adventures in cubing

Against my better judgment — and fully anticipating ridicule, mockery, and outright bullying — we begin.  A blog is born.   It generally takes me over 100 hours to properly birth a blog.  I’m a perfectionist.  I fiddle with every pixel of spacing in CSS, get crazy with jquery and php switches, and tinker in Photoshop until my eyes glaze over.  Not this time.  This blog gestated for just over an hour.  Why the short shrift?  Mostly because I have time for this, and should be quartered by my bosses, wife, and children for even contemplating it.  But also because I’m not confident this will go anywhere.  So, a hosted blog, free theme, 20 lines of CSS, and we’re off….

The “this” for which I have not necessarily the blogging — although that is something that I certainly have little time for.  The “this” is cubing.  Or, not being a fan of gerrunds, Cubism.  I refer, of course, to the mind-bending, frustration-enhancing, marriage-ending, deceptively simple 3×3 multi-colored cube that most folks refer to as a Rubik’s Cube.  According to Wiki and other unverified reports, the Rubik’s Cube “is widely considered to be the world’s best-selling toy,” with over 300 million pieces sold since its unveiling in 1980.  That’s a lot!  I had one when I was kid.  I think we all did.  And I couldn’t solve it.  None of us could.  Indeed, it was the not-solving aspect that drove me purchase one for my three-year old six months ago.  That purchase was not one of those my-kid’s-a-genius gestures.  On the contrary, it was a recognition that he would never be able to solve it — but that he would spend untold hours in the trying.  It would keep him busy.  And busy is good when you’ve got a three-year-old.

But my strategy failed.  To be sure, he couldn’t solve it.  But he tired of it quickly, demanding that I actually engage with him.  And so I did.  The cube went into a drawer.

Then one Thanksgiving morning two months ago, the drawer needed cleaning, the cube surfaced, and, having the day off work, my idle mind got the best of me.  I wondered whether I could actually learn to solve the cube if I found a tutorial.  It took all of one youtube search to confirm my suspicion.  Tutorials abounded, many quite good.  I hunkered down, scrambeld cube in hand, pen and paper nearby.  An hour later, I emerged with a solved cube.  Triumph!

At that point, I abanoned all pretense of control — allowing my obsessive compulsive personality to take charge. Marinate for a long weekend, slow-cook for a month, and, voila, a blog. Why?, you ask….