Absolute OpenBSD 2/e Haiku Contest Winners & status

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.

2 Replies to “Absolute OpenBSD 2/e Haiku Contest Winners & status”

  1. 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!

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