I got up this morning, worked out, put away the dishes, cleaned the letterbox, fed the cat, took out the trash, showered, got my lunch ready and now I'm bored. Well, I guess you could say I was bored before, which is why a lot of that stuff got done in the first place.
I've really got nothing specific to talk about right now except I that I type this waiting for my kid's school to open this morning after a two-hour-delay. We had a very slight dusting last night. The roads are bone dry. Don't get me started.
So I went through the puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page this morning and I was shocked to discover that I couldn't remember the encoding mechanism I used when I first posted this one over four years ago:
I eventually recalled it but, wow, I really need to write these down or something. Here are all the hints in ROT-13 format to prevent spoilers:
Hint 1 (Posted 11/06/10): N pvepyr, ru? Hint 2 (Posted 01/07/11): Gur svefg yrggre vf 'G'. Hint 3[Posted 02/05/13]: Guvf fubhyq or rnfl nf pnxr. Hint 4 (Posted 02/06/15): Rnfl nf cvr, V zrna.
All of the puzzles (and hints and links to the projects associated with the puzzles) can be found in the link in the sidebar on non-mobile devices and at the top of this page on mobile ones.
Think you have an answer? Post a comment or send me an email. Good Luck!
Wow! It's been years (years!) since I posted a hint to any of the puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page. What is the Secret Puzzle Page, you ask? Well, you can find a link to it in the sidebar on the left (on non-mobile devices) or under the Pages header at the top of this page if you are on a mobile device. You can find all the other puzzles and hints there, too. This one is hanging in my kitchen, btw... Why now, you ask? Well, it turns out that someone is actively interested in figuring out the Corkboard puzzle so I thought I would put out a new hint for everyone. My largesse knows no bounds, apparently. No, I didn't get a Word of the Day calendar for Christmas... I pulled that "largesse" phrase from the latest episode of Archer. Anyway, here is the hint: Hint #5 (Posted 1900 121315): Lbh cebonoyl pneel gur xrl gb fbyivat guvf jurerire lbh tb. As usual, I put out hints in ROT-13 format to avoid spoiling the puzzle for those not ready for a clue just yet. If you copy and paste the above gibberish here, you can have the hint automatically decoded for you instead of having to work it out by hand. That's not "cheating" by the way... Good Luck!
Well, it turns out my brother nailed three of the four items in the Cubist Art Puzzle, and only needed a small hint to push the ball over the goal line for the last one. Well done. Of course, he couldn't be bothered to post a comment, so, you know - totally doesn't count.
Not even a little.
Sad, really...
In any case, I came across this piece at an auction recently and I knew I just had to have it.
Any ideas? (You have to tell me where all five sections came from.)
Quick quiz! Can you name the three famous books described below from just the Wordle word clouds of their first chapters?
Book 1:
Book 2:
Book 3:
Leave a comment with answers. Good Luck, firstly with the puzzle and secondly with actually successfully posting comments... I am told the comment form can be a royal PITA depending on your platform. Thanks, Google!
I got a new desk for Christmas. It replaces the old one I built about five years ago. Other than being too small, there was nothing wrong with the other one and I didn't want to donate it just yet so it got moved to the Island of Misfit Toys (attic).
I love the new desk. In addition to the increased real estate it is a lot more cozy to sit at than the other one - you are less "at" the desk as so much as you are "in" it. It goes with the darker furniture in the room, it has lots of cubbies that hold cool looking/inspiring stuff (ammonite fossil, Robot Chicken robot, wooden El Cid (I guess) statue I picked up in Spain) and was pretty inexpensive since it was the floor model and the manufacturer had gone out of business.
The down side to doing woodworking as a hobby it that no matter how well built some store-bought item like this is any sort of flaws in the manufacturing process sometimes really stand out. Outrageous markups also stand out, but not this time.
I had to bolster the mounts that held the top part of the desk to the bottom part because, one day, it will need to be moved to get to some cables or the cat will attempt a daring bookcase-to-desktop leap and the whole shebang would have slid out of place or have come crashing down altogether. Also, there are no holes that allow for the use of power cords or data cables so I needed to make that modification as well, and is part of the reason my printer in on the floor to the right of the unit. This really annoys my wife so I will be building a matching printer stand in the near future. I will probably mount the stand to the desk to further stabilize everything.
But, hey it's easy to nitpick and say "I could build something better than this". While that is certainly true in this case and I enjoy building stuff 1) I didn't need to spend actual time building it and 2) unlike the manufacturer, I could take my sweet time customizing one and not worry about needing to rip out, like, 200 of these a month to make payroll. It's not really a fair comparison.
I will miss the old desk a bit, but I can already tell this place is going to work out great. Speaking of the old one, it's probably a good idea to put this out there again:
What is this? Well, when I build stuff, I like to incorporate some sort of puzzle into whatever it is. Many times the puzzles go unsolved, unnoticed, or both. That's cool. The ones that are discovered, though, I put on my Secret Puzzle Page (link in sidebar - top of page on certain mobile devices) and I sometimes put out hints (I haven't done so in a very long time but they are in the same place). This is the wooden plaque I mounted to the bottom of the old desk. Since the old desk is probably going to spend many years in the attic I thought I'd post this here as well.
I woke up this morning to find that someone requested a new hint for the Corkboard puzzle. No problem, right? Well... not really. See, I could have sworn that I posted more than three hints to this thing and I could have sworn I put the puzzle on the Secret Puzzle Page a long time ago.
Unfortunately, all I see are three hints but no hint of a corkboard at all on the Secret Puzzle Page. Odd. Maybe it's my imperfect memory combined with an imperfect editing of the site when I took down the Puzzle for Charity that's causing the problem.
Here are the three old hints and one new one. Usually I put these hints in ROT-13 to avoid spoiling the fun for those who aren't quite yet ready for one, but, since I posted the first three in plaintext, they will remain that way. Copy and paste the fourth hint here to decode it, or just do the ROT-13 heavy lifting yourself:
Hint #1 (Posted 2146 021210): The tacks are there for a reason.
Hint #2 (Posted 2136 062410): The words and designs on the corks don't mean anything
Hint #3 (Posted 2130 081610): The first letter is “W”.
Hint #4 (Posted 2031 090313): Gurer ner 21 yrggref va gur fbyhgvba
Oh, if it turns out I am missing something and I did post more than three hints in the past, let me know and I will update the hint list.
Meanwhile, don't forget to check out the other unsolved puzzles at the Secret Puzzle Page (link in the sidebar). Good Luck!
You know, it has been a very long time since I have posted anything about the unsolved puzzles on my Secret Puzzle Page in the sidebar. It’s been so long, in fact, I am in danger of forgetting what it was I encrypted and how.
Let’s fix that.
Here are some hints, encoded using ROT-13, one for each puzzle still unsolved. If you want to see the other hints, too, go to the Secret Puzzle Hints Page in the sidebar. If you have a guess, leave a comment on the Puzzle Page or send me an email. Remember to include the encryption scheme with your answer, please.
Again, not enough for a cogent theme.Here are a few paragraphs of personal, wacky, snoozy, project-y, puzzle-y, and site-update-y things, though.
Personal: I helped out at the church barbecue this weekend.The rainy weather made cooking 640 birds take much longer than usual so I was really feeling it after hoisting and flipping eighty pound racks while inhaling a dense cloud of chicken-scented buckyballs for six hours.On the upside, my contact lenses were finger-lickin’ good afterwards...
Wacky: I figure there is an exact right level of specificity regarding menu items and packaging for foods. If you are overly specific or too vague, the food becomes horribly unappealing. For example, Chicken Nuggets probably sound ok, whereas Bird Nuggets or Animal Nuggets do not and, on the other side of that coin, Disease-Free Domesticated Chicken Nuggets also sound gross.
Snoozy: We took down eight trees out back and planted three new ones in their place. The old ones, as majestic as they were, were very nearly pushed over on top of the house a few times during this summer’s storm-a-thon so money well spent, there. Dudes who take down trees for a living are surgeons or magicians... maybe both. I think two of the new ones will survive (the trees, not the lumberjacks - I am sure they are fine.). Not so sure about the third. They were all planted in what was basically 18 inches of pure clay, so we will see.
Project-y: Started building little knick-knacks to put inside Geocache boxes. The ones you see on the drying rack in the pic are meant to be little wooden GPS units. They are 2.5 x 1.5 inches and are made mainly from part of an old (1930s-1940s vintage) maybe-maple table top I salvaged from the side of the road. The buttons were cut from a leftover oak dowel I had sitting around. The coarse tools I was forced to work with (coupled with a clear lack of planning or skill) resulted in an obviously-hand-crafted look, which is cool. These ten took about two hours total labor. Once they have been used up I will make a new set of ten items, this time I think home-made yo-yos or little leather and wood books... not sure yet which.
Puzzle-y: Wow! It has been a super long time since I have posted a hint for the Puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page. Here is the fourth hint for the New Desk Puzzle:
Hint #4 (Posted 10/02/12): Nyvpr qvqa'g xabj gur nafjre, rvgure.
It is encoded using ROT-13 to avoid spoiling the fun for those who don’t want a hint just yet. Need more hints or just want to check out the other puzzles? Check the sidebar (up near the top, there) and Good Luck! Send me an email or just leave a comment if you have figured it out.
Site-Update-y: I added a new book to my reading list, cleaned up the sidebar a bit, and completely removed the WolframAlpha stuff I had there. In the old days (like a year or so ago) you couldn’t shut me up about the benefits of the site and its awesome “computation engine”. Now, though, every damn time I ask it anything at all it times out or gives some half-baked interpretation of my input or basically says “I can tell you, but I’m gonna need about tree-fiddy.” I respect that they need to make cash, but good grief, people, rein it in a little.
Notice: I have decided to close out the current Puzzle for Charity one month from today.
Why? Well, there are a few reasons, but the most important is that I want to go in a new direction with the puzzles I make and I don’t want to juggle several different puzzle types.
One month from now I will move it to the Secret Puzzle Page, shut down the prize pool, and send a $50 check to the Lake Country SPCA.
It's been a while since I have posted a hint to one of the Secret Puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page. Here is Hint #3 for the New Desk Puzzle:
Hint 3 (Posted 11/13/11): Gur svefg yrggre vf "J".
As usual the hint is posted in ROT-13 encoding as to not spoil the fun for those of you not quite ready for some help. You can find all the other hints and all the other puzzles in the sidebar on the right. If you think you know the answer, post a comment or shoot me an e-mail. Good Luck!
Oh, yeah, since this post pushed the Halloween Puzzle off the bottom of the page, here is the answer to that one (spoiler below):
Here is the puzzle:
Coloring the jack-o-lanterns black and the pumpkins white then giving the pic a couple of flips results in this:
Scanning this image with your smartphone gives you the message "Happy Halloween from the 36th Lock!"
Once again, a huge gap in writing. What gives? What could possibly be more important than writing down every errant thought I have about every shiny thing that catches my eye?
Nothing. Sometimes I just don't feel like blogging. Also, sometimes the act of actually doing stuff prevents the documentation of that same stuff. You know how it is. Or maybe you don't. You might not... That would be sad.
Now the muse is back upon me and I have a little lunch time in which to write, so here we go again. Here is a shotgun summary of the past month or so:
Read three books (well, nine if you count kids' books, and 11 if you count kids' e-books). The grownup books were Snuff by Terry Pratchett, Worldwar: In the Balance by Harry Turtledove, and The Official Red Book: A Guidebook of United States Coins.
The Pratchett book was OK, not great (Night Watch sets the bar pretty high, you see). Also, it looks like someone bought him a Word-a-Day calendar and challenged him to use every page. I am glad my Kindle has a built-in dictionary. The second book was an alternate history story that had aliens attacking Earth right in the middle of WWII. It started off very exciting but the action died in the middle so suddenly and dramatically it felt like the author decided to make the novel into a series half-way through. That's too bad... I won't be getting the second one. I read the coin book as part of researching a question my father-in-law asked me about pennies. I will post on that soon.
I am currently reading nothing.
Music: I added a few more songs to my iPod, including a new montage song: Uprising by Muse. Why is it a montage song? Video below.
Asking my iPod for its Genius Recommendation based on that song results in a new playlist I'd like to name "Music for a Dangerous Loner to Write His Manifesto By", but due to space limitations I just call it my "Watchlist Mix".
Started and finished Mafia II, Osmos, Contre Jour, Water, Scribblenauts Remix, and most of the new Angry Birds levels.
If you have the means, get Osmos. The physics-based gameplay is very well done and the whole thing is utterly beautiful to look at and to listen to. Very relaxing.
Scribblenauts is awesome because you have the power to call into existence virtually anything in order to solve an on-screen puzzle. For example, if the puzzle was to help your hero Maxwell rescue a man trapped in a snow cave you could say FIRE and *poof* a roaring fire appears, making him nice and toasty. Alternatively, you could summon a FLAMETHROWER or an ANGRY DRAGON, which also results in him getting nice and toasty albeit for a much shorter period of time than he probably would have liked.
Started playing around with Rocksmith, and now I can't get Nirvana's In Bloom out of my head. Having a lot of fun with this game even though I can't shake the feeling that the virtual people who came to see me play guitar in what looks like a smoke filled middle school cafeteria are just there to make fun of me. At best, I would gauge the crowd's reaction to my performance as "bemused and pitying". Same as my wife's reaction to basically anything I do, now that I think about it.
Started gussying up the sidebar some more. Added a new link to the blogroll: OVZombie. It's a site dedicated to tracking and reporting on the off-putting and possibly illegal shenanigans of one of my friend's neighbors. I guarantee you will love it. Unless you are my friend's neighbor, of course.
Made a new puzzle for Halloween. I will post the answer once it slips off the bottom of the page. Here it is. It's cinchy. If you know the answer, leave a comment.
My body has healed enough to where I am actually running on the treadmill occasionally. I will most likely miss my "5K" resolution goal. I have no excuse for missing the other goals. I need to get on the stick... Or quit trying things... Meh, something will come up and I will rock one of the things out. Maybe my Mafia II experience can be applied toward my handgun qualification... Who knows?
Finished building the Red Box Treasure Chest kit with my 3-year-old son and father-in-law. It looks great and it is his new de facto piggy bank. He is very proud of it. An unfortunate side effect is that he is now constantly grubbing for spare change. I'm all like "Get a damn job, hippy" and he's all like "Moooommm! Dad said a bad word!" Then I'm like "He's lying! Here's a handful of pennies shuddupwoodja."
He and I also built a McDonald’s out of Lego. This resulted in an alien vs. ghost gun battle and helicopter crash when the waiter heard that a patron's grilled cheese sandwich was "very very very bad". These things can get out of hand quickly. As far as I know this rarely happens in real life.
But all play and no work makes Jack an utterly intolerable man-child so...
Nearly finished resealing the deck. As of this Sunday it will have taken four weekends to complete but even now it no longer looks like a ticked-off Jackson Pollack impersonator with ADHD begrudgingly did the job as part of his community service for his repeated Painting While Intoxicated offenses. I would like to thank my wife for her patience and support while I dealt with this self-created disaster.
For those newbies out there thinking of sealing your deck using a pump sprayer (cuz the can says you can) and not thinning the pigmented sealant (cuz the can says you're not sposedtuh) just suck it up and use a 3 or 4 inch brush instead. Please trust me on this - it will take forever but you will be a lot happier with the results. Also, mix the sealant way more than you think is remotely necessary. After all, that 5-gallon drum may have been sitting there on the floor at Lowes for a very long time...
It has been a while since I have posted a hint to one of the puzzles on my Secret Puzzle Page. Here it is:
Desk Puzzle Hint #2 (Posted 09/08/11 20:00): Fcnprf frcnengr gur ahzoref, abg pbzznf. Sbe rknzcyr, gur svefg guerr ahzoref ner 96, 120, naq 69,181,920.
Just copy and paste the above ROT-13 encoded gibberish here to read the hint easily. Ignore it if you are not ready for a hint quite yet. I will paste the hint into the Puzzle Hints Page as well.
Hey! Now that the associated posts have fallen off the front page, here are the answers to the Five Wordle Cloud Quiz and the "Bored Goth Poem" Puzzle.
What am I talking about? Click here for the original Wordle post, and click here for the "Bored Goth" post.
Spoilers below!
Cloud 1: Genesis Chapter 1
Cloud 2: President Obama's Election Victory Speech - November 5, 2008
Cloud 3: President Kennedy's "Moon" Speech - May 25, 1961
Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Art of War Chapter 1 - Sun Tzu
Angel but not devil
Monster but not hero
Empty but not void
Nothing but not zero
Fifth but not fourth
Sixth but not seventh
Ninth but not tenth
Twelfth but not eleventh
Angst but not faith
Zigzag but not straight
Comment but not question
Angry but not sedate
Liquid but not solid
Vacuum but not air
Problem but not solution
Anxious but not scared
What am I ?
Answer: The first words in each of the lines have no rhyme. The last words do. (Sources: Wikipedia, WolframAlpha)
Made a few updates to the stuff in the sidebar this morning.
Added a section for 2011 New Year's Resolution updates. As you can see, the only movement has been in the Run Two 5Ks area. Back off - I still have nine months....
Updated the Quote of the Variable Time Period. Did you know all you have to type in to Google is "aim fo" - not even "aim for" - for the quote "Aim for the bushes" to pop up second? Wow.
Increased the Puzzle for Charity Prize Pool to $40. I just felt like it.
Updated the Currently Reading section. Man, I am glad this book is short.
That's about it but I have two projects in my queue that I will talk about later. One is to build my son a desk to match his new non-crib bed. The other is to refurbish his playset and put down six inches of mulch around the whole thing.
I am working on a super-long post that will take me a few days to put together so I just wanted to throw something out here for now.
First, an award! Yesterday at the gym a 45-year-old dude was working out on an elliptical, three machines down from a mid-twenties woman on the Stairmaster. I was at one of the Universal machines where I happened to be able to see both of them. The guy kept glancing over in a creepy-but-non-threatening way at the lady for a few minutes and then piped up the gold-medal winning lamest opening line ever:
"Heh, heh. It looks like you're really stepping up in the world."
Needless to say, it didn't work... she just sort of politely ignored him. It was disappointing that she chose to ignore my psychic advice, too, though: "C'mon... mace 'im! Mace 'im, mace 'im mace 'im!" That would have been awesome.
Shifting gears, I had a very vivid dream recently. It's short, so hang in there : I was driving down the highway at night with my wife and son when I started to nod off. I jerked myself awake (in that comically violent just-fell-asleep-at-my-desk way that we are all familiar with) in the dream... and in real life.
Well, that's just great. Now, not only am I not sure which scenario is actually real, it is extremely freaking important to figure out within seconds whether I am snuggled securely in my bed or whether I am barreling down the highway at 60 mph with my family on board.
This wasn't like the dream I had where I accidentally drove my car off the back of an aircraft carrier into the ocean. As incredibly real as that dream was, it was, like, totally obvious that it wasn't really real. This dream, however, wigged me out enough where I had to walk around my house for five minutes "officially" waking myself up just to make sure.
I am told that I need to see the movie Inception... It's on my list for sure, now.
Hey, you're still reading? Wow! Here's your reward, a hint to one of the Secret Puzzles. Just shift the letters below by 13 to read the hint, or cut and paste the hint here. All other puzzle info can be found in the sidebar on the right.
Chessboard Puzzle Hint #2 (Posted Jan 07 2011): Gur svefg yrggre vf 'G'.
Welcome to The 36th Lock! Puzzles, humor, and news, but mainly a way for me to document things I don't want to forget. Feel free to browse. Oh... sorry ahead of time for all the typos - I tend to bang these things out on a cell phone during my lunch breaks, you understand. Enjoy!
Looking for an article you could have sworn was here before? Use the Blogger Search tool below. Actually want accurate results from your search and not just "No Results Found" reported all the time? Yeah... me too. I'm not sure what to tell you, brother.
6/22/13: Made into Travel Bug TB56TVF by ReesaRice Goal: Tour Scottish castles Last Seen: North Wales, UK Coordinates: N 53° 04.121 W 004° 04.592 Travel Distance as of 01/08/17: 15122.9 miles
One Foot In Front of the Other - Revenge of the Nerds
Like to Get to Know You - One Crazy Summer
Push It to the Limit - Scarface
Winner Takes It All - Over the Top
Song recommendations welcome. Click here and leave a comment.
Quote of the Variable Time Period
Later that day, to make their escape, those boys crawled through 500 yards of foul-smelling nastiness I can't even imagine. 500 yards. That's the length of 11 baseball diamonds, one tennis court, a medium-sized male elephant, and a croquet wicket.
Most Recent Project
Seven Clocks
"Current" To-Do List
The idea is to add things here I will be working on in the future. Whether they actually get worked on or not is another story. Whether this list ever gets updated or not is yet another.
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