The other day I was with a group of friends and was introduced to a new person. As part of the usual formalities, we started talking about where we worked. She said she worked for ABC, and I replied, “Woah, you work on BitTorrent client software?!”, only to have a mutual friend laugh and say, “No, she meant ABC, the broadcasting company.” Hello, my name is stevec, and I am a geek.

Combine two of my favorite ways to waste time, and you get a winner. I’ve stumbled accross these Google puzzles from 2003, which I find more fun and challenging than the rather plebian (though still entertaining) “The Da Vinci Code Quest” puzzles Google published recently. It took me about one hour to solve the three puzzles from 2003. I spent most of the time on the last one, which is one of those things you could either get right away in a few seconds, or first waste half an hour of useless pondering on before seeing the answer in a sudden epiphany.