Defining Your Life

Masterchef Mark has one of those Facebooky things up at his place:

Find the nearest book.
Go to page 73, 2nd paragraph down, 3rd sentence WILL DEFINE YOUR LIFE

I love these things because I love the absurdity of things taken out of context. So...

Closest book was "COBOL For Beginners". Page 73 was a bullet-point list describing the features of the PERFORM keyword. No paragraphs, no bullet point had more than one sentence. Fail.

Next closest "book" was a printout of the United States Postal Service's "NCOALink Software Developer Guide". Page 73 has two charts describing how to properly use approved nicknames when doing an address lookup. Only one paragraph. Fail.

Next closest book is a reference manual. Pages are not numbered. Fail.

At which point I give up and conclude the obvious: my life is defined by reference manuals.

9 thoughts on “Defining Your Life”

  1. The Modesto Kid

    Closest book: Unicode Explained (O’Reilly). Third sentence on p. 73:

    Its content [i.e. the content of the sample text that you are putting together to test your font rendering capabilities] should depend on the nature of the real texts that will be used, but the following short sample text can be suitable as a starting point for typical non-specialized texts in English (see Table 2-6 at the end of this chapter for more specialized examples):

    The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.”You ‘quote’ inside quoted text this way—in U.S. style.”‘You “quote” inside quoted text this way—in British style.’His fiancée Martha visited Rhône.áà éè íì óò úù âêîôû æœ äëïöü ????? ????? åø

  2. The Modesto Kid

    Dude your commenting software fails the O’Reilly test for rendering Unicode fonts, specifically it does not understand vowels with macron or with caron. I hope this does not ruin your day.

  5. cleek

    FYI, the problem is that i installed WP using utc-8 as the database collation. that means Unicode chars get slaughtered on their way to storage. can’t be fixed without a complete re-install of WP and its DBs. not gonna happen.

  6. Platosearwax

    This is awesome. The nearest book to me happens to be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It would have been a manual of some sort at my computer desk but my wife had been looking at Hitchhikers and set it down on top. So, paging…and of course the second paragraph only has two sentences. So it is either the second sentence of that paragraph, which is this:

    “This is Zaphod Beeblebrox from Betelgeuse Five, you know, not bloody Martin Smith from Croydon.”

    Or it is the next sentence, which is this:

    “I don’t care,” said Arthur coldly.

    Either way, I think that’s a winner.

  8. Mr. Blandings

    “If a man seeks to design a better mousetrap, he is the soul of enterprise; if he seeks to design a better society he is a crackpot.”

    John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society & Other Writings 1952-1967.

Comments are closed.