I just learned Hexadecimal counting, and it looks sooooo hard, but once you get it it’s not!
oh well… just long division, over and over again until you wanna rip your hair out by the follicles…
ok, anyhow, gotta get back to school 
(God, I love taking the school’s computers and using them for private use… I just erase the history when done.)
You just have to learn the secret, come closer…
use your eight fingers (no thumbs) to count with. But think of them as bits and not digits.
OK, that is the secret to counting in hex. Now go out and use this knowledge only for good.
When you feel you are ready, I can teach you the Dark Art of converting quickly and easily between hex and binary. Astound your friends! Baffle your enemies! Pass your microprocessors course!
Counting in hex is easy, it’s just figuring out what number you’re actually up to when you stop that’s the tricky part. Try counting in base 1/3. 
Oh, and you haven’t had fun on school computers till you’ve played deathmatch Quake 2 over their network, during class too.
Wait 'til you try to do hexadecimal fractions and convert them to decimal. Fun fun fun!
Same thing really. I’m currently loving this evaluating floating point numbers stored in binary but written in hex I’ve had to be doing recently. Now that really is fun.
Anybody play Riven? The game uses a base 5 numbering system. I tried explaining it to my dad - he looked completely dumbfounded. “you mean you can count with something other than one to ten?”
The numbering system was the best puzzle in the game. I loved the little shark-thing game in the classroom. What a wonderful way to motivate kids to learn math–“Get it right or the shark-thing will eat you!”
Actually, I always used binary as my go between, and octal to convert to regular decimal numbers. Takes about 20 seconds to convert from hex to binary, then about the same amount to octal, then convert octal to decimal. Much easier than conveting from hex. (IMHO)
That’s the secret to counting in octal.. To count in hex you have to use all sixteen fingers.
Also, bits are binary digits not hex or octal digits.
Not true. In actuality you only need 4.
1 bit = base 2
2 bits = base 4
3 bits = base 8 (octal)
4 bits = base 16 (hex)
But since most computers use 8 bits to a byte, I learned to count with both hands, 8 fingers = 1 byte.
Lord have mercy, this is making me remember Chisenbok! Or Chisenbop, whatever it was called. If you remember it, fine. I don’t feel like explaining it!
Really? I normally go straight from hex (or anything) to decimal, since it’s straight multiply it out and add, but the other way I use binary as a go between. It’s much easier to work out if you need a 64 than to work out how many 16s you need.
Yeah, I was always good at converting to binary from hex and octal, and I found octal to be much easier to convert to decimal than hex, so I always went through binary to octal if I needed to convert to decimal. I liked octal because I knew what all the values were out to like 5 numbers, so all I’d do is add them up real quick…didn’t take me long at all.