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Updated 49 Days ago
Three Instant Stay At Home Date Nights
I love the cooler weather because it signals my favorite holidays - Halloween, Christmas, and my birthday, but as the summer heat fades the sun sets earlier and in the afternoons the mercury drops quickly. At around 5pm on a crisp fall Friday I drive home thinking about lazily wandering around the house all evening, wearing warm, furry socks and my favorite yoga pants. Alas, Friday is also the designated date night at Chez Meiners, so indulging in fluffy socks and staying in also has to meet the requirement of "date night" material. Being a woman of resource and skill, I discovered stay at home date night strategy that satisfies both the comfy clothes and date night requirements.
To ease the frenzy that starts to set in when I am feeling less than a jetsetter, I can travel the world in my own living room by planning a destination themed stay at home date night.
For a tour of Italy:
- On the Menu: Pizza or lasagna as a main dish or if you don't feel like cooking, a good place to pick up Italian to-go is Farotto's in Rock Hill. Don't forget to pick up a bottle of Chianti and some tiramisu for desert.
- In the DVD Player: "Moonstruck" or "The Godfather"
- Let's Play a Game: The Italian deck of cards is typically a 40 card pack, so remove the 8, 9, 10 and Joker cards from your 52-card deck and play a game of Scopa
For a tour of China:
- On the Menu: Take out, of course, but be sure to grab some chopsticks and fortune cookies so you can do it up proper. Call me a sell out if you must, but my favorite take out place is PF Chang's. They have both Kung-Pow Shrimp and Hot and Sour soup that are awesome - it's like a double sucker punch.
- In the DVD Player: "The Golden Child" or "The Last Emperor"
- Let's Play a Game: Mah Jong
For a tour of Vegas:
- On the Menu: Set up a snack and finger buffet with foods like steak medallions, shrimp cocktail, breads, cheeses, chicken wings, chips and salsa, basically anything that can be grazed upon throughout the night. I would recommend hoping to the grocer to pick most of this up, but ordering some wings from Syberg's won't hurt your cause... and yes, I have heard what they say about Hooters's wings and yes, I have also heard that it is not true.
- In the DVD Player: "Vegas Vacation" or "Goodfellas"
- Let's Play a Game: Gin Rummy
Though a stay at home destination date night sound like an oxymoron, it is a easy and inexpensive night that lets you and your significant other "go out" in your comfy clothes.
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.