First, a story of old. During my first week at MIT, in fact the week before classes even started, there is a week-long graduate student orientation. This involves various activities including meet-and-greets, trips to go fruit-picking and boating on the water and the like, receptions with food, and the like. Interestingly, ours also included a scavenger hunt. If you read these three posts, you will know that I (and clearly many of my friends, as well) have a particular penchant for scavenging. Our team did not do so poorly that year, but there was one spot that escaped us -- the "Holy Grail" of MIT hacking (see also this post). A little bird told us that it was located somewhere in Building 9, likely in a basement somewhere. Now, if you've never poked around the bowels of MIT, you won't know this, but MIT can be pretty intimidating in its winding underground corridors stuffed with nuclear engineering labs and sub-basements, and our essential flaw was that we weren't quite cheeky enough to find what we were looking for.Later that evening there was another event, a reception in Morss Hall, and it was very nice -- excellent food, cheap (well, free for us, technically) wine, and beers. After, we crossed the Mass Ave bridge into Boston and went to a "bro" bar on the other side, the Pourhouse.
Well, as you might imagine, by the end of the night our spirits were fairly high. We crossed back into Cambridge and decided that we would indeed find that item from our list. So, we re-entered the basement, and apparently we had drunk our courage right up, because find the ORIGINAL hacker's code, we did.
Tonight, I saved my friends some drinking and some courage and re-found it for them. We markered up the walls and enjoyed the small shrine of hacking that resides in ... well, I can't tell you exactly where :).
