I've always been something of a collage artist, which spills over into these still life montages, wherein I attempt to capture some thinking in a somewhat iconographic language.
For example, here I'm reflecting back on Pycon 2008, where XOs were very much on display (including disassembled), and where the ASCII to Unicode bridge served as a unifying topic.
The commitment of the open source community to a fully internationalized experience is quite evident, as symbolized by the Python logo, a computer language currently making this very ASCII (or Latin-1) Unicode transition. The Chinese dragon likewise symbolizes how the Unicode codespace has plenty of room for its characters.
Also, thanks to my overlap with Ian Benson, a mathematician and champion of Caleb Gattegno's brick-based approach to early algebra learning, I'm representing bits (0 or 1) and half bytes of four bits (e.g. 1011) using Cuisenaire Rods.
The longer sequence of bytes on the XO's keyboard is a veiled allusion to UTF-32 although it's only 16 bits long.
