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Updated 69 Days ago
You Know You Love Your Car When You Name It
One lazy school night (I think it was Tuesday) I sat down to watch a great little indie-comedy, The Dog Problem, starring Giovani Ribisi. I was drawn to it because I connected with title (my dog problems are a whole other post), but I stayed because it got me thinking about my car. Weird right? Well, in the movie Ribisi becomes a reluctant dog owner - that is not a spoiler, it's in the title - and thus his dog remains nameless for a good portion of the film. As I was watching, it occurred to me that I am pretty attached to my car because even though he isn't some restored or sporty deal, I decided to name him.
I will not sugar coat this - my car, like many others, is a piece of (mad-lib time). He has broken down on me a few times, stinks a little, and is generally tragic. He pays takes the punches well though - I have driven over a number of curbs which have resulted in rust spots, I haven't washed him in a year and a half, and there is more dog hair on his upholstery than there is on my dog. But he still gets me where I am going and, unlike a new car, I am not worried about my weekly habit of dumping coffee all over the car. He takes it in stride.... he is a cool cat and I call him Disco Stu.
Disco Stu and I are inseparable. I use inseparable loosely (but use it all the same) because not only do I not have another car, but because as I am nearing my final payment the inevitable is approaching - he is probably going to make me replace him. That's the way it always happens, isn't it?
It is bittersweet. Disco Stu doesn't have power windows or locks, the vents only blow air at one setting (full on wind tunnel), and he tends to die mid-turn when I have the ac running and make a right. A different car may be nice, but since I named him it would be hard to replace him.
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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Her name is Abby. She turned 4 in May. I took her out to Surf and Sirloin for her birthday and parked her right in front with a view of the fountain, under a light so her shiny clean exterior sparkled for all to admire.
She's perfect. She's classy. She's fun and sporty. She's always clean on the inside, but not afraid to get a little dirty. She's very pretty and low maintenance.
She has everything I could ever need in a car- XM, navi system, sunroof, comfy seats. She takes good care of me, and I take good care of her. I'm going to keep her until she dies.
Do you think Calvary would let me bury her in the family plot??
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.