Tuesday, November 08

Life

Law Review

Pixy's Law of Editing

In any document preparation system, the ease of spotting errors is directly proportional to the difficulty of correcting them.

Thus if you are preparing a highschool newspaper using electric typewriters and actual cut-and-paste, you will notice immediately that you have used "affect" when you meant "effect", but will let it slide because it's too much effort to fix.

On the other hand, if you are using a million-dollar WYSIWYG prepress and workflow system, you will not notice that you have inserted the last three chapters of Lady Chatterley's Lover - upside down - into Introductory Linear Algebra until after 50,000 copies have been bound and shipped.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:29 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Though really this is just the point where the Law of Unintended Consequences intersects with the Law of Maximum Inconvenience.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 08 2005 09:53 AM (QriEg)

2 Welllll, it could have been worse - you could have inserted the last 3 chapters of Lady Chatterly into the Algebra text?! I tend to be optimistic. And who made the 'rule' that you have to hold the book the exact same way all the way through?

Posted by: nita at Tuesday, November 08 2005 10:51 AM (gm7Og)

3 So, ummmm, what are the odds of that? ; )

Posted by: Chrissy at Tuesday, November 08 2005 06:24 PM (zJsUT)

4 Never worked in a bookstore, have you? :-) It happens here at the Duck U. Bookstore at least once a semester... no, not Lady Chatterley, but upside-down chapters, missing chapters, WRONG chapters... My favorite one was when I was working at a normal retail bookstore: 30 copies, pages 100-122 blank (except for the page number) and bound in upside-down.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, November 08 2005 06:44 PM (+rGmJ)

5 So Pixi I'm afraid I may have used a pronoun of the incorrect gender when refering to you Friday. Sorry about that if I did. Stuff is screaming right along by the way good work.

Posted by: Howie at Friday, November 18 2005 10:50 AM (D3+20)

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