Greenfield Village

Yesterday I had to drive a friend to the airport in the morning, which is actually located in between Detroit and Ann Arbor. Since I had already gone that far, I decided to keep going and visit the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, a large museum complex founded by Henry Ford in the early half of the 20th century. I had visited the museum half, including the Baseball as America exhibit, a month ago when my parents were in town and decided to purchase a student membership, which comes with free admission and parking and "pays for itself" after two visits.

Of course, since it didn't cost me anything, I started by zipping through Baseball as America again. This is Cooperstown's traveling baseball memorabilia exhibit, "a national celebration of America's romance with baseball." Included in the collection are a 1909 Honus Wagner card (the most valued baseball card in existence at over a million dollars), the Abner Doubleday baseball, Babe Ruth's bat, and a bunch of other stuff (including "The Shoebox of Baseball Cards Your Mother Threw Away").

But I spent the bulk of yesterday exploring Greenfield Village, a 90 acre "town" full of historical buildings, including a working farm, an exact replica of Edison's Menlo Park (the construction of which was overseen by both Ford and Edison to ensure that it was, in fact, an exact replica), and the actual childhood home and cycle shop of the Wright brothers, which was moved to Dearborn from Dayton, OH. I rode on a Hershel-Spillman carousel -- apparently the only kind to include giant frogs (which I, of course, rode on) -- and took a tour of the village in a 1921 Model T. The driver and I chatted a bit about cars, and I don't think I have ever been more relieved to be a Ford driver. I suspect that if I had said I drove a Corolla, he wouldn't have been as friendly. He was also impressed to hear that I drive a stick shift -- "A lady who drives a manual!"

I also had a good long conversation with the presenter at the tinsmith house. I got her to break character a bit and tell me about her job. I was highly impressed that in every house I went to, the presenters were pretty able much able to answer whatever obscure question I answered. According to the "tin smith," when they're hired, they're given a large binder for each house and/or "district" full of information. They're told to read it and know it, and most of them do so during the slow periods of the day. A lot of the employees are also retirees who are just looking for entertaining and useful ways to spend their time, so apparently, depending on the era, some of them just know things because it was something that came up in their own lives. The Model-T drivers, for example, are almost entirely ex-Ford engineers who actually spent the bulk of their lives working with and designing cars and trucks.

All and all, it was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. On return trips, I'll want to catch a Nationals/Lah-Di-Dahs game and take a ride in the steam engine locomotive that circles the village.

Da Vinci Code Quest: Final Phase

Last Friday I completed the final phase of the Google Da Vinci Code Quest. It was pretty much exactly what I expected, in that it was five puzzles which were all trickier versions of the puzzle types seen in the first phase, sans observation puzzle. One difference was that once you completed the puzzle, you were done with it and there was no need to use a Google feature to find something obscure or to know something about the book/movie. (I did have this lingering fear that there would be an observation puzzle that required you to go out and see the movie -- I'm really glad I was wrong.) I finished in 42 minutes, which I'm fairly certain was way too long to be in contention for the grand prize. (In fact, I know at least one person who beat me -- Anand finished in 37 minutes.)

The first puzzle was a symbol puzzle which was really just a 9x9 sudoku with no real twist to it, other than the fact that it used symbols, rather than numbers. It wasn't particularly hard -- no need to do any expansive iterative deepening search in my head.

The second puzzle was what killed me -- a "restoration" puzzle that was much, much harder than anything I had seen in the first phase. For those who didn't compete, the restoration puzzles were similar to the old peg jumping game, except that it was a hexagonal grid and instead of jumping over a peg and removing it, you slide two pegs (well, smudges) that were exactly one space apart into the hexagon between them. The goal, like in the peg game, is to get down to only one remaining smudge. I spent a half an hour on this puzzle, more than two-thirds of my total completion time.

The third puzzle was a chess puzzle (checkmate the black king in three moves -- and one of the moves is a stupid move by the black pieces), which, unlike in the first phase, you couldn't bypass by knowing random facts about The Da Vinci Code. The fourth puzzle was a "curator" puzzle -- hang multiple paintings on a wall so that they all fit, with added constraints due to the positions of the "hooks" on the walls that paintings can hang from. I never really found this puzzle-type to be that hard, though Anand said differently. The last puzzle was probably my favorite twist on an old standard puzzle. It was a jigsaw puzzle of moving images -- the shapes of the pieces stayed the same, but the images rotated through screenshots of the movie preview.

The cryptex was, of course, completely unneccessary for the final phase. But it makes for a nice little prize. Now I just have to figure out what I have that is small enough to keep in there... and how to change the combination so that anyone with an Internet connection can't figure it out.

Da Vinci Code Quest

Well, last Wednesday I finished the last of the 24 puzzles in Google's Da Vinci Code Quest about three minutes after it was released. None of the 24 puzzles were all that hard -- one of the sudoku variations took me about 20 minutes and every other puzzle I had done in under five minutes. The way the "Quest" was set up, your speed on the first 23 puzzles didn't matter as long as you had them finished before the last puzzle was released.

The final puzzle itself, the only one where your speed really mattered, was a joke as far as puzzles go. "Watch this Da Vinci code trailer and answer three questions about what you saw," was essentially the puzzle. For the second two questions, I barely needed to see the clip. As it happens, Anand, who was participating in the challenge having never read the book, asked me what "So Dark the Con of Man" anagrams to about ten minutes before the 1 pm start time. "Some painting in the book," was all I could remember. He then ran it through an anagram finder and reminded me about "Madonna of the Rocks." By random coincidence, the second question answer was "So Dark the Con of Man." The third question was "What does the answer to the second question anagram to?"

Thanks, Anand. I probably would have had to resort to using the Internet Anagram Server without your question.

The google servers noticeably slowed around the time I submitted my answers, and I realized that if a Google server was being affected, then well over 10,000 people were probably trying to play. Scanning various blogs all over the web, it seemed that this thing was huge and I quickly lost all hope of being in the top 10,000 and allowed to continue to the final phase. Thursday night everyone who finished got an e-mail thanking them for playing with a note that finalists would be notified on Monday.

Monday morning came and I had no e-mail from Google. But then I got an e-mail from Dustin Rabideau, another frantic competitor who had finished right around the time Anand and I did. He had been monitoring forums and blogs and it seems that the finalists weren't being notified by e-mail -- they were just getting cryptices (my preferred pluralization of cryptex) in the mail. With this in mind, I popped back home and there on the porch was a white box from the USPS with my name on it.

And inside...

{This is where I will eventually post a picture of the cryptex. Once I get batteries for my camera that is. In the meantime, Dustin sent me a link to someone else's cryptex here, which is pretty much exactly what mine looks like, right down to the stamp.}

That's right. As it turns out, my pessimism was all for naught. The passphrase that opens the cryptex?

PAXIL

Well, okay, it's really GRAIL (it's printed on the back of the box), but only the last two dials matter in the unlocking mechanism so anything ^...IL$ will open it. Inside is a "parchment" (not papyrus and no vial of vinegar) with the message:

Congratulations

---

you have proven worth of the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google, visit
www.Google.com/DaVinciCode
to see if your journey continues.

It's still just a big publicity stunt and a weak puzzle competition for an over-hyped book. But I have a cryptex, so what do I care.

A new homepage

It took nearly a year, but I finally got around to making a web page on one of the many Michigan servers that I have access to. Too lazy to create one from scratch, I simply took Anand's and replaced his information with mine and changed the colors (with his permission, of course). So, without further ado, I give you...

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~errhode

(As a warning, it's not really anything special.)

I ♥ the 80s

In honor of the VH1 series that I happen to have caught an episode of tonight, I give you Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Nintendo style. It's one of the odder baseball related things that I've seen...

And should anyone find their way to my corner of the world this summer, you should join me in checking this out -- Amrys, I'm thinking it would be right up your alley. (That would be an 1880s reference, to keep in theme with the post title.)

Twins 1, Tigers 33

Okay, so that wasn't the score of one game, but rather the whole weekend series. But the game I went to (Saturday afternoon) was nearly as bad -- 18-1. (By comparison, Friday was 9-0, Sunday was 6-0.) At least we went to the one game where the Twins actually scored. I have pretty much nothing good to say about the game itself, so I'll just leave you with the box score:

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9		R	H	E
Minnesota	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0		1	7	1
Detroit	3	2	4	2	0	4	2	1	X		18	23	0

And with that out of the way, onto the positives...

My parents were in town to help me move and the Twins were also in town, so we drove into Detroit straight from the airport to catch the 1:05 PM game on Saturday. As it happens, this was the day of Tigers On-Field Clinic #1 before the game, and since we were there early, my mom and I wandered the field listening to various bits of advice about how to be a better ballplayer. Some key lessons learned:

• "You hold the bat like you'd hold a dove. Think about holding a dove -- if you squeeze too tight, you'll kill it. Now, if you're holding a pigeon, go ahead and squeeze the little sucker all you want, I don't care." -- Andy Van Slyke (Tigers First Base Coach) during the batting clinic
• "If you want to be a catcher, then I think you should try being a catcher. If you don't, then that's okay. Just find another position." -- Gene Lamont (Tigers Third Base Coach) during the catching clinic, which featured Vance Wilson, not Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez (which would have been cooler)
• "Parents need to let the kids be kids. Because let's face it, when the game ends, they don't care if they won or not. They just want pizza and ice cream." -- Unknown dude in a Tigers uniform during an unknown clinic that we caught the tail end of

Besides the clinic, we also wandered around the stadium a bit and took a ride on the Foul Ball Ferris Wheel. Have you ever ridden inside a baseball? Because now I have.

And as an added bonus on the day, my scorebook now has two signatures in it: Juan Rincon, pitcher for the Twins, and Mike Redman, back-up catcher who signed right under his name in the line-up of the August 21, 2005 game. Now here's to hoping that at least one of them as a break-out year and becomes a star sometime soon.

And then there was that massacre of a ballgame... blech.