March 1 was a beautiful sunny summer day in Sydney. J and I could have spent the day sunbathing at one of the city beaches or picnicking on the grass in the Royal Botanical Gardens or hiking the trails at Blue Mountain but no. We chose to hole up in our cave-like apartment for 36 hours to participate in the quasi-annual Microsoft Puzzlehunt competition! Due to the time zone differences we joined our team around 4 AM Sydney time to set up for the event and hunted with them until the conclusion at 10 AM the next day. Somewhere in between I snuck in a 3 hour power-nap.
We've been preparing for this hunt since we arrived in Sydney about a month ago. Here were some of the things we did:
- Bought the cheapest printer we could find at Harvey Norman - an all-in-one HP printer for $49
- Saved over 3 GBs of roll-over bandwidth from previous weeks (we have a 2 GBs per week cap) - used about 2 GBs during the hunt
- Bought some white printer paper, mechanical pencils and a pack of tri-color BIC pens with a bonus highlighter from Woolsworth
Some things I had to talk J out of purchasing:
- A Rubik's cube
- Grid paper
- Various sizes of lined paper
- Colored highlighters
- 2X last-minute plane tickets back to Seattle ($1200 per ticket) - I'm so not joking!
I have the best teammates! It's a real disadvantage to not be on-site for the hunt so we thank our team three times over for letting us join in from Sydney!
Australia, out!
1. Our limited array of supplies
2. J at 1 AM after solving a puzzle called "DICE"
