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Updated 65 Days ago
Romance: Dapper to Crapper In No Time
I was completely floored when I logged on to MySpace today to do the typical mindless browsing when I came across something that made me whack my boyfriend in the back of the head and say, “Hey, how come you don’t do anything like this for me anymore?”
An old friend of mine posted a picture of 20 cutout paper hearts that her boyfriend had strewn across the apartment for her to find. Some of the messages included ‘You have the cutest smile’ and ‘You make everything better’. (All together now: Awwww.)
Surely, they are still in that puppy love phase. (Cynicism you say? Bah! OK, maybe...) They certainly haven’t been living together for years. Things like that stop after time, right?
Most of us would refer to it as the “Comfort Zone". That's Y-1 on the grid, or Year One-ish.
I have now shacked up with my significant other (S.O.) now for about two years. I would say the first year or so was great. We had many fancy dinners, movie nights and the cheesy ‘I’m thinking of you’ notes – it was all hunky dory.
Then slowly, we evolved into that couple bickering about whose TV shows should take priority. The sweet nothings soon faded away and were replaced with dialogue similar to, but certainly not limited to:
· “Oh, you want me to close the bathroom door? But I’ll just be a minute…”
· “Pants? I don’t need to wear those anymore between the hours of 4 PM and 7 AM. What’s the point?”
· “Why go out when we can pop DiGiorno’s in the oven? No? But hun, it's three meat!”
· 1 PM Sunday: “Shower? Nah, not today. Maybe on Monday. I’m about to conquer the criminal underworld in Grand Theft Auto.”
Some of those may be a little exaggerated, but you get the point. I can’t put all the blame on him, as I too am in the “Comfort Zone.” I’ll admit, over time I opt more for an “au natural” look and sit right on the couch next to him sporting my team building exercise shirt from '99. (If you don't get that reference you need to watch more of these guys.)
After talking with some friends, they agreed that most of the romantic hoopla came to a screeching halt after a couple years of dating and/or the one-year mark of living together. Sure there are a few romantic gestures here and there, but the longer a relationship the more spaced out they seem to become.
I was going to leave you with some links to romantic ideas, but they all seem so generic. Who needs mainstream ideas anyway? Get your own! Or let’s pool them and see what the ToastedRav community is made of.
Any Casanova’s in the bunch? Ladies, any sweet stories?
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#1) Brings flowers often (without cheating!) AND (drum roll please)
#2) brings me twin kittens (he describes cats as 'good with BBQue Sauce')
Sweet as peaches is still alive & well!
Not clever enough to upload a picture, but the babies are awweeee too!
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.