Earlier start today. 0930 instead of 1000. Still helped to lock up today but the difference this time was that I got to leave earlier instead of staying to the end and setting the alarms.
It was cold again today, not as much as yesterday but at least for the most part it remained mostly sunny.
We weren't too busy, considering it was a Saturday, but it was busy enough to keep me busy. I love being able to chat to random strangers and not be considered weird.
I did a bit of reading this morning, a chapter of Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan. I love his books. I think they're aimed at older children, but I think that's part of the reason I love them. Doesn't try and fluff up the language to sound impressive like some adult books do. They're easy to read and so well written. This is the second series that follows the adventures of Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon. The first series was the Percy Jackson series and followed only Greek demigods in the modern world. This series has expanded to include Roman demigods too. He also wrote The Kane Chronicles, following magicians of Egyptian mythology in the modern world. There's Magnus Chase, his Norse series, a series following Apollo, the sun god... I think that's all of them. Suffice to say, there's plenty to choose from, they're all mythology based and all really good!
I also did a bit of reading at work. Where I was off work for so long, I've been reading our museum guide book to refresh my memory on some of the key dates and events. I'm classing this as my non-fiction book.
When I got home, we walked the dog around the cemetery, I had my dinner, then had a shower. Dad and I watched the latest episode of Picard, then I got into researching ciphers for my Codebreaker Badge.
I started with the Vigenère Cipher. It was created in 1553 but wasn't cracked until 1863.
It's based on the letters of a keyword. The alphabet is written in a grid and a keyword is chosen. This word is written multiple times until the length of the phrase to encode is completed.
For my example, I've chosen REBELBADGES and my keyword is CHARLEY.
Above is a copy of a Vigenère square, or a tabula recta, from Wikipedia.
The word to be encrypted, known as a plaintext, is written without spaces and the keyword is written with the same amount of characters.
REBELBADGES
CHARLEYCHARL
So for example to find the right letter for the 'R', I look on Row C until I find 'R' on the row. It falls in Column P. So the code for this phrase is
PXBNAXCBZEH
To decrypt it, the principle is mostly the same. Start with the letter from the keyword, so again, this is Row C, match it to Column P and you find 'R' in the grid.
So yeah, that was my day. That cipher took a lot longer to research than I expected, mostly because I kept getting so confused when trying to actually work it out. I'll do another one another day.
I'll finish off with some gratitude of course.
- Sunny weather. Even though it was cold today, it wasn't too bad because it was bright.
- A nice hot shower.
- Clean pyjamas in fresh bed sheets.
- Leftover take away for lunch.
- Catching up on the latest episode of a really good series. This time round, it's Picard. Love it. Though so far, series 1 was better.
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