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Once we had all the movies, we noticed that they were all from around the 70s-80s, so we looked up what years they were released:

Animal House – 1978
Apocalypse Now – 1979
Blues Brothers – 1980
Odd Couple – 1968
Breakfast Club – 1985
Blood Simple – 1984

Taking the 2-digit year, we converted to the equivalent ASCII character, unscrambled the letters to get: DUPONT. Took the metro to the Dupont station for our next clue.

I’m giving away most of the work here, so only read the rest of this if you want help.

Time to slow things down a bit. There’s no need for constant motion, so take as long as you need to get a clear picture of what we’re telling you. Only by putting things in the right context will they make sense. Then you’ll see that our clues really are pretty simple; hopefully your blood pressure won’t stay so high all day! All we are looking to do here is broaden your horizons. Sometimes you know more than you think, it might all just be backwards in your head. It really only takes a couple insights, so we thought we’d give you some words of advice. Always take note of what is odd. There is no reason to make things harder than they have to be. Be patient with your brothers in arms — everyone gets the blues from time to time — and they will be patient with you. The game is all about staying calm. Now and again it might feel like the apocalypse, but it never is. We promise you’ll find a way through it all if you stick together. Think of it like building a house. Each of you must play your part and support one another without reverting to your inner animal. And there’s one easy way to avoid that. We don’t mean to club you over the head with it, but what have we always said is the most important thing? Breakfast.

We spent close to 2 hours in the lower level of Metro Center working on this clue. I think if we had just taken the penalty for a clue earlier, we could’ve gotten to another puzzle. Oh well. We totally earned this puzzle.

Time to slow things down a bit. There’s no need for constant motion, so take as long as you need to get a clear picture of what we’re telling you. Only by putting things in the right context will they make sense. Then you’ll see that our clues really are pretty simple; hopefully your blood pressure won’t stay so high all day! All we are looking to do here is broaden your horizons. Sometimes you know more than you think, it might all just be backwards in your head. It really only takes a couple insights, so we thought we’d give you some words of advice. Always take note of what is odd. There is no reason to make things harder than they have to be. Be patient with your brothers in arms — everyone gets the blues from time to time — and they will be patient with you. The game is all about staying calm. Now and again it might feel like the apocalypse, but it never is. We promise you’ll find a way through it all if you stick together. Think of it like building a house. Each of you must play your part and support one another without reverting to your inner animal. And there’s one easy way to avoid that. We don’t mean to club you over the head with it, but what have we always said is the most important thing? Breakfast.

I’ll post up a hint at noon in case you’re stuck.

This first puzzle was pretty straightforward, just a little tedious with the math. Solve the first set of equations to find the number of passengers departing the train at the last stop:

f = 12
g = 17
h = 3
i = 4
j = 3

Total passengers: 9.

The second train, we solve for the number of original passengers (n) when the man boards:

n – c + 2a – b + 3c – 2b + b – 2a + a – 2c + 2b – a = 6
n + a(2 – 2 + 1 – 1) + b(-1 – 2 + 1 + 2) + c(-1 + 3 – 2) = 6
n = 6.

Knowing the solutions are 9 and 6, we head to the metro station where one might transfer from Glenmont to New Carrollton: Metro Center.

Easy, right? Heh. It took us over an hour to get to the point where enough teams hadn’t solved it to figure out that one of the equations was written wrong. We then wandered around the metro station looking for the purple-visored fellow for our next clue.

Ian, Mindless, Elessara, and I got together a couple weekends ago for a puzzle race put together by a friend of a friend of Mindless. After our experiences with the Post Hunt, we went in with pretty low expectations for ourselves, but thought it would at least be entertaining.

The organizers expected that we would have no problem finishing by 6pm (with a 10am start). An hour into the first [time-sensitive] puzzle, we discovered there was an error in the solution. This was when we started to doubt we would finish on schedule…

I’ll be posting each puzzle separately with the solution in a different entry. This is Main Clue #1 (corrected; ignore negative people (as a general life philosophy, but also when calculating the number of people in these problems)):

A man with a purple visor boards an empty train with 3 other people. To quell the boredom of his commute, the man decides to count how many passengers get on and off the train at each stop. Unsurprisingly, no one departs at the first station, while f/2 + 2g people climb aboard. At the next stop, 3h individuals disembark as 5i+14j new people rush toward the newly vacant seats. Curiously, at station three, no one gets off once again, and f+2i pack themselves onto the train. The man, wondering why no one seems to work near the third stop, nearly misses the h+j people who hop off at the next platform. Grateful no one boarded to take their place, he notes the 2fg/i people getting off at the penultimate stop. Finally, he and the remaining passengers reach the terminus and disembark.

Silently cursing his hometown’s circuitous public transport routes, the man runs to an adjacent platform and slides through the closing doors of another train just in time. Before he can catch his breath and count how many other people are on the train, the doors open again, and c people get off, replaced by 2a new faces. The man finds a seat and tallies the next several stations’ traffic: b off, 3c on, 2b off, b on and 2a off, a on and 2c off, 2b on and a off. At the end of the line, the man and the remaining five riders disembark and exit the station. As he walks to work, the man calculates how many people were initially on the train.

There are 6 marbles in a bag: 2 black, 3 white, and 1 red. If you reach in and pull 2 marbles out at the same time, p is the probability that you get exactly one black marble.

0: Departing Franconia-Springfield 10:22am
1: Departing Greenbelt 10:30am
2: Departing Largo Town Center 10:35am
3: Departing Huntington 10:37am
4: Departing Shady Grove 10:24am
5: Departing Branch Ave 10:38am
6: Departing New Carrollton 10:36am
7: Departing Fort Totten 10:42am
8: Departing Vienna/Fairfax/GMU 10:23am
9: Departing Glenmont 10:27am

Ian bought MarioKart for me this weekend! And then we spent about 15 hours playing… stopping only long enough to go to his parents’ house for Gilmore night. We need to get a second wheel. I didn’t think it would make much difference, but I played once without the wheel and I kept forgetting to push the button to power slide. Not good enough.

Other big news: Sonny’s back in the country! He’ll be back in the area toward the end of the week, so I expect we’ll have a lot of family stuff going on this weekend. Maybe some GTC and karaoke? Just a guess.

So… I thought after I took the PE exam, I would have lots of free time to blog again, but as it turns out, I have lots of time to go out and do stuff again. I’ve been to a couple wine tastings at The Curious Grape in Shirlington with some of my friends from the Old Job. I finished my volunteer gig with the Higher Achievement Program. I spent a day with some high school kids playing with robots in a pool (SeaPerch). Caught up with some college friends who have been in town for training, and as a result also got to see some of my friends in the area that I don’t do a good enough job keeping up with.

I was up in Annapolis for the Naval Academy design presentations again. And I got out of there just in time to make it over to the sailing store to buy some sailcloth for the bag that I keep trying to convince myself I’m making. They were super nice and helpful too. So, I need to get some zippers, thread, and needles, but otherwise, I’m all set on material.

I’ve been talked into doing a thesis for my masters, so I might finish before 2011… Hopefully. I need to come up with an idea and start doing some research on it, but otherwise, this will be a good fill-in for the semesters when I don’t have any classes available to take. For instance, next semester… the class I need to re-take from last fall isn’t offered again until 2009. So, I’m signed up for a 2-semester design class, which will be very similar to the senior design project I did for undergrad, just a different project/group. But after that, there are only 2 other courses I need to take, which are offered every 2 years.

One of my Flickr pictures of Boston Beer Works from 2004 got posted to an online map guide.

I watched Risky Business for the first time; thought it was dumb. Can someone explain the significance of this movie to me? He made poor decisions and got away with it only because the guy he pissed off was just as dumb as he was. Why is this a good movie?

Ok, need to get back to the ‘Kart. I’ve unlocked all the 50cc and 100cc. I am sooo addicted.

Must… stop…

Need sleep.

Hellllpppp meee.

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I quit Tetris cold turkey after spending a week playing one game. Now, I only play socially, when I’m out or in a group setting. I try not to play when I’m at home alone.

Then yesterday, I had this awesome idea to crochet a Tetris scarf. I started mapping out the pattern on the way home (on the bus; Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do this while driving) and realized that I had no idea what color the pieces are. I was fairly confident that the screen is 10 blocks wide, but had no idea what colors were involved. So, I had to play and find out. Sure, I could’ve just looked it up on the internets, but my DS was right there

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So, I started playing…

I’m out of practice. The computer beat me on Level 4. It took me at least a dozen tries before I could win Level 4 consistently enough that I would try Level 5. I finally won 2 in a row and turned it off. I don’t have time to get addicted to this again. I’m very busy!download Ruthless People

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Uf… Eleven and a half hour day today. I can’t even complain though… NewGirl got there earlier than me and was still there when I left. I figured I could at least come home and take my pants off before working some more.

I decided I wanted something mindless after watching a little TV. It hasn’t been as engaging lately as it used to be. I probably only watch 1 show a night lately (except for Mondays, which are *awesome*). So, I checked out Second Life. I’ve had a couple people ask if I played. Obviously, people who don’t know me very well. ;)

It sounded like my kind of thing though… Animal Crossing meets The Sims or something. Anyway, I played for like half an hour and I’m bored out of my mind. Mindless, though. I’ll grant it that. For all the options it gives you for your avatar, the graphics aren’t spectacular. I couldn’t get the hair to blend right, so it just looked like I had a weave in. The clothes were basically painted skin or blobs of color floating around your bodyshape. Every time I tried to change facial features, it would turn my avatar by default so I couldn’t see her face. Then, when I was fixing her hair, all I could see was her face. It made no sense.

Maybe if I had played longer, I could’ve made a pretty avatar, but it wasn’t that interesting. And maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but I ran around for a while and couldn’t find anything to do. Boring. I guess I could’ve stood around talking to people. But what’s the point of that? If I want to play a game, I don’t want to talk to people. Boring.

Who wants to name my car? I was discussing car names with a couple coworkers during lunch the other day and it was decided that I would like my car better and feel more attached to it if it had a name. They suggested a bunch of names, but they were so fitting for my car that I can’t remember any of the suggestions.

Having said that, I have a green 2002 Mazda 626. I like puns and nerdy names. But you already know that.

Also, all our plants have names, so that’ll give an example of the kinds of names I’m able to come up with (if Dellilah wasn’t a good enough example).

Harry Palm – palm plant, named after a former coworker who I never actually worked with or met. He just got paged a lot.
Violet – violet.
Gimli – dwarf tree, a present from my cousin.
Basil (short a sound) – basil (long a).
Charlie – the sad looking evergreen type plant that Ian’s mom gave us last Christmas. It’s going to grow up to be a perfect Charlie Brown tree in about 2-3 years.
Slagathore – the miracle amaryllis plant download Babylon 5: The Lost Tales – Voices in the Dark movie , named after a throw-away joke on Scrubs.

I thought naming plants was weird until I started doing it. It makes perfect sense and now all the plants are still alive. The one plant that never got named died about 6 terribly slow, drawn out deaths. It was bad.

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After proposing the resurrection of the Lying Game, I realized that blogging everything exciting (as well as the boring) in my life for over 4 years, I didn’t have many cool stories I could embellish convincingly. I figured I had to have some good stories from college during my pre-blogging years, so I would just write about them when something came to me. Then Sonny was in town and Ian’s brother got married and I forgot about the game.

Anyway, thanks to Laura for playing and reminding me! And, well. I like to lie about stuff. So, here goes (2 lies and a truth):

1) I take my daily multi-vitamin drinking Vitamin Water(R).
2) I have a food journal Lost in Space video

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3) I run 2 miles three times a week.

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I was looking through my stats for the first time in a long while and saw that I recently had a search result from Google for weed jar The Invisible ipod

. I vaguely remembered the story, but couldn’t remember why I blogged about it since it happened well before I started blogging. I clicked through and saw that it was part of The Lying Game that I played a couple years ago.

So, I am going to start it again.

The Game:

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On Friday, September 14th you’ll post 3 stories.

* Two false and one true or
* Two true and one false

Readers have to pick the false story(ies), leaving their guess in the comments. (Make sure you let them know which version of the game you’re playing.)

On Monday, September 17th you’ll post the correct response.

The stories can be as crazy as you want them to be. But you want to make them all believable enough that the reader has to give the game a little thought.

You have over two weeks to work on your stories and get the word out. Let me know if you’re playing, so I’ll be sure to read your stories. Feel free to post early if you want, but let’s all wait until that Monday to ‘fess up.

From the Alfred Hitchcock magazine:

“I believe you are unfamiliar with the penal system in our country,” said the warden, as he led the new prisoner to his cell. “We find that it improves prison morale for each prisoner to have a chance to end his sentence at any time. In your case, we have set up a combination lock on your cell door. There are ten dials, on which you can set up any ten-digit number. If you set up the right one, the cell door will unlock and you will be free to leave.”

“I see,” said the prisoner. “Then if I try every possible number, I’m sure to hit the right one.”

“True,” said the warden, “but even if you were able to change the numbers at the rate of one per second without rest, it would still take you a hundred years to hit the right combination. However, you could try numbers at random and have a chance of choosing the right one. Or, you could search for the clue which we always provide.”

“What sort of clue?”

“Well, it might be almost anything. For example, one of our prisoners was put in an escape-proof cell and told that he would be pardoned if he could break out. He was also given permission to keep any plants he wished in his cell.”

“What became of him?”

The warden chuckled. “After more than two years, he suddenly realized that some words may have more than one meaning. He requested a poison ivy plant. Soon after receiving it, he broke out – in a rash. Naturally, he received his pardon.”

The warden unlocked the cell and ushered the prisoner in. “Your cell contains a desk calculator and writing implements. Good luck.”

The prisoner was left alone. He tried a few combinations on the lock without success. What could the clue be? A thought struck him. It seemed worth a try. He made a few calculations, and then set up a number on the lock. The cell door opened and the prisoner strolled out, after serving less than an hour of his sentence.

What number did he try?

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