My family and I will be leaving for an exciting cruise to Hawaii on Monday. In order to preserve the sanctity of this vacation, I have temporarily activated a CAPTCHA to block most, if not all, of the spam sent to this blog. Just to be clear on this issue, I hate CAPTCHAs. They unnecessarily inconvenience commentators by adding yet-another step to the commenting process and are sometimes difficult for even humans to decipher. With that said, I have activated the CAPTCHA a day early to ensure that there are no serious conflicts with the plugin before I leave, and it will be deactivated as soon as I have returned.
For this vacation, I have decided to employ the use of reCAPTCHA. In order to leave a comment during this period, you will need to enter the two words that you see, separated by a space. If you are not sure what the words are, either enter your best guess or click the reload button for a new set of words, and “visually impaired users can click the audio button to hear a set of digits that can be entered instead of the visual challenge.” Best of all, solving the CAPTCHA presented by reCAPTCHA helps to digitize books which are too difficult for computers to decipher alone. The following is a direct quote from reCAPTCHA’s help page.
By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see were taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, we are using the results of your efforts to help decipher them.
We’ll be back with plenty of new photos early next week. Until then, please enjoy the photos from our last vacation to Hawaii.
The Anti-Spam Monkey has been deployed.
[cross-posted from MacManX.com]
