puzzle hunt
so puzzle hunt ended well. we ended up in 11th place out of 51 teams. pretty good, especially considering that the top 5 is almost always the same teams.
we weren’t doing so hot around midnight, somewhere around 40, and between midnight and 5:30 or so we didn’t solve any puzzles. but then we started putting things together, and we got our second wind, and things began to work. we got up to 10th place, but in the last 20 minutes, the damned team Tiger Pit (my old team) jumped into 10th and pushed us to 11th.
I solved a couple puzzles myself. one was the music puzzle - we had a 8 or 9 minute mp3 made up of various song clips. the clips cut off in random places, and if you took the next word that was in the song (the word before being cut off), and took the first letter of each word, it spelled out “Cowboy Junkies Sun Comes Up Its BB”. Except those last two B’s both came from the word “blank.” The cowboy junkies have a song Sun Comes up it’s Tuesday Morning, so that was the answer.
The other puzzle I did was one where you had a sheet of papaer with a bunch of dotted lines on it, and some little tick marks evenly spaced along both of the sides of the paper. If you cut across where the tick marks were, stopping before you reached the end, you got a zigzagged piece of paper, which if you folded it correctly on the dotted lines, gave you something that looked like the letters AOLA.
Those two fit into one of the metapuzzles, where you had to take the stock symbols of 12 top NASDAQ companies and put them into a puzzle to figure something out. to figure out which ones, you had to first solve some other puzzles, like this music one (TUES) and the foldy one, (AOLA, which is AOL Latin America’s stock symbol).
There were some that were ridiculous, there was one that was both really hard, plus when they gave out hints, they were referring to an old version of a puzzle, so they cancelled that puzzle. Which meant that Alan spent about 6 or 8 hours screwing with a puzzle that turned out to be nothing. There was one that had people running around campus from place to place, which is fine, they always have some like that, except this one took over 2 hours of running around to solve. I think in all the guys had to go to 10 different locations. They spent more time driving than they did solving puzzles.
Pretty good fun, though in the middle you realize how much it sucks. But i’ll probably do it again next year cause i’ll forget how stupid and painful it was. Or i’ll hate myself and want to punish myself, and what better way to do that than to keep yourself awake for two days straight, in a microsoft conference room with a bunch of other guys. Especially when you’re sick.
And speaking of puzzle hunt, where the hell is my freaking syrup? I somehow lost my maple syrup, which is impressive, since the only two rooms in my apt. that it’s ever been are the kitchen and the living room (i never use my dining room). It’s not in the fridge or freezer, it didn’t fall of the shelf, i checked all the cabinets and cupboards (what’s the difference between cabinets and cupboards anyway?), it’s nowhere to be found! I think that damn syrup thievery ring struck at my place. Either that, or it fell behind my fridge, and will soon attract various animals to my apartment. So if i disappear in the near future, check for reports of a bear attack at a bellevue apartment in the local seattle news.
I WANT MY SYRUP!
March 23rd, 2004 at 11:18 am
Dang, yeah. It sounds like it might be more fun if they kept the puzzles but dropped the ‘no sleep’ thing. Like maybe just a few puzzles one evening, followed by pizza. And video games. Who’d say no to that?
That puzzle with the MP3 is really cool, though! Way to go w/ the pop culture knowledge!
March 23rd, 2004 at 11:43 am
I stole your syrup. You got a problem with that?