I offered a haiku contest for the new Absolute OpenBSD. Winners got their haiku in the book, credited to them, plus an ebook copy of the book, plus a physical copy if I get enough physical copies and few enough winners.
More people entered than I expected, a pleasant surprise. I appreciate everyone’s efforts.
The winners are:
Chapter 1:
Josh Grosse: “Mailing lists are rough / Homework is mandatory / Love it or leave it”
Chapter 3:
Josh again, with “Straightforward questions. / Will you take the default prompts? / Think before you choose”
Chapter 7:
Ludovic Simpson, with “the root of all evil/ is never far from your touch / sudo saves your life”
Chapter 12:
Justin Sherrill, with: “My tunnel is now up/ I can do IPv6 / Me and three others” (needed slight edit for syllable count)
Chapter 16:
Josh Grosse again, with “Working behind scenes / taking care of vital things / the daemon is here”
So, that’s three winners. I can swing three paper books.
I had a lot of competition for certain chapters, others less so. Sending a network chapter haiku meant you went up against everyone, where submitting a haiku on the system maintenance chapter means you only went up against me.
How did Josh get so many? Two ways. One, he submitted a haiku for every chapter. Two, I believe he was already familiar with haiku, and has read some of the classics. (Twitter doesn’t let me search old tweets easily, so I can’t be certain of that, but I’m pretty sure he’s the one I’m thinking of.) Josh actually inspired me to hold the contest with his Chapter 1 haiku.
So, now that the haiku are ready, where is the book?
Chapters 0-22 have gone through content editing. Two chapters remain.
Chapters 0-17 have gone through tech edit.
Chapters 0-14 have gone through copy edit.
Chapters 1-6 have come back to me from layout. I have initial galleys to correct. They look really really nice — NSP always does a fabulous job producing books.
The layout folks haven’t gotten the haiku yet, but needed to have something in that space. When I opened the draft I found:
Here, a placeholder
For a haiku still to come
Replace at pages.
The No Starch folks get it.
I didn’t see this until going through the PDF version from No Starch, today.
But it is actually my haiku on chapter 16. That *is* a great honor!