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MIT Mystery Hunt
is over as far as I'm concerned. I don't think this kind of event works very well for me. I think it works great as intended: a bunch of people actually in Boston who get together to solve puzzles and do a silly brainiac scavenger hunt.
For me, I joined a few of my Liboncatipu buddies (Andy, Jamie a little, Mike, Jeff but not Jonobie, Jen and Chris) who had teamed up with various other Microsoft Puzzle Hunt groups -- we mostly had people from the Silly Hat Brigade, who were organizing the effort, as well as some superstars from groups like the ScruBBers, and Toast and stuff like that. During the day, it was just 4 or 5 of us in a small conference room, but by the evening it had grown to a huge gathering of a bazillion people in two huge conference rooms, and was no longer a group I was comfortable with but was more like one or two people I knew and a lot of people I had just heard of or seen on stage at PH events, who probably wondered what the hell I was doing there.
I worked on a colors-wordfind problem for a while in the afternoon, with Andy and Derek. What sucks is that we did a fairly good job of getting through to the penultimate step, and THEN got totally truly stuck, so that was annoying. But at least that part felt a lot more like real Puzzle Hunt -- just a few random people in a room telling jokes and being dorky and working on solving stuff.
The thing is, basically, we had stuff set up in Google Spreadsheet and Google Wave to communicate between stuff in Boston and stuff in Redmond, but what kept happening is that the people in Boston would just kind of solve stuff ahead of us or over us and we would have no clue who was doing what at any given time. The first puzzle that I ACTUALLY helped solve was a transit map one, where you had to teleport between Boston and DC subway systems. We spent 20 minutes talking through the thing, solved it, only to find the group had already solved it, without telling anyone they were working on it.
This came to a head after dinner when Mike and I basically sat there for around 4-5 hours and managed to beat the crap out of a particular weird open/n-tris crossword puzzle. We were at the 95% solved point at 4am, after some REALLY brilliant twists on our part, and figured we just had a LITTLE bit more to go -- and then -- with NO prior knowledge that ANYONE ELSE was working on it -- suddenly out of nowhere, our team had a solution for it. There was NOTHING in wave and NOBODY had touched our spreadsheet, so WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK!? It really pissed me off.
So I made Mike drive me home, and now it's 6:30am and I should sleep, but I'm still feeling kinda angry. I don't think I should be angry at the event per se -- everyone knows what they're getting into, really -- but I just don't think this kind of thing (not many puzzles, but MANY PEOPLE, and a lot of coordination between places) works for me, is all. From what I saw of the puzzles they were really neat and interesting, and if I was on a smaller team and actually on location I bet I would have had a blast, really.
Oh yeah, so dinner was a mini-goodbye party for Jason, since he's moving to SF on Sunday to be with Drew. It was me and Mike and Andy and Jamie and Jonobie, and Arjun and Jen who I don't really know. We went to the Purple Cafe in Bellevue, where I had some fantastic sweet potato fries that came with a not-quite-fantastic sandwich. Most people drank wine and seemed pretty happy about that, though. The place seems nice enough but not really my kinda place... not bad per se, just that since I don't really drink, places that specialize in wine and cheese kind of are wasted on me. The atmosphere seems very classy while not being ridiculously expensive/upscale, we were sitting inbetween several huuuuuuge wine racks that stretched two floors up. But people kept coming in that looked like they had just walked off some MTV video shoot, the girls were wearing huge high heels and tight tank minidresses in the dead of winter and the guys had accompanying wear that I dunno how to describe; as a fashion it kind of struck me as "upscale pimp wear". Every time they walked by I did a double-take like "Am I in a nightclub or something?"
I also got to talk to Jason for a while afterwards at MS, and I should see him on Sunday too. It's kinda sad, really, though I mean, I can't ACTUALLY blame anyone for leaving Seattle.
For me, I joined a few of my Liboncatipu buddies (Andy, Jamie a little, Mike, Jeff but not Jonobie, Jen and Chris) who had teamed up with various other Microsoft Puzzle Hunt groups -- we mostly had people from the Silly Hat Brigade, who were organizing the effort, as well as some superstars from groups like the ScruBBers, and Toast and stuff like that. During the day, it was just 4 or 5 of us in a small conference room, but by the evening it had grown to a huge gathering of a bazillion people in two huge conference rooms, and was no longer a group I was comfortable with but was more like one or two people I knew and a lot of people I had just heard of or seen on stage at PH events, who probably wondered what the hell I was doing there.
I worked on a colors-wordfind problem for a while in the afternoon, with Andy and Derek. What sucks is that we did a fairly good job of getting through to the penultimate step, and THEN got totally truly stuck, so that was annoying. But at least that part felt a lot more like real Puzzle Hunt -- just a few random people in a room telling jokes and being dorky and working on solving stuff.
The thing is, basically, we had stuff set up in Google Spreadsheet and Google Wave to communicate between stuff in Boston and stuff in Redmond, but what kept happening is that the people in Boston would just kind of solve stuff ahead of us or over us and we would have no clue who was doing what at any given time. The first puzzle that I ACTUALLY helped solve was a transit map one, where you had to teleport between Boston and DC subway systems. We spent 20 minutes talking through the thing, solved it, only to find the group had already solved it, without telling anyone they were working on it.
This came to a head after dinner when Mike and I basically sat there for around 4-5 hours and managed to beat the crap out of a particular weird open/n-tris crossword puzzle. We were at the 95% solved point at 4am, after some REALLY brilliant twists on our part, and figured we just had a LITTLE bit more to go -- and then -- with NO prior knowledge that ANYONE ELSE was working on it -- suddenly out of nowhere, our team had a solution for it. There was NOTHING in wave and NOBODY had touched our spreadsheet, so WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK!? It really pissed me off.
So I made Mike drive me home, and now it's 6:30am and I should sleep, but I'm still feeling kinda angry. I don't think I should be angry at the event per se -- everyone knows what they're getting into, really -- but I just don't think this kind of thing (not many puzzles, but MANY PEOPLE, and a lot of coordination between places) works for me, is all. From what I saw of the puzzles they were really neat and interesting, and if I was on a smaller team and actually on location I bet I would have had a blast, really.
Oh yeah, so dinner was a mini-goodbye party for Jason, since he's moving to SF on Sunday to be with Drew. It was me and Mike and Andy and Jamie and Jonobie, and Arjun and Jen who I don't really know. We went to the Purple Cafe in Bellevue, where I had some fantastic sweet potato fries that came with a not-quite-fantastic sandwich. Most people drank wine and seemed pretty happy about that, though. The place seems nice enough but not really my kinda place... not bad per se, just that since I don't really drink, places that specialize in wine and cheese kind of are wasted on me. The atmosphere seems very classy while not being ridiculously expensive/upscale, we were sitting inbetween several huuuuuuge wine racks that stretched two floors up. But people kept coming in that looked like they had just walked off some MTV video shoot, the girls were wearing huge high heels and tight tank minidresses in the dead of winter and the guys had accompanying wear that I dunno how to describe; as a fashion it kind of struck me as "upscale pimp wear". Every time they walked by I did a double-take like "Am I in a nightclub or something?"
I also got to talk to Jason for a while afterwards at MS, and I should see him on Sunday too. It's kinda sad, really, though I mean, I can't ACTUALLY blame anyone for leaving Seattle.