Kelly Smith, a long-time reference for me as to “what’s worth checking out” has done it again - he’s mentioned a great furniture company in Seattle, Henrybuilt.com.

What I don’t understand is how Justine and I can be making over $100,000 a year, both have personal savings, 401k’s, and beyond and still be struggling and drooling over things like nice furniture.

We live just upstairs and one building over from Chartreuse, and it kills me that we struggle. Sure, the Magstand thing still grows, money is coming in from family and friends to keep me in enough money to fund the evenings and weekends, but the Ross shopping and deciding if we take our lunch all five days or can afford a Friday dinner together is getting old.

As I’ve posted before, I spend part of my week reading up on the life of Riverbend (at the Baghdad Burning blog). Today, a new post appeared with what I can only describe as a heartbreaking statement:

The first evening we arrived, exhausted, dragging suitcases behind us, morale a little bit bruised, the Kurdish family sent over their representative – a 9 year old boy missing two front teeth, holding a lopsided cake, “We’re Abu Mohammed’s house- across from you- mama says if you need anything, just ask- this is our number. Abu Dalia’s family live upstairs, this is their number. We’re all Iraqi too… Welcome to the building.”

I cried that night because for the first time in a long time, so far away from home, I felt the unity that had been stolen from us in 2003.

That paragraph came at the end of her most recent post on moving to Syria, and admitting that she and her family are now refugees.

Why does the world tolerate our war?

Many, if not all, of you by now should be familiar with the term Captcha. If not, here’s a short Wikipedia entry describing what a Captcha is:

A CAPTCHA (IPA: /?kæpt??/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. “CAPTCHA” is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. A CAPTCHA involves one computer (a server) which asks a user to complete a test. While the computer is able to generate and grade the test, it is not able to solve the test on its own. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human.

To me, the idea of a Captcha was brilliant. That was, until the other day when I saw a news report on BBC about reCaptcha, Luis von Ahn’s new path from the original Captcha format. Instead of requiring visitors to enter random strings, the strings now represent real printed documents (basically, turning every Web site visitor into a human OCR). I am so blown away by this technology that I am glad to add it to my Web site, and will be rolling it out to Justine’s Fresh and Tasty Design blog, the OSNAP.net blog, and of course the Magstand Web site.

You’re welcome to read the reCaptcha Web site, or the press release from Carnegie Mellon, but in basic terms the reCaptcha project turns anti-spam forms into digitizing machines. Word by word, Web participants will be digitizing thousands of pages of printed volumes that automated computer software has been yet unable to accomplish.

Just to illustrate, compare these two graphics:

This is a “CAPTCHA” image, generated by a computer in order to test the “human-ness” of a user. The string of text is randomly generated, and once the generating server is satisfied with a users response, the image is destroyed (along with the answer). Compare that with a reCaptcha:

This is a reCaptcha sequence. The two words (strings) in the white area represent two real scanned words from a printed source. If the user enters a satisfying response in the “type the two words” box, the user is granted whatever permission the form controls, and the image and response are saved in a repository, thus assisting in the digitization of the printed source.

I am dwarfed by such brilliance.

I don’t usually get sucked into the Bush-era scare tactics, but this message on the Seattle Metro bus (line #8) scared me a little this morning.

I’ve heard about these ads on metro buses in New York, some that even listed the number of 911 calls and incidents (I don’t have the exact quote, but it was something like “19,000 people saw something - and did something about it!”). That kind of “watch your neighbor” stuff scares the bejesus out of me. Way to go, Homeland Security. Way to go.