The other day at work, I caught up to my mentor on the way to dinner. He was asking Wei-Hwa why Wei-Hwa wanted to borrow a baseball bat. And I'm looking around the table, and it's mostly folks from the Burninators team. So I figured that they probably wanted a baseball bat for the same reason that I did: photos for Shinteki.
Conversation around the Burninators' table turned to the upcoming Hogwarts game. Apparently, the waivers had some interesting clauses. Something like: players can't sue if harmed by magical forces. Someone raised the dire possibility of getting impaled by a unicorn. Someone else pointed out that this would be really bad torture: the touch of a unicorn's horn has healing powers. So you'd be stuck on this horn, constantly healing and re-injuring. Then the hallucinations would begin. And then, you'd see unicorns.
Today at work, the fancy-pants video-conferencing equipment between here and the Kirkland office wasn't working. Actually, the video was working fine. And the Kirkland people could hear the California people just fine. But we couldn't hear the Kirkland people. And one of them wanted to ask a question. He tried writing his question down and holding it up to the video... but no-one could read it. Folks made silly suggestions. One person suggested charades. Giggles. And another person said, "Does anyone here know semaphore?" Giggles. And I said, "Uhm, I know semaphore," and I tugged out my always-handy code cheat-sheet, gestured at the column of semaphore letters. And there were surprised gasps. So I racked up some serious geek cred today. I guess I would have racked up more geek cred if I'd actually memorized semaphore, but I'll take what I can get.
Speaking of which, Vincent Cheung reported on the Google Intern Scavenger Hunt without giving away any pertinent details. I don't know him, but I guess we can trust him to work on secret projects.
Speaking of high-tech company intern puzzle hunts, here are some reports on Microsoft's intern puzzleday, which was just this last Saturday. Julia, Canagape, Colin.
It's a wonder any of us ever ship any software. (Ha! Just kidding! Uhm, did I ever tell you that my opinions are mine and may or may not coincide with those of my employer?)
Labels: puzzlehunts
Hey, thanks for posting the PuzzleDay links! I've forwarded them to the rest of the planning folks. It's nice to hear that the interns had a good time. And it's quite impressive to me how you find all these links. Thank you.