Before I get to talking about my early disposition conference with the DA and the judge, let me talk about a code set developed in the 16th century called a Vigenere Cipher. I discovered this in researching a sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley known as Kryptos.

Vigenere Ciphers are weak by today's standards, where MD5 and SHA-1 reign supreme. Even so, I'm intrigued by its ease of use, and the fact that for a text-based algorithm, it hides patterns. Encoding the phrase "She sells seashells" which has lots of repeating letters, using the keyword "shore" gets us

SHE SELLS SEASHELLS
SHO RESHO RESHORESH
--- ----- ---------
KOS JIDSG JISZVVPDZ

Intriguing stuff.

Of course, a veteran code-cracker would note that JIxxx occurs twice, and that the Z's are 5 characters apart, and could deduce, then, that the key is 5 characters long. Let's use the keyword "sea" instead.

SHE SELLS SEASHELLS
SEA SEASE ASEASEASE
--- ----- ---------
KLE KILDW SWESZILDW

That one's more confusing because the K's have a distance of 3 and the W's have a distance of 2 and then 7.

EDC went okay. Right now I'm looking at doing a minimum of 90 days of jail time, which is the legal minimum for first-time offenders in DUIs that cause injury. Judge seems okay so far; the police report has my BAC at 0.15, which is less than twice the legal limit, and so at least it wasn't an obscene amount, and the judge's interest wasn't piqued by that amount. I was afraid that he would use me and my case as a political statement; DUIs are a hot-button issue at the moment.

But right now there is no resolution. If they offer the 90 day minimum, I'm likely to accept it because the judge seems to be okay with work furlough. Stay tuned...