#0: Hello bobr

When Dennis Ritchie invented modern software along with Ken Thompson and wrote the immortal “C Programming Language” book with Brian Kernighan, their first pristine example was a program to display two words: “hello world!”

main() {
    printf(“hello world!”);
}

It struck me as a fun start to my blogging experiment, a 5-year mission to explore new worlds and share insights with you about what should be obvious but isn’t.

A word about the name. I am proud of my last name, Rosenschein, but you must admit that it’s tough to spell, unless you live in Vienna (Austria, not Virginia). In high school, 11 letters didn’t quite fit in the SAT forms. Israelis automatically insert a T after the SH sound, and Americans often leave out the S or C.

So, in a simplify-your-life moment, I bought a great four-letter domain: bobr.com. Now I’m @bobr on Twitter, bobr.tumblr.com, and you might guess my email, too. Call me Bob R. or the Yahoo-esque bobr (rhymes with flickr, tumblr, fluttr). Imagine my surprise when I received this email from one Alexey of Moscow. “You may want to be listed on our research site, the largest in Russia devoted to beavers. As you know, the Russian word for beaver is бобр.” [with the O pronounced like the AW in law, the R trilled as in Spanish — listen here] I declined Alexey’s kind offer, but now there are three ways to pronounce my name, probably more.

So hello to you from bobr and welcome to my blog. By all means please tweet, follow or otherwise share me. I look forward to hearing from you!