Prologue:

Before starting this contest I had reservations. Being the 2nd person to solve the first challenge is a dubious honor. It means that you finished it, but it also means you will have to go through the torture again if you want the title. It is fun and addictive, but I admit I was dreading this contest. I should mention there were several people working on this who were ahead of me at one point or another especially Lisa Offutt who finished hours behind me.

So this is my story of how I solved the second challenge.

Monday:

1st clue is posted, I see a pretty red box & click on it before reading the clue. Apparently this is the right thing to do & designed by someone who thinks like me, bodes well....on to find Sue, Carl, Janice & the ubiquitous Mr. X. Search for Janice on several sites, do some picture searching for the silly bird. Notice that the field is a football field, so it is not St. Louis cardinals. I decide this is too difficult without other clues & go back to work.

Tuesday:

more of the same, but too much work today to play very much.

Wednesday:

really busy at work, SC must post a clue soon...

Thursday Morning:

Get a break from one of my hiring managers who gives me until next week to get him resumes, and glory be; finally a clue...the columns and the strange spelling of webb. Joplin, Mo had been on my radar anyway and a quick search of Google maps confirms Webb City is a suburb, if towns of 45,000 can have suburbs. I had changed my profile on Tribe to read Janis before I realized it was relevant. Sorry to Chris who mistook me for SourceCon, I was just messing with you. Found the HS band's website & I am off and running now.

Later that morning:

OK, so I have a date, part of a name, a school and I am thinking classmates. Sure enough it is there. Now it gets interesting. Lots of info on the site. Two maps & some additional information looks promising. A treasure trove of information is on the site. I spend some time on the LA map first, it seems too random & Google Map's street view confirms it is not quite right. Look at the second map & this looks good. Right there, I see MySpace is in the building & check it out. It takes a few tries before I realize that Sue was living in LA, but working in SF? What a commute with gas prices these days! On to the next clue.

Even Later Thursday morning:

OK the MySpace page was wordy and more misleading than the rest. Yikes the text was long, but I recognized it immediately as the SourceCon website text. The only thing I was sure of was that it would be on YouTube and approximately 3 minutes and 14 seconds into a video.
This was a tough clue so here are some of the things I tried before solving it:
Analyze missing text, search for "X" words
Compare all names of "heroes" to known industry experts
Analyze all numbers on the "heroes" section
Find Justin Spivey's Mother's tribute on YouTube, listen till 3:14, needs better music but nice

Finally, I start putting phrases from the text into the search function, and find the answer. Who would have guessed it was purple squirrels? Then I found the awesome squirrel video. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, you should. Kudos to SourceCon for this challenging yet brilliant clue. Itwas hidden in the video at 3 min, 14 sec: "Robert Miller plays James Bond."

Thursday afternoon:

The adrenaline is kicking in now. I know this is fishy. Robert Miller never played James Bond. Robert Miller was a spy, but the similarities ended there. I check Google, nothing, Wikipedia, nothing. I start searching YouTube for Robert Miller James Bond, and 007 and it was right there! I watch final video & realize that I am not there yet (dammit) but there is still one more clue. You have got to be kidding! Another clue.

Late Thursday afternoon:

Skip exercise class because I think I am minutes away from solving this but the joke is on me this time. 24 hours of distractions, false leads, and overall misdirection were to follow.

Final Clue:

You will find the answer on another well used social networking site and of course, more numbers. I decide to ignore the numbers for now. I type in well used social networking site and come up with the used panty social networking site. Starting to wonder if this contest is taking a very strange turn. However, if you type in the phrase in quotes on Google, you get a lone reference to Facebook. That must be it, way too much of a coincidence for it not to be relevant.

So begins my trip down the rabbit hole where I eventually swallowed the blue pill instead of the red pill.

This clue has so much text. I realized it was from Wikipedia & started a host of searches on serendipity, LSD, and Louis Pasteur to name a few. Hours go by, I get a little punchy and start hitting the random button on Wikipedia. Time for bed, I will not be solving this riddle today.

Friday morning:

I wake up, my eyes stinging from the glare of the monitor, my body aching from sitting for too long and skipping class. I am convinced today will be the day. Still, I get nowhere; I am in the waiting place. I start going back to old clues, rethinking my logic, twiddling my thumbs. I figure out the red logo at the beginning, if you read it upside down and backwards is youtube's logo. Great! I am already past that point. I decide to reevaluate the numbers in so many ways I can't count. I keep down the wrong path for several more hours until....

Friday afternoon:

I want to hurt someone or cry, but I can't decide which so I take a closer look at the site. I click on the more details button next to the date it was posted, something I had done a few times already. I had noticed before that on Robert Miller's site there was a reference to RobW, but this time I realized that it should have been RobM. A quick google search of the exact phrase and I've got it! Unlike the last challenge, this time, I see those magic words on the final site: There have been 0 views on this profile.