Re-starting the blog, and results of the second contest

As you may have noticed, after a hiatus while the school year started, I'm back to blogging.

First, I never resolved the second contest.  No one solved the puzzle but Matt Nass made partial progress, so he gets 3 Shadow-points.  I'm going to leave the puzzle open and if anyone solves it they get one Shadow-point.  Here's the puzzle again, with a little bit filled in as a hint:

Instructions for the puzzle are here.

Also, I think that weekly was probably too frequent for the contests, so they're going to change to bi-weekly; I'll have another one out soon.

If there's anything you want me to write about, put it in the comments here.