Saket Vora

So there is no class tomorrow, but it hardly crossed my mind until now. Honestly, I’d just rather have class.

Read outside for a few hours, catching up on case study and neural science reading. I want to enjoy it — i’ve been hearing the weather is terrible everywhere else. On Saturday afternoon went over to Staples (luke got a new chair) and the new Safeway on El Camino. The new Safeway is a lot better than the old one (which they are demolishing next door). After getting back we went with Nader to Nick Steinmetz apartment in Rains, where he was hosting a MIT Mystery Hunt party. MIT puts on this three day hunt where teams must find a coin hidden on campus, and there are around 100 to 120 extremely difficult puzzles or questions you must solve to know where it is.  Nick’s friend at MIT formed a group and he volunteered to work remotely, and recruited a bunch of fellow Stanford grad students to help out.

So the scene: about a dozen people seated around Nick’s living room, with count’em ten laptops open with a whiteboard and papers everywhere.  A sofa table stood off the side, rather lonely (until the pizza came). This is serious business — Nick’s team had created an entire wiki to help the collaborative effort. In addition to the 50 or so MIT students working in the team, people were filing in results from Kansas, Illinois, Boulder, LA, and Stanford. The questions are incredibly tough, with the answers being a short word or phrase. Nader, myself, and another guy worked on one for about 2 hours and got nowhere. Nick and Luke had better luck, successfully solving one. Their question featured about 8 different pictures of a person standing somewhere (usually on a street sidewalk) in Boston. Being from Boston, Luke helped out. A T-stop (public transportation) sign could be seen in the background of two photos, so perhaps all of them were near T-stops. Using Luke’s knowledge and Google Street View, they tracked down the location where all the photos were taken. I saw some of the photos — some of them were entirely nondescript. They then noticed that all the t-shirts being worn were from Threadless.com. Each of these t-shirts has a name. So they found the name of each t-shirt. Nick suggested that they then order the T-stops pictures from the center of Boston going out, then they took the first letter of each of the corresponding T-shirt names and found the right word — they had solved it.

Mine wasn’t so lucky.  I’ll post a bit of the question after the Hunt is over.

We went from around 6pm to 11:30pm before people were mentally worn-out. It was fun though, nice crowd.

Today I worked on the MarkStrat strategy decision, took care of the laundry, and helped Luke make some banana bread from some going-bad bananas. Watched the Chargers-Patriots game too; oh well. The Patriots are going to streamroll over the NY Giants.

In Krispy Kreme Challenge news, they have reached 1414 registrants as of this writing. A huge milestone to be sure!

The more I see/read about the Democratic primary, the higher my blood pressure goes. I have a dreadful feeling that the Democrats are going to @#%#@ themselves over again due their own stupidity.

Switching gears finally to EE 314 homework (been procrastinating that all weekend).