown-ups, though, never give up on their love of these little blocks. Something about the bright primary colors, or the satisfying snap they give when piecing them together. You can build almost anything with a complete set of bricks, but now we've extended their capabilities beyond just building cool yet blocky robots, cars, planes and houses. Now, with these USB Memory Brick Thumbdrives, we've taken a regular brick and inserted a 4 Gigabyte piece of USB flash memory. Now you can store millions of pages of text, thousands of images, hundreds of songs, or 10 hours of movies. Then, when you're done with your file storage, build it into your robot, and watch as he stomps Tokyo! Rrraaarrrr!!! Ok, maybe not so much with the Tokyo stompage, but still! How cool!

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BODY tag T-Shirt

Sometimes simpler is better. No need for funny one-liners or obscure and geeky references here. Just a simple homage to the markup language that makes the web go 'round. Charcoal grey 100% cotton heavyweight t-shirt with printed on the front and on the back in white ink.

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