For the last few years I have been spending some time each summer visiting the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. It’s great place, with lots of energy and very hard working and talented teachers and masters students.
The CDM folks generally put me up in room 404. It’s a beautiful suite, quiet and comfy and tucked away at the very end of a hallway.
I have always enjoyed the fact that my room number there is 404, because in computer lingo that number has special significance. It’s the HTML error code number returned when you try to surf to a web page that your browser cannot find.
In such cases, host sites have historically returned a variant on the message “Error 404: page not found” (some of them very creative). I love the idea that maybe I’ve been staying in a room that cannot be found.
And sure enough, I’ve never had a random person knocking on my door, bothering me or invading my privacy. Maybe the magic mojo of that room number has been protecting me.
It’s a little like having a superpower, except in this case the superpower works only in one place in Vancouver. I’ve sometimes thought how cool it would be if I could check into my “unfindable” room wherever I went.
Today I arrived in Paris for a short conference, and they handed me a room key for room 404 — a quiet room at the end of a hallway. Maybe this superpower is portable after all…
The game design capstone course in the University of Toronto’s computer science department had a course code of CSC404. If I’m remembering things right, it was chosen deliberately, because the professor who started the course didn’t know whether he was going to be able to continue it the following year (as it was kind of an experimental course at the time).
Nowadays, CSC404 is the biggest game design course at the U of T, with a huge cross-university student showcase at the end of each year. And yet it still kept the course code that it used when it was likely to vanish.