I'm a software developer. That means I get to play with upcoming, interesting technology long before you "normal people" start using it. :-)
C# is a programming language from Microsoft, the primary language I use to write computer programs. The new version (v3) is quite interesting, merging data-centric queries and functional programming into something quite fantastic.
Long story short, I've had the inkling to play with some of the new technologies. Wes Dyer blogged on how to use C# 3 to grab an image and generated an ASCII image from it. (An ASCII image is an image made entirely of letters, numbers, and symbols.) The idea is nothing new, but the way it's done using some new C# 3 techniques is interesting
So I tried it out, tweaked some of the code, and voila, I've got image->ASCII image converter built.
I grabbed a black and white image of this lovely girl:
and turned it into an ASCII image using a console program written in C# 3:
Fun stuff! Thanks to Wes for the example code.