Birthday – How Lenny made me work for it.

So. This is a picture of Lenny – the sockbear.

Lenny lives in The Netherlands with Maaike’s sister… and this year, in conjunction with Maaike, he set me a series of challenges. Starting a week before my birthday.. I’ll admit that I loved 85% of it… but was surprised how much I learned about how badly I deal with having odd problems thrown at me.. and asking friends for help! I do neither of these things well it seems!. On with the tasks..

Task 1: whanau is important
a) please draw Maaike’s whakapapa, 4 generations back.
b) you need to collect some more information about 3 people (at least one on paternal side and one on maternal side)
– what is their DOB?
– what kind of person are they or were they?
– how do/did they make a living?
c) you can collect bonus points if you do 5 generations…

It took a couple of days, and I’d not realised that Whakapapa goes forward as well as backwards in genealogy.. at least according to Maaike (final arbiter on all things!).

Next were some climbing questions… that I found pretty tricksy..

Once that was complete it was (finally!) onto a question that I actually found doable on my own and didn’t have to ask help for :) I loved it. That’s not to take from the other questions.. It just being my area I quite enjoyed it.

First of all.. I had to work out what the question was!…

A long time ago before we had computers that were really much
smarter than us, computer programs and data were stored using
paper tape.

The tape reader was made up of a toothed drive wheel, a light
source and 8 light sensors.

As the tape progressed on the drive wheel, the light would
shine through holes in the tape. If the sensor on the other side
detected the light, a binary ‘1’ bit would be registered. Where
there was no hole, a binary ‘0’ bit would be registered.

This can be shown in a bit of ASCII art using the message “Hello
World”, and how it might be encoded:

Holes for toothed drive wheel
|
V
___________
1st byte | O :O | => 0100 1000 => 0x48 => ‘H’
2nd byte | OO : O O| => 0110 0101 => 0x65 => ‘e’
3rd byte | OO :OO | => 0110 1100 => 0x6C => ‘l’
etc. | OO :OO | => 0110 1100 => 0x6C => ‘l’
| OO :OOOO| => 0110 1111 => 0x6F => ‘o’
| O : | => 0010 0000 => 0x20 => ‘ ‘
| O O: OOO| => 0101 0111 => 0x57 => ‘W’
| OO :OOOO| => 0110 1111 => 0x6F => ‘o’
| OOO: O | => 0111 0010 => 0x72 => ‘r’
| OO :OO | => 0110 1100 => 0x6C => ‘l’
| OO : O | => 0110 0100 => 0x64 => ‘d’
___________

And here is your challenge. Can you solve a little bit of computer
history trivia?

___________
| O :O |
| O O: |
| O :OO |
| O : |
| O : OOO|
| OO :OOOO|
| OO :OOOO|
| OO : OOO|
| OO :OO |
| OO : O O|
| O :OO |
| O : |
| O :OO O|
| OO :O O|
| OO : OO|
| OOO: O |
| OO :OOOO|
| OOO: OO|
| OO :OOOO|
| OO : OO |
| OOO: O |
| O : |
| OO : O|
| OO :OOO |
| OO : O |
| O : |
| O : O|
| OOO: |
| OOO: |
| OO :OO |
| OO : O O|
| O : |
| OO : O|
| OO :OO |
| OO :OO |
| O : |
| OO :O |
| OO : O|
| OOO: OO |
| OO : O O|
| O : |
| OO :OOOO|
| OO :OOO |
| OO : O O|
| O : |
| OOO: O |
| OO :O |
| OO :O O|
| OO :OOO |
| OO : OOO|
| O : |
| OO :O O|
| OO :OOO |
| O : |
| OO : OO|
| OO :OOOO|
| OO :OO O|
| OO :OO O|
| OO :OOOO|
| OO :OOO |
| O :OOO |
| O : |
| O O: OOO|
| OO :O |
| OO : O|
| OOO: O |
| O : |
| OO :O O|
| OOO: OO|
| O : |
| OO :O O|
| OOO: O |
| OO:OOOO|
———–

After quicky extracting the punch cards into actual ASCII.. it was (overkill) but a fun half hour working out the Ruby code to give me the answer..
here’s the binary and the ruby follows…

class String
def convert_base(from, to)
self.to_i(from).to_s(to)
end
end

test = File.open(‘binary.txt’)
output = “”
while line = test.gets
output

The answer to task 3 was “Garage” … which was where the next clue was. I had to work out what the following meant:

Which led me to a place well known to me (admittedly first guess was out by ~50km…) where I got task 5

This was another fun but tricky one.. had to work out the amount of cash it would be if you covered NZ in $1 coins. I was out through excitement by about a factor of 100 the first time… but quickly corrected (yes, discovered I get quite excited and jump to an answer without thoroughly checking my workings.. I’d be a rubbish scientist!) ($639,429,962,458,034 was the number I got, but I measured the coin as 22mm… I didn’t look it up to see it was 22.5mm… so was probably out by a few billion)

Then it was onto a questionnaire..oh.. and I had to bake for my colleagues (that Lenny is a hard taskmaster!)

Then I got a picture of some cat food… and had to go round to the cats I’d looked after for some friends to solve the final puzzle. Well, final but one..

I have misplaced the last puzzle (which was an excellent one)… had to do some social engineering.. well, work out the sorts of places that Lenny might have gone to.. Will put it up in a bit!

All in all… lots of fun (and some frustration too.. which was silly on my behalf!). Thanks to all who helped contribute to the puzzles – and to the answers (I’d have been lost without you all), and thanks especially of course to Lenny. You’re a hard taskmaster! but a good one :)