Hello Readers! Greetings from the middle of intern season.

It's been really busy around the office this summer with a ton of fun and technical events going on. The weather has been a dream and the interns are having a wonderful time. Who could ask for anything more?

A couple Saturdays ago, several hundred Microsoft Interns met in one of the buildings on campus to solve a variety of puzzles and coding challenges. The all-day event pitted teams of interns from all different locations around the country in a super tough competition with puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty.

Brandon Unger, a Penn State May 2009 graduate, was kind enough to take these pictures of the future CEOs of Microsoft concentrating hard on winning first prize.

One of the puzzles was so hard that no team could solve it! It was a version of the old school video game Asteroids. You had to shoot the asteroids, and when you did a number flashed. Everyone thought that the number was code for something... but upon second look when the asteroids broke apart it displayed Braille letters. From those Braille letters it spelled out a clue to look at the spaceship on the game. When you looked closely at the spaceship it left a trail in Morse code which was the answer to the puzzle. WOW!

I would be lucky to get through that game without losing all my turns… let alone looking for those intense puzzle answers. I think it would be great to get a puzzle challenge going on the jobsblog soon… any takers?

- Janelle