Interesting. I thought using single quotes meant you didn't have to escape special characters. Is this because the regex grabs the single quoted text and then interprets it as a normal (double-quoted) expression?
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Linux, sci-fi, and Nat Torkington, all at Penguicon 3.0
perl -e 'print(map(chr,(0x4a,0x41,0x50,0x48,0xa)))'