Puzzle Day and more...

My puzzle day team!

Trying to stay organized

These were all the cupcakes!

Working hard...

We got pieces of this rocket when we solved certain puzzles, to win first place you had to launch it first. We didnt win...

See how seriously the Microsoft employees take puzzle day. This guy actually wrote one of our puzzles.

So last Saturday was puzzle day. Its an intern event, kind of like a scavenger hunt except we have to solve puzzles all day around campus. Its taken very seriously here at Microsoft and even the employees get dressed up to fit the theme. This years theme was Microsoft Interngalactic Summit, so all the puzzles had to do with space stuff (yes star wars and star trek like crazy...super nerdy I know). My team was named Entropy, and we reserved conference rooms in our work buildings to do the puzzles. The puzzles are all pretty complex, and we were starting slow until I finally went to our smartest teammates apartment to wake him up and drag him to puzzle day. The puzzles were all pretty cool and written by Microsoft employees too! One puzzle was a stack of pictures with captions at the bottom. Except each pictures caption was really a caption for another pic in the stack. So you had to match each picture with its correct caption which created a chain of linked pics. Each caption had one red letter so when you look only the red letters on each pictures it spelled out, look under your table. When you look under the table there is a LED invisible ink detector. Each of the pics had letters written on them in invisible ink (which we knew about before hand and had already tried microwaving the pics and using a lighter to burn them a little thinking heat would make the ink show...wrong). Then the invisible letters finally spelled out the answer. Another puzzle clue was a tray of hostess cupcakes. One of our teammates went to get them, but had forgotten his badge at home so couldnt get into the building to get them. Insead, he snuck through an open back kitchen door before anyone else had gotten their tray and took one, while hiding 4 others. On his way back he started eating them (he didnt realize they were a clue and just thought it was free food). So when he got back and everyone started eating them, we realize some of them were missing the cake part underneath the frosting. About half of the cupcakes were totally cakeless. We then realized it must have been a clue. Luckily, since there were still 4 trays hidden, he went back to the kitchen and got them and we ended up with 5 trays of cupcakes. Turns out, the cupcakes without the cake translated to 0's and the cake ones were 1's. It was 4 binary strings which translated to the word SPAY. Random! It was a pretty fun day though. Anyways, we ended up coming in 21st out of 35 teams which we were excited about since we were the youngest team. Plus, we beat the MIT team and the other explorer team! 

Sunday was lots of fun. We woke up early and went to brunch at Saltys on Alki. Their Sunday brunch is world famous, even though I think the food at the brunch at la Mansion in San Antonio might be a little better. The view here was amazing though. We sat overlooking the water with a gorgeous view of Seattle on the other side. From there we went downtown and shopped for awhile. Spent way too much money...but it was all necessary I promise (I didnt have any gold heels and I needed some haha) Then we went to Pike Place market, probably for the last time (AAAHHHH!) and I got lots of fruit. Then we came home and slept for a little while. Its so nice because at 8 'o clock when I wake up from a nap, its still light out to go do something. So I called a friend and we went down to my favorite park and just sat by the water until the sun had set. We watched a movie at the apartment and I got to bed pretty early. It was a great weekend, and one of the last ones Ill get to enjoy around Seattle. Microsoft has tons of stuff planned for this upcoming weekend, and the following weekend, my last here, we were planning a trip to Canada. 

And then back to work. its Wednesday now, and the past 2 days I havent left work until about 10 pm. We have to have all our code in by end of the day Thursday, so its super crunch time. Not only do our features have to been done, but we have to have all the teammates parts integrated, unit testing done on each feature, all errors handled, documentation, ect... Last night was pretty fun though. We were working and one of our friends shows up at the office, which is pretty cool because he is super smart and helped us out a lot. Then 2 of our other friends show up, but instead of help they more just talk. It totally turned in the building 34 social hour. So an hour later we are back to work, and getting a bit slap happy. Its weird to be the only people in the building, we can be as loud as we want haha. But we made decent progress even with the interruptions, and still have two full days to finish everything. Wish us luck!!!