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by Steven Bevacqua

 

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Jun
18th
Thu
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WIRED 17.07—Arrived in the mail today.  That’s me on page 18.

WIRED 17.07—Arrived in the mail today.  That’s me on page 18.
May
31st
Sun
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PRIZES

—A lot of you have asked what swag I scored after the New York Times article mentioned that JJ Abrams would be sending a few things my way for being the first to solve his puzzles.  Well, a couple of packages showed up at my doorstep this afternoon.  First off was a copy if the May issue of Wired signed by JJ.  Also, a few items he rated in his “Playlist” article: a copy of “Catcher in the Rye”, a copy of Kenny Shopsin’s “Eat Me”, Thomas Dolby’s “The Golden Age of Wireless” on CD, and most awesomely—the complete 156-episode, 28-DVD box set of The Twilight Zone.  One of my favorite TV shows… as a kid I used to religiously watch WPIX’s annual marathons and tape as many episodes as I could so I could watch them again.  Now they’re finally all mine!  But it didn’t end there, the second package was a tube—containing two “Star Trek” movie posters signed by JJ as well.  Some of you know I collect autographed movie posters, so these will get some prime real estate on my walls!
May
22nd
Fri
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May
14th
Thu
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Apr
26th
Sun
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QuotesThis Bevacqua guy must be a maniac. He solved the thing in a couple days and he’s already taking on the biggest mystery
madamimadam, on the unfiction ARG forums.
To be honest, I just get a little obsessive over unsolved puzzles.  I’m nowhere the caliber of anyone who can tackle a Sunday New York Times crossword.  But it has been fun googling my name the last week or so!
Apr
23rd
Thu
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MORE WIRED PUZZLES

—Still trying to answer some of the leftover questions in the WIRED issue.  Based on an idea from Nick Tierce on the Brad!cal blog, I converted the code on the “LOST numbers” page to letters based on a repeating cycle, where “A” could be encoded as 1, 27, 53, or “B” could be 2, 28, 54, etc.  Anyway, once the numbers were converted to letters, I tried a Vigenere cipher (inspired by the Kryptos article) and took random guesses at code keys.  Sure enough, by my sixth or seventh guess, I decoded the message:

“USE LETTERS BACKWARDS FROM END”

from the first page of numbers.  Now I have to figure out what the second page is all about.

Apr
21st
Tue
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Apr
20th
Mon
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Apr
19th
Sun
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STAY TUNED

—That’s what I was told to do after a surprising phone call woke me up Friday morning.  That, and “It’s gonna be cool”.  Mysterious!  I’ll let you know the news as soon as I get details…
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