Goals (mostly for other people)

First off, congratulations to Jake on his new blog. He joins me in the Three Blog Club. More than that, I am glad that he’s refocusing on his goals. Entrepreneurial (it’s going to take me a while to get comfortable spelling this one) goals are hard to accomplish, but if anyone I know has the determination to see them through, it’s Jake. I plan to help him out where I can.

It’s ironic that today, the day that he posted his first entry to the new blog, I saw a place where one entrepreneurial idea he had was being implemented by someone else. If we had done better with that idea (like done anything with it), maybe we could be making a modest income from one of the more successful malls in northern Utah.

I think that I have a little too much risk aversion to throw my lot into a new enterprise. I’ve landed myself in one of the most stable jobs in the country, and I don’t have any immediate plans to add risk there.

On a related note, I’ve started practicing cryptography. I’m trying to hone my code breaking skills so that I can work on even harder codes. Interested parties can help my by giving me text files that contain messages that are 300 or more letters long. I’m especially looking for text that contains unusual frequency patterns (few occurrences of the word “the”, higher frequency of uncommon letters like b, c, f, g, j, k, m, p, (not so much) q, v, w, x, y, and z, and fewer occurrences of letters like e, t, and n). The best success I’ve had at finding text that’s hard to decode came from a blog of a person who learned to type in chat rooms. His review of Hitch took me quite a while to crack. Interested parties can send me texts at (first initial)(last name) at my addresses at hotmail.com or (preferably) comcast.net.

I’ll take any submitted texts and run them through a program that removes spaces, punctuation, and capitalization (already putting most texts on par with Rayjay’s work, except in terms of spelling), and then replacing the letters with a random substitution key. Analysis and decryption is done using some programs I’ve written in C++, and Excel. Code and executables are available on request.