Circus Money Sudoku

First, a simple low-key happy 59th birthday to Walter Becker of Steely Dan. (I'm sure that alone makes his day reach an acceptable happiness level.)

Ironically and completely coincidentally (as far as I know) Ken Levine's blog post today is "Why wasn't BECKER a bigger hit?" No relevance to Walter, of course—the title character in the show was named John Becker—but still a nice little cosmic convergence on the Becker name for this particular date, I thought.
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Second, a while back I updated a couple of my old Excel files. I thought I'd re-post them. I recommend that folks right-click the links and choose "Save Target As..." to save the files to your own hard drives for future convenience. I believe the second one might actually have to be downloaded that way because it's a winzipped file that should then be unzipped for use. Also, keep in mind that both are hosted on a free geocities site, so there are potential bandwidth limitations when downloading. If you find one or both aren't downloading, just wait a few hours, then try again...

Random Steely Dan / Donald Fagen / Walter Becker song quotes (430K)—Generates random quotes from Steely Dan songs or the duo's solo works. Now includes lines from Becker's latest release, Circus Money! (Note: I use Excel 97 on an old, but standard PC platform. I'm not sure if the F9 key will work on other platforms or not. Also, you may get a warning about the file having been made using an old version of Excel, but that's only because, well, it's true. Don't worry about it.)

Sudoku (zipped to 842K from over 3.5M)—Of course you have to manually input different start grid number configurations on your own, but once you do that this file should auto-solve (via the "Solution" tab) all but the most truly difficult ("evil") sudokus. The one thing I've changed is that the "help" feature now gives mere pointers or hints. Previously, turning on the help grid option showed not only where blocks could only be particular numbers, but what those numbers actually were. Now I just highlight those blocks without actually showing the numbers. Sure, you can just try each number in turn in those blocks until you hit upon the correct one, but the intent is for the solver to visually examine the grid and figure out which number is the correct one. The idea is that doing so will eventually help the puzzler to recognize certain logic patterns that maybe they don't ordinarily see right off when first trying one's hand at sudoku.

On a personal note the Sudoku file required far more development time and effort (i.e. thought) way back when and is therefore the one I'm much more proud of, but I like both.