Why come no updates?

Do you know why I never post here anymore? Because the State of Texas changed their plates.... again. You just changed it State of Texas! I mean really, was that even TWO years?

I don't know who's idea that was, but you totally ruined my little pointless thing I had going here. Thanks jerk. In true Iron Man 3 style I'd like to call you out by telling you where I live. But I'm a coward so I'm just going to tell you how to contact me james@geekwagon.net. That's right State of Texas license plate decision maker you can contact me directly and I will respond. That's not a threat, that's a promise. I will write you back and tell you exactly how I feel in as kind of words as I can find.

So that's it fellow license plate followers. Both of you will have to move on to new blogs because I refuse to figure out the new plate scheme. The old one took months just to figure out that C came after B. WOW who would have thunk it. I can't handle that kind of stress anymore. This blog is officially retired unless I hear from someone official as per my lame call out in the first paragraph.

EDIT: okay it was more than two years, but it still wasn't very long.

Second Quarter 2012

Nothing new to report, move along.

Which is sad I've moved to making quarterly post, and already have nothing new to talk about.

First quarter 2012

I intentionally have not posted in a couple of months in the hopes that a few months later I'd have something interesting to write about. I was wrong. Admittedly a large part of my problem is I have a blog about something I haven't been doing. I can give excuses but I'll spare both my readers. Needless to say updates for the first bit of 2012 are far and few between. Not only have I not been noticing new plates, but even when I do I forget to write them down. I know I've seen a few not on the master list. I will do my best to catch back up on those.

One last post for 2011 in the lamest blog ever. I don't know if it's the holiday's or if there has been a lull in new plates on the road. I've recently taken a couple of trips and kept an eye out, but no new plates in a couple of months now. Even a guy at the coffee shop I visit on occasion who just got new plates did not get anything new or exciting (in fact it was quite old--started with AM).

Hopefully next year will be more exciting for license plate hunting... is that even possible? Can you have more excitement when there is none. It's kind of like multiplying by 0.

drunk posting doesn't matter if no one reads your blog right?

So I've seen more plates and I'll update my chart when I am more sober.

I just want to point out, DG almost caused an accident. Totally worth it because I hadn't seen DG yet. Also, this is my note that I saw it today.

The other thing I wanted to point out was it's obvious to me some plates are more common in certain area's. When I lived in Corpus Christi, there were a lot of BB's in our apartment complex. Like every new car had one.

Here I've noticed a lot of CY's. Normally CY wouldn't even be a noticeable letter combo except every school here starts with CY (because this is CYpress). I can't help but wonder if it is a coincidence, or if someone thought it would be funny. I hope it's someone trying to be funny.

No F and G (get it, no effing G)

Lame jokes aside, it does boggle the mind. I've seen plenty of truck plates starting with BE and BH now, but no BF or BG.

Cars finally started beginning with D now, but still skipping vowels. DB and DC is all I've seen so far. Presumably I will have a lame joke for DD by the time they come around.

There is no end

No end to the amount of content I can create out of watching licence plates.

There was a mysterious jump on the truck plates. Lately I've seen many BC, BD, and BE's out on the road. Then out of no where comes a BH. On the car side it's not abnormal to see a two letter jump because there are just so darn many cars (even in Texas!). Like just the other day a CY popped up before I had recorded CW. No biggie. I know the CW's are out there. I just haven't seen them yet.

Going back and looking at my notes about order (yes I keep notes).

• AV well before an AU.
• CF before a CE
• BV before BT, the BV had a guy looking at a map in a passenger seat. I can surmise it was an out of town car, possibly even a rental. In hind site this BV before a BT is even less interesting now that I'm sure there are no BU.

Unrelated note: In an effort to cross promote things I do I'm posting a link to my other site, geekwagon.net. Not that I think it will get any hits from here (or anywhere) I'm just throwing it out there. The subjects there are arguably less lame than this blog.

Worst blog ever

I only update this about once a month, and I missed last month. I'm not worried about it because there is a chance this blog could go down as the worst blog in history.

The other day I saw a CJ3-Z that was light. That tells me for sure the cut off was not at the CJ3/CJ4 barrier. Haven't seen enough plates to narrow it down any more, but it looks like the change took place somewhere between CJ3-Z and CJ3-S. Also, on the light and dark subject, I saw a truck plate with AW9 that was still dark.

Truck plates have been interesting. Looks like they are going to reuse all the B's for trucks, just using all numbers for the last four. For now they are easy to spot because of the lighter color. I fear when the tucks plates go past the CJ's it might get harder to differentiate the car and truck plates at a distance.

What's new?

BC that's what. It was also excluded from the original B's on the car plates. So was BE. I can guess BA, BC, and BE will be truck plates. If my guess is right about vowels being trucks, so will BU (which I also never saw on cars). It makes for an interesting bit of trivia, truck plates BC might be the only truck plate to not have a vowel in it.

With the revelation trucks are coming out as B+vowels now, I double checked the first truck I saw with a B plate (written about in a previous post). I was right, it was in deed a car plate with a BZ. I thought maybe it would have been the first BA I found.

I was thinking about this the other day too. If car plates are BB#-A123 format and truck plates are AA#-1234 format, they could theoretically reuse the first three letters. For example there could be a truck plate BB-1234 since all the car BB's have a letter followed by 3 numbers.

This just shows me I will have to pay more attention as this game goes on. It could get exceedingly complicated.

Update on the CJ Dilemma: CJ3 is dark, CJ4 is light. Haven't been able to narrow it down any farther than that due to lack of data. But this is good enough for my purposes.

A Discovery

I wouldn't have believed it if it wasn't sitting at the light in front of me. I got a good long look at a BA. A number I thought was already in circulation. But it was light in color, and it was marked Truck.

The early B's came out long before I started paying attention, so I never noticed there was no B-vowels like I noticed with the C's. Now that I look back at my list, I never saw a BU either. So it makes since to me that B-vowles and C-vowels are going to be truck plates like I predicted before I heard about a D. I never saw the D myself, I can only assume it was a B on a light colored plate, at a distance. An understandable mistake.

I was so excited about this I updated my table to the right.

The New Mystery

It's official, the DA's are out and they're on trucks.

The real mystery is, why are there no CA's or CE's? Will there be a CU? I was guessing they were saving the C-vowels for truck plates, but my guesses have been wrong in the past. Actually, I've been wrong on every guess so far with this plate business.

Greatest Thing

The greatest thing about this blog; I automatically win any "who's a bigger nerd" contest.

The CJ Dilemma

I recently wrote about the new lighter plates and how they started with CK. It was an incorrect assumption because now I've seen light colored CJ's and dark colored CJ's. Naturally, I have a desire to pin point what number of CJ this started. Here is what I've got so far.

CJ1 - dark
CJ2 - dark
CJ8 - light
CJ9 - light

So I'm guessing somewhere between 2 and 8 they started issuing lighter colored plates. I've never payed attention to the third character, I just always assumed they came out in order from 0 to 9. I hope paying special attention to CJ will give me some insight.

It's been a year?

It's is clear I am not good at updating my license plate blog, but who cares? No one is reading this anyway.

I have noticed the newer plates, starting with CK for cars and AY for trucks, look washed out. The backgrounds are significantly lighter then their predecessors. I can only assume this was done because the new plates are hard to read from a distance.

I actually noticed the lighter pictures on CL's first. There are a lot of CL's around school. CK's I saw for the first time today. Funny how that works. I surmise that different distribution points get different numbers and that's why sometimes we see an abundance of some letters over others. Occasionally this leads to observing plates out of order.

Also, today marks the first time I've ever seen a plate that starts with a B on a truck. The plate itself did not say truck, but it was one of the Home Depot rent me trucks. It was definitely a truck; 3/4 ton truck at that. Many SUV's and light trucks are questionable. I've seen both car and truck plates on just about everything that could remotely be classified as a truck. This marks the first time I've seen a car plate on something unquestionably a truck.

I look forward to finding a truck plate on a sedan.

This post also marks that it has been a year since I started observing Texas license plates. At first it was stupid and I kept it to myself. Then one day I got brave and told my girlfriend about it. She thought it was fun. Since then I've told a few more people and they all tell me what plates they've seen lately. I can only guess this nerdy past time is not as dull as I thought it would be.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me spot license plates!

No CA or CE?

The past few days I've noticed a plethora of C's emerging in the area. In fact I just saw a new one, CG a couple of days ago. Still no CA or CE, which got me thinking, maybe they are leaving out the vowels for the C's. Maybe that's what the Truck plates will use after they run out of A's.

Unfortunately, the next vowel used in license plates will be U (I and O are not used for the obvious reasons), so it will be a little while before CU could be around. Considering how long it's been since CA should have been around, and I've seen so many CB, CC, CD, CF, and now a CG, it is plausible they've skipped the vowels. Only time will tell.

None of this explains the lack of an AU. I know I have seen AA and AE, but they were out before I started keeping track. Which is why they are not on the list. There are less A's so there is a good chance I just haven't seen one yet. Once I start seeing more AV's and AW's then I'll start some AU conspiracy theories.

Added Tracker

I added a tracker in the right column today. It's just a simple html table, but I have to admit I never bothered to wrap my head around those until today. I found a real-time HTML editor that was useful in figuring it out; bookmarked that one for later too. Of course the W3C was the key to figuring out the syntax to make a table.

I know it's not pretty, but it is an important part of the site. Later I may change it up to be sortable. I hear there is a little javascript I can make that happen with.

Courtesy of Texas

I also added some rather lame art blatantly ripped it off this image. Some day I will do my best to make it pretty. I think it would be cool to incorporate the red squiggly on the upper right somewhere on the site too (what is that anyway?).

While coming up with the background image for the title I came up with a new title for the blog. It is now cleverly called "The Lone Star Plate Hunt".

After making the sad image with Microsoft Paint, I almost changed it to "Hunt the Lone Star Plate," but that would require a lot more effort. My MS Paint skills just aren't what they used to be.

What Counts?

The new Texas plates come in two variations, both with similar patterns. It took me some time to figure it out, but plates marked 'Truck' start with an 'A'. All other plates, I've decided to call them regular or car plates, started with a 'B'. Both types have a total of seven characters divided up into a 3-4 pattern. 

For example, truck plates are all an AB1-2345 pattern. Two letters and a number in the first part, then four numbers in the second part. They increase incrementally. The first plates were AA, then AB. Currently the highest I've seen is AV.

Car plates are very similar except they started with B. An example would be BA1-A234. Notice the letter in the second part of the plate number. Assuming 10 different numbers can be used (0-9) and 23 letters used from the alphabet, this gives cars significantly more plates.

For every BAx-xxxx there would be a total of 230,000 plates (10x23x10x10x10). On the truck plate side, for every AAx-xxxx it would be merely 100,000 plates (10x10x10x10x10). From my observations there are a lot more car plates than truck plates in Texas (amazing I know-but I'll get back to this in a later post).

It is the second letter of either plate that is most significant (to me anyway). So if the last truck plate I saw was AS, that means now I keep an eye out for anything higher. Presumably AT would come next, but this is not always true. Some letters are not used (another post topic). Sometimes you just see them out of order (yet another future post topic).

Now that all those details are out of the way, what counts? Like I said in the first post, I only count plates I've personally seen. This does not mean I discount when other people tell me about anything new. My girlfriend told me she saw an AS; even sent me a photo of it from her cell phone. Even though I had not seen it yet myself (don't count photo's either), her sighting confirmed the existence of AS.

Finally, we've established the particulars to how this plate hunting works. So where are we today? I plan to post a column on the side that shows the current plates spotted and the dates they were seen. But for now I'll update within this post.

Highest Car Plate

CF - October 3

Highest Truck Plate

AV - September 25

Blogging the Mundane

Admittedly, blogging about license plates is a boring idea.

Texas started issuing new license plates on November 1, 2009. I could not help but notice a pattern in the new plate numbers. I sincerely tried to ignore this patter, but the geek inside me would not let it simply be there. I threw a small spiral notepad and a pencil in my truck. Every time I saw a new set of numbers I wrote down the date and any other circumstances I felt were pertinent at the time.

Here I plan to share my plate tracking experience. It is sure to be the epitome of mundane. Regardless, I will persevere for a couple of personal reasons. First, it gives me a steady topic to practice writing. Like many others I've started several neglected blogs. Secondly, I find irrelevant data interesting in some context. The dates found in this blog are about as irrelevant as they can be because they are the dates I saw the plate. Not the date they were issued. Not the dates they stopped issuing. Simply the dates I saw them "in the wild". Some I see in an order that makes since. Others I missed until well after their order. I will explain the spotting and recording of plates in more detail in another post (probably the next post).