lexiphanic

• I saw the Bourne Ultimatum today with my dad. A good movie for seeing with your dad, unless he is a huge pacifist or hates Matt Damon. I liked it, and I was surprised that I liked it.


• Had a really great chat with my dad afterwards. In many ways, I don't really know who he is as it's only in the last year or so that he's started to open up to me. I suspect it's because I've been reaching out to him, as he never made much of an attempt himself to do so.


• I've always been concerned about him not having any hobbies: he goes to work early each day, works, then comes home and sits in front of the TV until he's ready to go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. He has no creative outlets, and I suspect it's a big cause of why he shouts at the TV news to "lock-up-and-throw-away-the-key!" anyone that does anything even remotely criminal (like crash a stolen car).


• Today I talked to him about his interests. I'm going to drive him out for a session of bushwalking and nature photography this Saturday and he seemed genuinely delighted by the idea. He wants to do some gardening in the backyard, too, so I might see if I can't encourage him to do that somehow very soon. What I also discovered is that he's still very much into repairing cars (he was a panel beater and car painter [or sprayer, or whatever they're called] for many years before he changed careers and met my mother). He wishes he had a space with a shed where he could fix cars and take them apart and just generally make a working one out of two broken ones. I wish there was a way I could give him the opportunity to do that somehow. Nothing comes to mind at the moment, though (and I want a way for him to be able to easily bail out if he discovers he's just not as able as he used to be).

Big rocket-sciency statement coming up!:
Sp4m iz t3h gh3y. Also, if you work in PR, quit so that you can reclaim your soul. You represent all that is evil in this world.

Moving on.... I've run a few websites with spam issues and I hate making my users jump through hoops to get around it.
I spotted this in my browsing today: reCAPTCHA.
Simple definition of a captcha: those things where you have to type in the word or number from the picture to submit the form - since computers can't read the picture, they can't get past this step ... bye bye spam.
reCAPTCHA is really clever though... instead of it being totally random, it instead gets you to type in words from an image from an actual book that is being digitized. This means fulfilling the captcha is actually contributing something to someone somewhere: not just stopping spam. Your extra step becomes more productive than you think.
I feel honoured to be living in an age of such genius: imagine what it could do if that genius wasn't busy solving our mass-marketing problems!