blathering about Puzzle Hunt a little, and some other stuff

Uh, if I put off writing an entry until I feel like I can properly write out Puzzle Hunt I will never write another LJ entry. I do promise more details soon, with pictures, which will probably crib from this post.

Anyway, Saturday morning I went to Microsoft and got there just in time for the opening presentation. I found Brian, Drew, Jason, and Matt easily enough, and I also ran into some other people I know, like Sheryl, and dleung8, and my friend Brian M, who I don't think I had seen since the last Puzzle Hunt 15 months ago. Talked to Kevin Babbitt for about two seconds as well. Didn't run into a bunch of people I usually see, sadly.

Our team this time was fearless leader Mike Janney, agh, garzahd, Jason Lucas, bpr, Steve Henry, Ajay Kang, Andy Rich, Jamie Eckman, Matt Travis, jeffford, and me. A pretty good gang all things considered -- we lost a few people who couldn't make it this year and/or were out of town and picked up a few people who were superstars from other teams, basically. And in other funny things, I think over half our team has first and last names which are both first names. But anyway.

And thus, we dug into the puzzles immediately and pretty much never stopped. I mean, we had momentum the entire time, everyone was pretty much always working on something. There were a lot of really nicely done puzzles in there, and a lot of pretty funny ones too. At my best count I put in significant contributions to 11 of the 42 puzzles in the hunt, and put in small contributions to some others. It was funny, the solving was going so smoothly there wasn't quite as much of the "I HATE this puzzle, does anyone want to swap?" stuff. We'd often have two people work on something -- I worked with Mike, Matt, and Brian a lot -- but most of them didn't require ninety people to complete. I don't know if the puzzles got easier or if our team has just gotten so much better over the years. I mean, we're still nowhere as good as ...cking Good Toast (heh heh), but I actually felt like we were really a top-ten team this time for real.

I even got to go on a few meta puzzles, including a cafeteria in Red West and a kitchen in building 4, which sucked, but I'll get to why in my actual detail post if I ever write it. I'll also explain the quinoa and the swimming gear. Maybe.

So yeah, we finished at 5:45am -- with all twelve of our team members there to see it. Craziness. A few of us stopped by to congratulate the team down the hall from us, who had finished 15 minutes before we did, and then packed up our conference room and went home.

(Funny part is -- A lot of us had brought a ton of food, and a lot of BREAKFAST FOOD FOR SUNDAY, which then became totally irrelevant :)

I got to sleep a bit after 7am, and I woke up at like... 3:30pm, with a text message on my phone from Drew saying board games were happening in the Building 40 cafeteria at 3pm. Let this be a hint to everyone reading: if you want me to be somewhere and you're not sure I'll be awake -- GIVE ME A CALL, DON'T SEND ME A TEXT MESSAGE, I'M NOT GOING TO WAKE UP. Anyway. So I went back to Microsoft, and by the time I made it to the cafeteria it was 5pm, and Brian, Jason, Drew, Matt, and Andy were finishing up a game of La Citta.

We went to the closing ceremonies, where we found out that 12 out of 76 teams finished all the puzzles. Also, we were disappointed to see that the top team -- which had a name we hadn't heard of before, "Death to Dr. Zero" -- turned out to ACTUALLY be the Staggering Geniuses in disguise. Aw.

In another bizarre event, there was this woman there with a really cute puppy -- which we'd noticed all weekend -- and so a bit before the actual ceremony thing starts, the puppy lady comes up to us, and is like "Hey, is your name Dianna?" and I'm like "Yeah, I'm Deanna," and she's like "Did you teach me at Governor's School?" And suddenly I'm like "HOLY FUCKING SHIT! MERRIE RINGEL! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?" That was a crazy coincidence -- so yeah, Meredith Ringel was one of my students during my first year as a CS TA at PGSS, in 1996, and I swear I hadn't actually seen her since then. She went off to Brown, then Stanford for grad school, where she played The Game and met a bunch of the SCRuBBers people -- one of the top teams in PH -- and then came to Seattle to work for MS and ended up on their team for PH. So wacky. I'm astounded she recognized me after like 11 years.

After dinner, a subset of our team -- Drew, Jason, Mike, me, Matt, Brian, Steve, and Steve's girlfriend Kim, ended up going to dinner at Firenze or whatever the place is called in Crossroads, an italian food place. It was a fun way to celebrate. Usually after closing ceremonies, all we want to do is go home and sleep, but see, this year was a little different :)

I came home and watched my doramas for the weekend, including the second episode of Yukie Nakama's Hellish Wedding, couldn't even make myself finish the entire thing, and just decided to completely give up on the series.

Unfortunately I couldn't get to sleep much. I think I first finally fell asleep at 3:30am, but I woke up at 5am with my arm hurting, and then fell asleep again, and woke up again at 6:30, and fell asleep again, and the next thing I knew, it was like... noon. Oops. So I didn't get to work today until like 1:30. But I did stay there until 8:15pm hacking on code. The good part is I feel really close to done on my project. The bad thing is I'm still not done.

I got a BBQ sandwich for lunch from this little place on Marion between 2nd and 3rd as I was walking up the hill. It was cheap, fast, and tasty -- but kind of messy. I didn't even try to eat it without a fork, because I like there to not be BBQ sauce all over my keyboard.

I sort of want to write a baseball-related mini-Puzzle Hunt, but I don't know how many people would be interested in it.

EDIT> Pictures from Puzzle Hunt 10 are here.