I just came across a cool site called Can You Crack It? According to this ABC News article, it was set up by a British intelligence agency that’s looking to recruit web-savvy cyber-spies, and this was how they decided to find some. It’s a tough cyber code they’re asking people to crack/solve. Their thinking is that in this digital age, with highly intelligent hackers opting to make it big online instead of enrolling in university, they’re apt to find some young people to join them who would otherwise be wreaking havoc and making the agency’s life miserable. Turn them to the good side of the Force before they get too mired in the dark side. They should recruit Lisbeth Salander, too.
I thought this strategy was pretty brilliant. It’s a real good example of knowing who you’re trying to talk to, what their demographics and psychographics are, what motivates them, and how to best reach and engage them. It’s the sort of stuff I’m telling my clients all the time. I hope it’s successful for them. I think it’d be great to get a big team of potential hacktivists working for good instead of evil, especially since I’ve been working on promotional materials for the upcoming RSA Conference 2012 in San Francisco.
As for the code itself, it’s a doozy. I love trying to solve puzzles like this but it’s way beyond my ability to crack. After studying it for about five minutes, I declared myself highly unqualified for a career as a cyber-spy. The only inkling of a possible starting point I could come up with is that the code uses the numbers 0 through 9 and the letters a through f. That’s 10 numbers and six letters, totaling 16 characters. And there are 16 columns of coded pairs. So maybe each column represents a letter. Although the “keyword” field only holds 15 characters. I’m thinking the first one is blank, mirroring the site name in the upper left corner of the page. I’m either brilliant, or I’m grasping at straws that aren’t even really there. Where is Tom Hanks when you need him?
Yesterday I added to my Apple family with a gorgeous, 27″ Cinema Display, a new wireless keyboard, wireless Trackpad, and battery charger. So I got to spend the majority of the day reveling in the beautiful packaging as I set up my equipment, and breathing in that awesome, new-computer-accessory smell that we all love so much. I think I got a little dizzy. Or maybe that was the bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc I cracked open in celebration of my purchases.
My mom’s name is Maria, and she finally gets a monster storm-slash-potential natural disaster named after her. When my siblings and I were growing up, “Watch out, Maria’s on the rampage” was our fraternal I-got-your-back warning that someone had done something wrong and that someone had lived to regret it, and all the other someones in my mother’s path were going to suffer right along with the offending someone. [Confused? Sorry, there were five of us.]
I never hold out much hope that writing jobs on Craig’s List will pan out, or are even worth the time it takes to respond to them. There are exceptions, naturally, but the majority of companies/people searching for writers on CL have a long list of requirements and high expectations, yet they don’t provide the information a writer would need to meet them. Still, every once in a while I go to CL to see what’s there, if for no other reason than to enjoy a good eye-rolling session. The other day I saw a post that was yet another prime example of what I’m talking about.
Yahoo News had an interesting article recently about hidden symbols within corporate logos. The FedEx one is probably the most famous, with the reversed-out arrow between the “e” and the “x.” And here are a few more that I found interesting.
I have to admit I never saw the bicyclist in this one, but now that I know the yellow sun is the front wheel and the “r” in “Tour” is the body, with the “o” being the back wheel, I wonder how I ever missed it.
Here’s another one I never saw until it was pointed out to me. Do you see the sideways Kiss? Look between the “k” and the “i.”
Finally, one of my favorite websites to peruse is Amazon. But I never understood the yellow half-circle under the logo, which I thought was a cheesy smile. Turns out it isn’t. It’s an arrow that goes, if you notice, from the “A” to the “z,” a subtle message that you can find just about anything at Amazon.com. Which is actually true. Still looks a little cheesy, though. But they get a pass because both 
Recently a colleague asked me to speak with a friend of hers who is just starting out in his first writing job and needed some advice. But when her friend called me, I discovered he didn’t need advice on pronoun-antecedent agreement or parallel construction, or even the creative process. What he was really looking for was permission to be The Writer in the room.
