My new claim to fame

[ffutures]

I forgot to mention my new claim to fame - I had a letter published in the Evening Standard last night. Admittedly it isn't exactly of world-shattering importance:

Is the rotten printing of recent Sudoku puzzles in the Standard supposed to make it more challenging? I have poor sight and I am finding the current mix of fuzzy numbers and missing lines very difficult to solve.

They cut more than half the message, which originally went on to say

- not because the puzzles are any harder, but because it rapidly gives me a headache, and because the missing lines make it easy to put numbers in the wrong place. PLEASE fix it!

The good part is that they HAVE fixed it as of last night - my guess is that whoever sets the puzzles was scanning in an image that looked OK, but got resampled during the printing process and lost a lot of quality, they just needed to know about it to change the settings and fix it.

Comments

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

The Independent on Sunday used to have a column commenting on mistakes in the previous edition. One week the columnist stated that it's an old adage in the newspaper business that if you want to swell your postbag, make a mistake in the printing of the crossword, as they had done the week before. Ironically, they made a mistake with it that week as well.