Ok, it’s being done by many… the whole Nearest Book, Page 23, 5th Sentence thing, so here’s the instructions if you missed them, and mine:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.
The sentence in question, from The Perl Cookbook:
It removes the leading whitespace from the text of the here document.
Now this is tricky, because the nearest “book” would have probably been a PDF file on my Mac, as the keyboard and mouse are the closest things to me. Heck, even the hard drive is closer than a paper-based book. Of course by that notion, I suppose any electronic book could have been considered as close. Perhaps Lessig’s Free Culture should have been the book of choice, as it’s just a click away…
The whole exercise was also tricky because the book I chose contained a code sample, so I had to determine exactly what a “sentence” consisted of. I chose a string of words followed by a period, which when read seemed to make sense. This is somewhat fitting considering the book I chose. Of course it would have been more fitting if I had chosen the book under it, Mastering Regular Expressions which may have actually been nearer, but I didn’t measure, so who knows.
(Hmmm, I just realized, the nearest book is actually an old QuarkXPress manual that is under my monitor, which isn’t really very accessible. Since we’re all about accessibility, we won’t even think about using that book!)
Sheesh, do I make things complicated or what?