It was my last day at the Guardian, and as a leaving gift, Peter Martin, the tags editor, made me a tag cloud linking to all of the stories that I wrote in my three and a half years there. Steve Busfield, media and technology editor, gave me a piece of paper with just the code for the tag cloud and this simple bit of BASIC on it all on classic VT100 green text on a black screen.

10 PRINT “Kevin Anderson has left the building”
20 GOTO 10

“I’m told that you’ll know what it is,” Steve said.

Friend and colleague Simon Jeffery joked that it was a bit of a joke to print it out. Fortunately, Peter sent me the code so I didn’t have to type it all out.

It was a moving farewell not only to me but also to colleagues Bobbie Johnson (in absentia in San Francisco) Mercedes Bunz, Laura Scothern and Stephen Brooke from the Media Guardian and the technology desk. Thank you to everyone at the Guardian who I worked with over the last few years, with a special thanks to Steve and everyone else on the Media and Technology desk who welcomed me so warmly during my brief sojourn last year and who really made feel a part of the team.

UPDATE: I meant to mention that Peter made this lovely tag cloud which not only displays the tags but links to my articles on those topics using a service called Tagul. He used it to create a 2009 end of the year tag cloud of people in Guardian articles.