Hi, eyepopslikeamosquito (:

First and foremost, I'd like to thank you for your numerous writeups about golf. While I religiously upvoted each of them, I never took the time to actually write a meaningful comment. It's a shame, considering that those writeups are both interesting to read and insightful, and have on several occasions helped me when I was stuck on a hole.

One year ago, I wrote this obfu which makes use of uuencoding. Nine months ago (that's one month before your writeup), I submitted the shortest Perl solution to Guns and Zips, using another, much less efficient method of compression. Since then, I brought my solution down to 358 strokes.

You may think that I did this using pack u. But, oblivious to your writeup on the topic, I actually used a hand-crafted compression algorithm with about 50 characters of overhead. D'oh. When I stumbled upon Compression in Golf earlier today, I was flabbergasted. “How comes I never thought about using uuencoding in golf before?”

I'll see what I can do with pack u. In the meanwhile, I'd love to talk about golf with you. I would be honored if my solution to Guns and Zip inspired another one of your brilliant writeups. No, really, I mean it.

But not right now. Right now I'm going to bed. Yeah, it's late in my timezone. See ya (: