Thursday, October 26, 2006

Formatting A Book Vs. Solving The Rubik's Cube

I was probably 14 when I saw my first Rubik's Cube. I was with my family, visiting another family whose kids were the right ages for my younger siblings, but the wrong ages for me.

Here was this messed-up cube. Here was bored little me.



Over the next hour and a half I solved exactly one layer. Try as I might, I could not get beyond that. But I couldn't stop. One unusual shuffle of these little blocks, and ... hey, that's new! Am I closer?

Of course, then my brother's playmate showed up, grabbed the thing from my hands and had it done in two minutes. "It's easy," he said. "You've just got to remember where the center pieces are."

Oh yeah. Sure.

So here I am, nearly 30 years later, tweaking this and that on my book format, pulling out my hair when faced with a change I could never have predicted. But I can't stop. My most recent hang-up? I spent most of yesterday and am beginning today with headers, footers and pagination.

Ah, well. Be assured the colours are slowly being shuffled into their correct order. The final layer is just about there.

3 comments:

dan said...

I always thought books should be numbered backwards... "how many pages do I have left."

Have fun! :)
pd

DarkoV said...

WP, Hope you're not working that Rubik's Cube of a book over to get to an ideal solution. We, your soon-to-be-avid book readers are looking for not an easy solution, but an interesting one. All of the colours don't match? Who has a perfect set of china, I say? Halloween is around this weekend's corner.

Please, no tricks.

Whisky Prajer said...

DV - "Halloween"? Yes, and I've got two little editors fond of costumes who never fail to remind me (first thing in the morning and last thing at night) that it's just about here.

DH - I'm starting to think book pages shouldn't be numbered at all...