My definition of the word "soon"

OK, so my definition of the word "soon" might differ from everybody else's ... like by about a month. *sigh*. Never mind, all good rules were meant to be broken (even ones like the definitions for common words). The picture is of the Tux cake I made for Tahlia's birthday, which was on the 24th of February. The design was from the Australian Women's Weekly Kids' Birthday Cakes book (a copy of which every self-respecting Australian mother owns, of course!), and I used a Green's chocolate on chocolate cake mix - because I figure that when you're putting that much effort in to the look of the thing, you can cut corners on the actual substance. It took two big packets of cake mix and I had to bake it in a roasting pan to get it big enough. Even then, I had to turn poor Tux's toes in slightly to get them to fit.

One thing I found interesting, nowhere does the Women's Weekly credit the design to Larry Ewing (who drew Tux in an early edition of Gimp), or Linus Torvalds (who's fascination with penguins after being bitten by one at the Canberra Zoo was the basis for the Tux design, and who gave the final thumbs up) or Alan Cox (who made the initial suggestion for Tux on the Linux kernel mailing list), or James Hughes (who gave Tux his name). I guess some people take the liberties of the GPL just a mite too far.

A quick google will reveal that I'm not the first to blog about this, and I am under no expectation that I will be the last, although most that I found sledge the "Party Animals" book, rather than the "Kids' Birthday Cakes" book as the Tux cake (renamed the "Penguin Prince" and sporting a red bowtie) is featured on the front cover. While I fully agree with the sentiments of my fellows in the blogosphere, I can't help but muse on how this oversight came about.

I imagine a poor overworked test kitchen staffer, mixing up some cake batter - the fourteenth batch today - and swiping an errant hair behind her ear as she calls out "What's next? Which bloody cake are we making now? It'd better be a big one, I've got oodles of batter here and I'm not making an extra cake if I don't bloody havta!"

A harried, pimply work experience kid comes flying in and turns the pages in the draft recipe book frantically before raising his wavery voice, "Ah, um, we've run out of recipes Mildred! What should I do?"

Mildred doesn't look up, just keeps beating madly and says "Well use yer head, and make it quick! There must be an animal we ain't done yet. Hurry up, me arm's about to fall off, and I can feel the RSI building up in me elbow!"

The kid scratches his head and then, his eyes drifting over to the computer where the draft of the book is being written by another crazed staffer, recalls his IT teacher going on about Linux and open source and says, "I know! A penguin! Hold on, I'll have an image for you in a jiffy ... and it's open source, so we can use it!"


Okay, so maybe that's a little fanciful, and it pretty much assumes that there exists no Quality Control or proof reading process within the ACP books consortium (the publisher for all AWW titles), but the mind does boggle ...

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People who are blogging about Tux:
Dave Hall
The Thinkers' Podium

If you know of any other posts of interests, feel free to let me know :)

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