I just posted an ad on craigslist, but to prove I'm not a web bot or automated script, I was asked to type in the word the appears above.
WTF?!
Apparently it says "MANUS", although the only reason I know this is because there was an option to listen to the word read aloud, presumably for the visually impaired.
These reverse Turing tests are called CAPTCHAs. Last year, my brother Andy posted about his own problem passing one of them.
Maybe robotism runs in families?
Well, not really.
Actually, it was just the tipping point that made blogs finally seem worthwhile.
For me, Safari 2.0 did for blogging what iTunes 4.9 did for podcasting. (How's that for geeky Mac reference?)
A few years ago, I helped my friend Nicole set up her blog. At the time, I considered starting my own, but they seemed mostly vain and pointless.
(I'm not sure why that stopped me, since I had already spent countless hours building a vain and pointless personal website.)
But that website is fairly static and functions mainly as an online museum to myself. More importantly, it doesn't provide any incentive to keep writing, which is something I've been trying to force myself to do ever since finishing my last writing assignment in college.
To wit, this blog. Thanks to RSS, I've recently started following a handful of blogs, created by friends, family members, and a few screenwriters. So in the spirit of radical originality, I decided that I'm gonna write one too.
At least for the few weeks that my attention span will probably hold out.