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.

1. Make a freestanding seriffed number one from cardboard, for one point.
2. One, two… not necessarily from a shoe.
3. Flat appendage growing from a bird’s skin.
4. Any found 2D circular object.
5. What do points mean? Prove your loyalty.
6. She sells…
7. Sir Henry Cole sent it first. Any old one will do.
8. For a tub, not a cone.
9. An airmail sticker from any country other than the UK.
10. Any old plant pot.
11. A Parkhouse. Wood. Don’t get hung up about it.
12. Masquerades as currency for kids. No notes.
13. A fortune cookie fortune.
14. UHT portion.
15. A piece of John Spilsbury. It’s just not cricket and we don’t need enlightenment.
16. Paint a face onto the head of a drawing pin.
17. Lepidoptera in a matchbox.
18. A cup of coffee.
19. Hamwi’s zalabia.
20. For an easy twenty points bring back five empty shoeboxes.
21. Change a spoon into a fork.
22. Given away so that when you write you read their name.
23. Any naturally occurring heart shape.
24. Make a maquette of George Meikle Kemp’s commemoration out of chip forks.
25. Anything inflatable but not a balloon.
26. Anything stuffed but not an olive.
27. Find an occurrance of the word ‘frog’ in any work of fiction written originally or translated into English, photocopy the page, highlight the word ‘frog’ and include a full bibliographic citation.
28. A snapshot of anyone standing next to a piper.
29. This propelled Erik Rotheim to fame.
30. A bound lock of ginger hair.
31. Any Accountant’s business card. It must state their profession.
32. Toad in the; Courtney Love; in one.
33. Inca left undiscovered.
34. Any piece of dolls house furniture.
35. National Museum Viking grave. Item 6. Anyone will do.
36. Gormley Field. One out of tin foil.
37. Sunnyside up or easy over.
38. A ‘white’ towel, tea towel or item of clothing that is no longer white because it has been washed in with coloured fabrics.
39. Joseph-Ignace and old ornament.
40. Witches’ Memorial. According to the sign what has the dual significance of evil and wisdom? Sculpt one from a candle.
41. In humans there are thirteen, divided into two groups; four fat soluble and nine water soluble. Bring one back in its supplementary form.
42. A price tag for an item costing 1.972308292331602² in pounds and pence.
43. Make a freestanding cardboard doll of Scotland’s First Minister, measuring at least 15 cm tall.
44. Ena Sharples wasn’t seen without one on top.
45. Every page is a coward; cut from rectangle to square.
46. OK, so we don’t need the canopic jars or the ushabtis, but you’re going to need the linen strips. Dolly will do.
47. An imitation or toy mobile phone.
48. Clean favourite with Blue Peter.
49. Escalator EAST TO EDINBURGH. Take away ‘bed’ and ‘tutors’. What are you left with?
50. The Salisbury Centre. Ask for Sarah.
51. A game of snooker or a unit of film. Gold coloured please.
52. Describe your journey to City Art Centre this morning using a minimum of 30 words cut out from a newspaper and glued to the back of any old postcard.
53. Don’t be a coward; pulled to make dreams come true.
54. A black and white photobooth portrait of a child.
55. Trample on four eyes.
56. Not cashew and lightning.
57. The People’s Story. What did the Joiners of Edinburgh carry in the Edinburgh Reform Jubilee Grand Procession on 10 August 1832? Make your own.
58. Ripped not shaved.
59. A corrugated cardboard model of Edinburgh Castle using a fruit box, the logo of which must be visible in the model.
60. Dance for All, St. Stephen Street. Ask for Julie.
61. Any action figure that is not Wonder Woman dressed as Wonder Woman.
62. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/410715/the_one_dollar_shirt/
63. Potato Tiggy-Winkle.
64. An original printed document from the year 19XX, with XX being your team number: i.e., team 1, 1901; team 2, 1902 etc.
65. 11:30 am PROMPT. Scotland’s Disgrace; Greek Tragedy.
66. George Washington’s were made from hippopotamus ivory and gold and were stolen from Smithsonian.
67. Kick it. No balls.
68. Great Junction Street and Ferry Road crossroads. Top Right. What is the woman in the green dress carrying in her crate? Get one.
69. Bake the letter in FESTIVAL SCAVENGERS that corresponds to your team number position in the alphabet.
70. Visit Priscilla’s. Ask for Dazglaz.
71. Not spice or magazine but toast.
72. You’re prosthetic. Normally cut off to spite a face.
73. Go to Benson & Forsyth’s roof and euroscope out the clue in the classroom window.
74. Decorate a fairy cake with the word WIN using at least 3 different edible substances.
75. 1.30 pm PROMPT. Crags Sports Centre.
76. Munich, Nice, Florence, Dunedin, San Diego, Xi’an, Kiev, Aalborg. What is missing? First syllable. A toy one will do.
77. Fowler, Baker Arrol. A postcard pre-dating 1950.
78. Knit the letters ‘FS’.
79. Digital age deception named after children’s handicraft. Make one.
80. Quick foot to 5 Marischal Place.
81. Ullus libri in contraho.
82. Lisa Gherardini. Paint your own; postcard size.
83. What did five schoolboys discover in a small carefully protected cave high on the slopes below the summit of Arthur’s Seat in 1836 (reported by The Scotsman on July 16 that year)? Make one of your own.
84. 7″ at 45. King sleeve.
85. 3pm PROMPT. The Kirk below the Castle.
86. Promenade with John. Doric, Ionic or Corinthian. What has the lion got in his hand? Make one out of cardboard.
87. A lipstick dick print.
88. Arbuthnott. The Chaos Clock. The Lightning King was already sitting on the shore. What had he made in front of him? Make your own.
89. Queen’s Drive. Routemaster. Green letter anagram.
90. Robert Louis Stevenson’s home in Heriot Row. Go to ‘A’ downstairs - not the main door.
91. Cole called for it in the middle of the night.
92. Witch transport.
93. A Polaroid photograph of a skip.
94. Show your pass for free entry. Xiao Xuan’an 2001 Zigui Hubei. Workers X X at demolition site. Produce your own. Contents unnecessary.
95. 4.30 pm PROMPT. Don’t be late for class. Leith Academy. Use the front door.
96. Any piece of folding furniture.
97. Employees on their way up the career.
98. Show your pass for free entry. Promotional material from the Young Bond Graphic Novel due out in Autumn 1008. First class stamps. What does the central one depict? A real one please.
99. Ric Ocasek + Jim Morrison. Forget the ’s’.
100. You’ve brought everything but; now that too.

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 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.

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.

Oh well, it’s not like I actually need to sleep.

I’m not for mixing sport and politics at all but given China’s human rights record this was pretty much inevitable.

Free wifi was fairly available in New York and over on the west coast of Canada but elsewhere was quite hard to find – even in San Francisco. Rumours circulated that Apple would introduce WiMAX support to the iPhone at Macworld to bring it inline with other portable devices.

Apart from the problem of not being ubiquitous, wifi has detractors who claim that there are health risks associated and more places than Sebastopol have backtracked on plans to roll out widespread publicly available municiple networks for this and other reasons.

Despite heavy investment from big names, providers in Australia have deemed WiMAX to be a “disaster”. Accordingly, Intel may be hedging their bets with some research into RCP. Other people (albeit those with vested interests) have predicted that mobile broadband will kill off wifi hot spots in the very near future.

In the UK in the early 1990s there was a mobile phone system of sorts in place from Hutchison Communications called Rabbit. This was the precursor hot spot version of mobile phones as we know them today and were very short-lived.

Regardless of which technology wins out, the investment in infrastructure required to bring around the end of hot spots and the emergence of an internationally agreed standard for a permanent high-speed connection is a good couple of years away yet.

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.

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.

Most importantly, I’ve finally relaxed properly. For the first week or so of touring famous landmarks I was seemingly surrounded by couples and acutely aware of being on my own. Despite what you may think, the trip wasn’t about finding myself. As Scott Ginsburg says, you never really find yourself - you create yourself. I soon realised that it was always going to be about becoming comfortable with who I am.

It doesn’t really matter where you go, there’s no place like home as Dorothy Gale discovered. I’ve missed my slippers, my own bed, Haddock and chips, a decent cup of tea, unmetered Internet access and orderly queues. I missed randomly meeting friends in the street and changing my plans for the day. I’m no longer worrying if the local flora and fauna are going to do me harm. I enjoy tax-inclusive prices in a currency that I am familiar with. I’ve missed the law’s trust in my ability to cross the street and when doing so, doing so with impunity.

“I left my sandals in Rotorua” doesn’t have quite the same romanticism as having left my heart in San Francisco but it gives me an excuse to return one day. Admittedly, a very feeble excuse but an excuse nevertheless.

Departure from Tokyo was delayed 45 minutes after a plane suffered a blown tyre upon landing. It gave me some extra time to stew in my bad mood. The reason? Virgin Atlantic wanted to charge me £75 for an exit seat. While every other airline practically fell over themselves to offer me some extra legroom, Virgin saw this as an opportunity to profit and effectively penalise me simply for being tall. I refused to pay as a point of principle and ended up folding myself into a normal window seat.

Even still, apparently I was asleep and snoring within minutes of taking off. I managed to squeeze five films in between further power naps: Son of Rambow, American Gangster, Charlie Wilson’s War, Vantage Point and Cloverfield.

I landed back in a grey and chilly UK at Heathrow (terminal three) and faced an hours wait for my bag. Of course, nobody told us what was wrong or how long we’d be milling around. While I waited I found the nearest power point and charged my phone. Once I was reunited with everything I jumped on the Heathrow Express and - after a quick trip on the tube - was soon on my way to Colchester for an overnight stay to meet my mum, sister-in-law and my two month old niece. The drive back to Halifax with my mum on the Sunday was largely uneventful apart from a flyby of vintage planes while we drove past Duxford.

A week later, after catching up with friends and family back in Halifax, I was on the train again and heading north back to Edinburgh. I have another week to remember where the office is, get used to early mornings before I start work again and return to some semblance of normality.

I’ll be using the time to visit relatives and catch up with friends before heading back to Edinburgh so blog posts will be far less frequent than of late. I’ll be back with my thoughts and reminiscings from the last few months soon though!

Welcome to Japan: land of contradictions. It was supposed to be the rainy season while I was here but I didn’t see a drop of rain all week. I also didn’t experience an earthquake which I’m delighted about.

Here you can still smoke in restaurants but signs try to dissuade you from smoking while you are walking down the street.

I learned that those masks you see people wearing aren’t due to worries over pollution. They’ve for combating the spread of germs. Specifically, your germs. You know, so if you’re ill you can still go into the office and not contaminate anybody else. Surely, any culture that has a specific word set aside for death from overwork can’t be all that healthy. On the other hand, in the longevity stakes, Australia (even with its new-found fattest nation status) is number two to Japan.

It does kind of make me wonder what age people would live to here if everybody did suddenly stop smoking.

Setting my timezone used to be a problem. No matter what I set it to, when I went back to the homescreen my timezone would revert to London. A full restore the other week fixed this issue but others remained.

Whenever my headphones were yanked out the volume slider would move down substantially. When I plugged back in, the slider stayed where is was but the volume didn’t change accordingly. This still doesn’t seem to but it is nowhere near as bad it was.

The fact that anything stored in the memory of the calculator was wiped if you quit the application. However, the result of the last calculation was still on the display when you went back to the calculator. This has now been fixed and in we get a scientific calculator when the iPhone is held in landscape mode. The calculator buttons also now click when pressed.

The calendars are no longer all lumped together as one. You can choose which ones to display and there is some colour-coding to help you differentiate between events in different calendars.

My contacts that I had marked as a favourite, oft-called number have disappeared but the contacts themselves are still there. Nothing major involved in getting them back as they were.

Alarms for the working week, weekend and occasional alarms used to be listed in the order that I added them but now seem to be listed in chronological order. I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

The airplane symbol now actually flies in and out when the flight mode status is toggled on and off. Nothing gratuitous but I thought it was a nice touch.

I then went and grabbed a few of the free applications from the AppStore (NetNewsWire, Facebook, VoiceNotes, Light and Remote) and also purchased a copy of Super Monkey Ball which may prove to be a mistake if I ever want to get anything done. It is very addictive. NetNewsWire is great and has replaced the iPhone formatted webpage on my home screen. Unlike the Facebook application with does most things that the iPhone did apart from letting me see my wall. On the other hand it does feature the chat capability.

The best application for me though is the much-rumoured iTunes / Apple TV remote. It is simply awesome. Could this be the thing behind the mysterious comments from Steve Jobs four years ago when Apple introduced the Airport Express and AirTunes and Walt Mossberg complained that he would have to get up to play a track and asked how he could control his music from another room.

“Wait and see” answered Jobs with a wry smile.

I have never found the EDGE (2G) speeds to be all that crippling to be honest. Besides, like most people with an iPhone, I use the wifi connection a lot. I’m usually at home, in the office or within range of a wifi hotspot from The Cloud or the newly announced partnership with BT Openzone.

That’s the new stuff on the hardware front far as I can tell apart from a crappier back to allow the GPS signal to be of any use. No new camera (optic or sensor), speaker, microphone or chipset. There will need to be something pretty awesome to make me upgrade to the next version too - whenever that may come be pass.

After taking some photographs in Wadakura Fountain Park, I walked along past Nijibashi Bridge and aimed for Tokyo Tower. I’ve noticed that it’s quite tricky when you’re trying to find a particular tall building or structure in the immediate vicinity and you’re surrounded by other tall buildings or structures. I can testify to the fact that the area around Otago Green Hills boasts a couple of shrines and a Buddhist Temple that are worth a gander. I also chanced upon the NHK Broadcast Museum and enjoyed most of it despite there being next-to-nothing translated into English. Yes, I do realise that I am in Japan but I guess my expectations had been raised by the Edo-Tokyo Musuem yesterday. I say that I “enjoyed most of it” because for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, they were showing the ‘highlights’ of Argentina vs. England from the 1998 World Cup. I felt obliged to I had to watch it for some masochistic reason.

Eventually I found Tokyo Tower and purchased a ticket for the main observation deck - a mere 150 meters up. Allegedly, you can see Mount Fuji, 97km from there on a clear day but I’m not sure if there is such a thing with the pollution haze. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the tower and it has been the tallest self-supporting steel structure in the world for all of this time. It’s also the only place in Tokyo that I’ve found that sells postcards.

Once I descended and found a nearby (not necessarily the nearest) Metro station, I made my way to Yoyogi and Shinjuku for a wander. I was aiming to be at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office buildings a little before dusk in order to catch the city in day and night. As it was, I arrived a little early. The North observatory is open until 2300 and in a little under a minute in the elevator, I was on floor 45 and 202 meters high. I had some time to waste so I had a good look around the toy and souvenir shops while watching the cityscape graduate from light to dark. It really is a beautiful sight and once night falls the cafe becomes a piano bar to add to the atmosphere.

I started off for home via the bright lights and shops of Ginza for something to eat before boarding the final subway train of the day. I couldn’t believe how busy it was. It was well past 2100 and yet the carriages were packed full enough to rival anything I’ve seen when I’ve had the occasional misfortune to experience rush hour on the London Underground.

Today I met up with a friend and his mum who is over visiting too. After wandering through the gardens of the Imperial Palace this morning and having a sushi lunch on the grass, we tried to go to the Sumo Museum but it’s closed for the week unfortunately. In contrast to the wrestlers themselves it’s very small so it was no great loss. We headed to the nearby Edo-Tokyo Museum as planned. About halfway through the tour a petite Indonesian girl came up and asked me if she could have her photo taken with me purely because I was so tall.

We finished off the day with a bite to eat in Andy’s Shin Hinomoto. I’m not the biggest fan of raw fish. In fact I’m with the school of thought that suggests an alternative name for sushi: “bait”. Even still, the food was very nice. The place was really busy (I’m told that this is as per usual) but we managed to squeeze even though we hadn’t booked. I would suggest you do book if you ever want to go there.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring the streets of Asakusa and had to take in Sensō-ji while I’m here. There has been a scaffolding forest growing around the area around the temple over the past few days. I found out today that this is for the Hozuki Market where 600,000 people are expected today and tomorrow. Apparently praying here on July 10 is the equivalent of praying for 46,000 days.

You can see the attraction.

I only realised recently - to my horror - that people born in 1990 are of legal drinking age (in the UK at least). There’s only seven years age difference between my brother and me but there are a few things I mention that he refuses to believe ever happened.

Remembering the following things actually make me start to feel old:

• Only having three channels of television and the stations closed down overnight after playing the national anthem.
• Weathermen physically sticking symbols on to a board shaped like the UK.
• Half penny coins.
• Can ring pulls that actually detached.
• Getting change from a pound note when going to the cinema - and having a snack.
• Being able to smoke anywhere apart from the bottom deck of the bus.

I’m wondering what state the tram work in Edinburgh is at. If I’ve ranted about this to you before then I apologise but an experience I had on the tram in Melbourne last week has rekindled my annoyance.

The City of Leeds has a comparable sized population to Edinburgh of just under 450,000. Trams may have an advantage of a greater capacity that would be better suited for cities with a population of over a million. Leeds binned plans for a “Supertram” in favour of a trolleybus network after being denied funding by the English Department for Transport.

When I left the Edinburgh project had already gone over-budget and traders (who have received no reduction to their rates) were starting to feel the pinch as people stayed away from the city center chaos in their droves. The sheer cost and delay in having to uproot the various utility pipes in order to lay the tram tracks is one thing that bothers me.

On my way into Melbourne I was delayed for 30 minutes as the train level-crossing gates were stuck down and, being a tram, we couldn’t go around them (safely marshaled by transport officials) like every other vehicle on the road. This inflexability is my biggest annoyance with trams. All it takes is a single obstacle to well-and-truly hose things up for the entire line. I was bored enough to notice that Yarra Trams backwards is “Smart Array”. Smart my arse.

Trolleybuses can be fitted with an auxiliary battery (which can be charged by regenerative braking) that is able to take over the propulsion for short distances, say when there’s an obstacle in the way or if the trolleybus is required to switch lines.

I think that the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Edinburgh project will eventually run to could have been spent better elsewhere in Scotland: various roads like the A92 need upgrading for example.

Trams died off for a reason. It’s called progress. I can only think that Edinburgh went for the tram option as a pure and simple status symbol for the capital. Trams simply don’t have an advantage over a trolleybus for anything tangible.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle when trying to check in as Air New Zealand managed to somehow mess things up so that Singapore Airlines couldn’t actually find me. Eventually everything was sorted out and I had my exit seat on the flight to Singapore. Unfortunately it was next to a guy who must have been about 25 stone in weight so I didn’t have all that much room after all.

After wasting a couple of hours at Singapore airport (eating, drinking and laughing at a crashed Windows-based display screen) I boarded the connecting flight to Tokyo and was a little surprised to find myself on an Airbus A380. I’m not really a plane spotter but this thing is simply awesome in it’s hugeness (or huge in it’s awesomeness, take your pick). Take off and landing were amazingly smooth - it’s a shame that the rest of the flight was spoiled by turbulence. Inflight entertainment¹ and seatback screens were great and had USB and CAT5 ports and even a coaxial jack. The seats were a good deal wider than any other plane and I thought that there was even enough leg room until the girl in front of me reclined her seat and crushed my kneecaps about 30 minutes after I finally fell asleep. Yes, the mix up when checking in at Melbourne had resulted in me not getting my beloved exit seat on this flight. I think I just about managed to contain my rage - I was way too tired.

The best thing about this flight however was not being treated like a suspected terrorist. We actually got metal cutlery. Even a proper knife! I was almost speechless. On the flight from Melbourne to Singapore we had metal cutlery too but unbelievably had to make do with a plastic knife. The whole idea of foiling an attack this way is ludicrous. A pencil will make an adequate weapon for goodness sake and nobody has said anything about me taking my keys in my carry on luggage.

We landed at Narita just before 0800 and it was already 24° Celcius. Once off the plane there was a crush of people trying to take pictures of it. I’m always somewhat wary of taking pictures in an airport myself so I just made tracks to immigration, baggage reclaim, customs and the ATM before sweating my way to the air conditioned relief of the train.

I’m staying in Asakusa, at the center of shitamachi which isn’t as bad as it sounds and is actually the historical area of Tokyo. An early night tonight I think and then checking out some of the recommendations of the friendly train passengers who started chatting to me and maybe also doing some exploring of my own.

¹ Named “KrisWorld” apparently, which is based on Red Hat Linux. There was a glitch that caused a reboot just after landing for some reason which confused the Bejeebus out of the kid next to me.