While the rest of the country was busy watching Super Saturday and the British “great haul of China“, I joined 167 other scavengers solving cryptic clues, seeking out items and performing tasks all across Edinburgh for the Festival Scavenger Hunt. If you saw people running around the city carrying obscure items like kitchen sinks yesterday then it’s a fair bet that they were also taking part.
Unfortunately we didn’t win but we did have a lot of fun along the way.
People initially asked which charity the hunt was in aid of but were more curious when we explained what was actually going on. I’m looking forward to seeing what has been made of all the submissions for a week-long exhibition at the City Art Centre that starts tomorrow.
I’d like to say a big thank you to the following people and businesses who helped me out during the day: The Dress Fabric Shop, Twigs Florists, The Bruntsfield Hotel, Cockburns Delicatessen, Greggs Bakery, Witchery Tours and the friends I pestered with phone calls and text messages. Twitter proved useless yet again. Obviously thanks also go to the organisers, my team mates and Whitespace for entering the teams and allowing us to use the office as a base of operations.
A full list of the clues and their point value follow.
Edinburgh in August is a fantastic place to be. The Festival is in full swing, the sun doesn’t set until after 2100 and the pubs are open for longer. Okay, so the weather does demand that you equip yourself with an umbrella and sunglasses but spirits don’t appear to be dampened all that easily.
To many, comedy is what the Festival Fringe is all about and I can’t say that I’m all that different. I have been to see musicians, book launches, gallery openings and the odd bit of theatre but usually I’ll be laughing at Tommy Tiernan or someone similar.
However, for a bit of a change of tack, I think that I may have finally found a use for Twitter: I’m taking part in a scavenger hunt in-and-around Edinburgh in the morning, the fruits of which will be collated and presented in a week-long exhibition.
Keep an eye on my Twitter feed to see what I’m up to and looking for between 0900 and 1800 tomorrow.
Update 19/08/08
I think I may have found who may be responsible for Blockbuster going down the tubes. When your CEO is this out-of-touch this you should start worrying. I’m wondering the same thing as John Gruber: How does Jim Keyes still have a job?
I managed to hog most of the bandwidth in the office yesterday watching the BBC’s online stream of the Olympic opening ceremony at the Bird’s Nest and was suitably impressed. I’ve subscribed to the events schedule and again was blown away by the sheer number of events that are taking place.
I really enjoy the Olympics and am constantly amazed by the dedication of professional athletes. Until the Nerdlympics become popular I think that I will just have to enjoy watching from the comfort of the sofa.
I’m pretty sure that Team GB will achieve the modest medal target it set for itself but I don’t think that we’ll ever see the dizzy heights of 1908 as shown on this great interactive medal table from the New York Times that charts country performance since the inception of the modern Games back in 1896.
Let me clarify that. It’s nice to be thought of, most of the time. It depends on what the thoughts are I guess. For example, if someone is thinking of a way that they could annoy me from afar then I’d rather they thought about somebody else.
Case in point: my friend in Tokyo spotted this note at a temple in Tokyo. I’ve something of a penchant for cryptography so I found this incredibly frustrating. After some (okay, a lot of) research I thought it must be some form of Vigenere encryption and attempted to break it with some frequency analysis. Unfortunately I think that this was always doomed to end in failure as I suspect that the original message isn’t in English. The clue was the Roman numeral used to denote the month in the date which is apparently used in Poland, Serbia and Hungary. All I need to do now is seed the algorithm with letter frequencies from these and other languages.
It may have escaped your notice but today the Olympic Games kicked off (quite literally, with the women’s football) — a whole two days before the opening ceremony on Friday. Even at this late stage China has decided to go back on their pledge on free expression. Not content with quashing protests of those already in the country, China have revoked the visa of a gold-medal-winning Olympian. Joey Cheek is a speed skater who also co-founded Team Darfur.
I’m not for mixing sport and politics at all but given China’s human rights record this was pretty much inevitable.
On my travels I was always keeping an eye out for complimentary wireless Internet access points as I didn’t really feel like paying the exorbitant data fees. It would have cost me £7.50 per megabyte or, to put it another way, £45 to view this picture of Lake Wanaka at full-size, although this came down slightly (more so for within the EU) after the introduction of the 3G iPhone.
I enjoy working with like-minded people: the kind of petty pedant1 that immediately spots the flaws in statements like “only five people died during the construction of the Empire State Building” or spends time debating whether replay television channels should be named +1 or −1. I believe that it’s something inherent to jobs that involve some level of computer programming and the precision required. Computers are still pretty dumb but they make up for this in terms of sheer processing power. If you’re not precise when giving instructions then strange things happen.
It took me longer than I care to admit to remember how to concatenate strings in JavaScript last Monday morning but things started to come back to me pretty quickly and, by mid-afternoon, my muscle memory had kicked in to aid with passwords and the like. I may no longer remember how to work the toaster in the office but my OCD / kitchen Nazism is still as rampant as ever.
My first week back at the coal face was rounded off with a bit of excitement and a surprise visitor on Friday afternoon when a young seagull wandered into reception for a quick look around.
1 These same people will no doubt check my HTML source code to ensure that I’ve used the correct character at the end of this sentence.
It’s Sunday night and I have the mother of all Monday fears. It’ll be my first day back in the office tomorrow after taking three months off. Thanks to keeping this blog updated on my travels, my typing isn’t too bad but I think getting my coding back up to speed may prove to be more of an issue!
I’ve been meaning to sit down and attempt to kick-start my mind a little this weekend but I’ve been otherwise engaged with catch-up drinks, birthday celebrations, leaving parties and soaking up the early Festival atmosphere on the Royal Mile and Spiegeltent. It’s apparent that I have missed the brief respite granted to the denizens of Edinburgh that occurs after most of the students depart and before the tourists arrive en masse.
In between the aforementioned distractions I did manage to get my head around a lookaround-based regular expression that was bugging me before I went on my travels so the weekend wasn’t a complete write-off on the programming front.
So that’s that over and done with. I traveled westwards by train, plane and automobile for over 31,000 miles until I got back to where I started out from a few months ago. I beat Phileas Fogg by a few days. I’ve eaten subs, grinders and hoagies. I’ve renewed friendships and forged some new ones. I’ve experimented with facial hair, driven for the first time in a decade, jumped from a really high building, rolled down a steep hill in a ball, fell out of a perfectly fine airplane, shaved my head, met my baby niece and just about melted my credit card to boot.
