A Prompt Response
Today’s Prompt
What is your middle name? Does it hold any special significance?
My middle name is David.
I’m named after the oldest brothers of my parents, Robert Dearth on my mother’s side, and David Hope on my father’s side. I’m not a particularly sentimental person, so while those names have meaning to my parents, I’ve never reflected on that fact too much.
That said, there was a significant time period where I considered going by my middle name. My name has been a source of consternation for much of my life. There were many times in my childhood where we relocated, changing schools and homes, and any one of those presented an opportunity to make a change. Such things were not as prevalent or encouraged as they might be today, so I stuck it out.
I don’t like the nickname Bob. For those of you who don’t know who Bob Hope is, you might not find this relatable. But the sheer amount of Bob Hope jokes that plagued my youth still haunt me to this day. Jokes about USO tours and Brooke Shields and on and on and on. My wife can relate to a degree; her family name is Scully and Vin Scully provided similar, well, amusement I suppose. And I guess because of the famous name, shaking the nickname Bob was difficult.
I don’t particularly care for Robbie, or at least I didn’t once I hit my teen years. My uncle, one of the most important people in my life, settled for calling me Robe (short for Bathrobe) for some reason; I made the mistake of admitting that during a team event at work and that stuck for a bit. I’ve pretty much chosen Rob as my nickname since high school.
Generally I’m fine with Robert, there are many people I know who call me that.
People ignored my wishes, in fact often they still make the mistake of calling me Bob to this day. I remember a little league coach calling me out to my mother about how I ignored him when he called on me by the name Bob. She reminded him it wasn’t my name and suggested he make a change. Today I let it go, but I still do my best to make sure that my nickname is in use on things like my company’s directory and my LinkedIn profile.
At the end of the day, I don’t think of myself as a David or a Dave…so I’m glad I didn’t take that step.
This post is one of many in my responses to random prompts surfaced by the application that tracks my website statistics, as well as any others I encounter.
An Occasional Coding Exercise Leads To Puzzle Book Sales
There was a time back in my early Amazon career, when I was managing the Independent Publisher Portal, also known as Kindle Direct Publishing, that I wanted to end to end test the publishing process for print on demand. The challenge with doing so was that the publishing workflows were really good at recognizing duplicative content as part of its fraud detection. This made testing repeatedly close to impossible, because each test required a new, unique book.
I decided to pop open Visual Studio, fire up my rusty C# skill, leverage Microsoft Word’s XML based formatting, and write some code to automatically generate books. Because I wanted them to be legitimate, repeatable, and make it to the Amazon marketplace, I couldn’t just randomly generate text files.
So I wrote a program that automatically generated Sudoku puzzles. First, I wrote a randomizer that would generate a random 9×9 sudoku grid filled with a solved and valid result. Then I wrote a sudoku solver to validate that the puzzle in its final form had a solution.
I then decided I wanted to have three different levels of solvable sudokus, with about 30 of each in a book. So, for each level, I removed a certain number of random digits from the puzzle, one by one, until the solver determined that the puzzle was no longer solvable. I then stepped back to the last solvable version and marked that as a “hard” puzzle, added two more digits back for a “medium”, and then two more digits back for an “easy” puzzle.
With that code written, I went online and downloaded a free use sudoku puzzle image, and created a Word document template including the cover file. I saved that file so I could open it later, along with a few fields I could merge in, such as the volume number, as well as the colors for the cover so any books I created could be unique. With that, a few parameters could be passed in to my program, generate 60 puzzles, add them as pages to the Word document, and save out a new, unique puzzle book.
I was able to successfully test my publishing workflow. Ten of these puzzle books were published out to Amazon. They remain available for sale today, and I still occasionally sell one.
With that done, I decided to go back and write a different puzzle output, adding a dictionary integration and code that created word search puzzles. There are ten of those out at Amazon as well. It was a fun little project that took a bit of thinking to get through, and over the course of several years managed to pay for a couple of dinners.
A Prompt Response
Today’s Prompt
What is your favorite drink?
So, ordinarily I would say Diet Coke. In fact, one of my old peers used to tell me they often judged how well my day was going by how much (or how little) Diet Coke I had consumed that day.
I don’t like coffee, I don’t like tea, so my caffeine intake comes from Diet Coke. And I don’t even like the aroma of either coffee or tea. One of my early memories is getting up one night as a child, seeing a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid in the fridge, pouring a glass, taking a drink, and realizing way too late that it was actually Iced Tea. Haven’t had any since.
But I’m not sure that’s really the question here.
I’m not a big drinker, not by any stretch. I’ve got health issues that sort of encourage me (require me?) to avoid alcohol. I don’t like the taste of most alcohols, especially beer, which I find just awful. Even the non-alcoholic beers just don’t do it for me, although I did try Zima a bit here and there back in the day. And more often than not, I’m the one driving. Add it all up and I rarely if ever have a drink.
Many of my friends and colleagues are aware of this. Many more tried over the years to get me to have one here or there. But it remains rare: the last time I had one was a failed attempt in New Orleans earlier this year to order a beverage that the bartender got completely wrong, and was simply not tolerable.
That was a Fuzzy Navel.
Somehow, they left out the orange juice when they made the drink. Which is most of the goodness of the drink. I actually like the taste of a Fuzzy Navel. When I do drink, it’s for the taste more than the experience.
About 12 years ago, there was an engineering wide company meeting in Santa Barbara. My manager, who lived in Irvine, and I were good friends but rarely saw each other. After dinner, I made the mistake of letting him buy me a Fuzzy Navel…because everyone I knew there saw me with the drink, and then proceeded to repeatedly buy me ones for the remainder of the night, even occasionally upgrading to my second favorite drink, Double Kamikaze Shots. Then they followed me around the rest of the night to see what happened, including my mild-mannered QA tester who insisted they would outlast me.
Sadly for them, I don’t really get affected much by the alcohol personality-wise, I just get chill. As long as you ignore the 1am ping pong game where I told my QA tester I was going to unequivocally kick their butt.
So, yeah. Fuzzy Navels. Once about every 6-8 years.
This post is one of many in my responses to random prompts surfaced by the application that tracks my website statistics, as well as any others I encounter.
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 