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Updated 97 Days ago
Shoes : From Covet to Closet
It's the little things in life that make me happy (a smaller butt, small well designed jewelry...) One of the things that makes me so happy about my new job here at Toasted Rav is that I can now wear that pile of open-toed shoes that I couldn't when I was working in a conservative business environment. I now have more fun getting dressed in the morning, because I pick out my shoes first and the pull everything together based on that choice - it's like shoes are Garanimals for grownups.
The more I shop, the more I find that I am in love with very expensive shoes... namely Christian Louboutin's (prices range from about $500 to well over $1,000 per pair!), but I am not comfortable spending more on a pair of shoes than I do on car insurance so I have to get creative to take my favorite looks from something I covet to something that lives in my closet. One of the answers to my shoe problem comes in the form of shoe guy Steve Madden. For example, here is a pair of Christian Louboutin I covet:
and here is a pair of Steve Maddens that could actually go in my closet ($80): 
Another Louboutin I covet:
and a similar pair by Steve Madden for my closet ($99):
One last covet from Mr. Louboutin:
and a treat for my closet courtesy of Steve Madden ($109):
I am not an ex-reality television star nor did I play one on TV, so I shop on a budget and I think that saving money and still wearing styles I love is really all about just getting a sense of what I like and being patient enough to shop around until I find it.
I also recently started using Polyvore to pull together pictures of my favorite shoes, accessories, and clothing so that I can keep track of what I love but can't afford. I use the site go on virtual shopping trips when I don't feel like working I am eating lunch (thank you "Alt+Tab"), and before I shop within my practical budget it helps remind me of what to look for in any potential additions to my wardrobe. Fair warning: Polyvore is potentially more addictive than caffeine.
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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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.