My Strangest Work Yet...

This has got to be my strangest, geekiest work yet on cafepress.com: Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, ROT13-encrypted.

Yes, that's right. I took the entire text of A Tale of Two Cities and ROT13 encrypted it. Then I scanned the blank back of an old yearbook of mine and used it as the basis for the cover design.

I case you don't know what ROT13 encryption is, it's a very very weak encryption scheme that's really only good for allowing people who don't want to read something to avoid it. It's often used in usenet newsgroups. (Those groups that Google Groups & others repackage in a web interface - they're much better read with a real newsreader.) Both encryption & decryption is accomplished with the same algorithm: rotate each english alphabet letter 13 letters over, so that instead of ABCxyz you get NOPklm. All other characters are left as-is. I actually wrote my own utility program to do the conversions, txt file to txt file. (Yeah, I'm that geeky. Not geeky enough to buy and read a book like this, but enough to get a chuckle out of it - and I hope bigger geeks than me will do me one better and buy the thing.)

Now that I've done this one, it should be relatively easy to do others. The time-consuming part is proofreading the formatting. The cover design was quicker than I anticipated, once I got the blank cover scanned. I'm scrounging around my book collection for other blank-backed books, of course. Can't have them all green, can I?