Daily Archives: April 20, 2009

My father-in-law tells a little story from time to time.  Mostly when his family is trying to decide on a place to eat.  In this story, he tells of the sad tales of several restaurants that my in-laws would find and frequent, then find delightful, and then finally find closed not long after discovering them.

I am thinking of this story as I watch the latest episode of Kings on Hulu.  Kings, the story of the rise of King David set in more modern times (if in a fictional kingdom), seems to be destined for Cancellation Land as it’s banished to Saturday nights.

There’s five nines probability that Dollhouse is also heading out the door.  Though some people (who will remain nameless) might disagree, I thought the show showed great promise.  I was looking forward to see if Wheedon could take what was admittedly a weaker first season and build on the premise.

More than likely I will never know.

The threat of cancellation extends even to shows I’m told that I would almost definitely like like The Sarah Connors Chronicles.  It also stands on the brink of cancellation.

Battlestar Galactica negotiated a graceful termination, if gracelessly executed.

I could go on.

So what’s wrong with my tastes?  I want to blame the viewing populace of America, but given that I’m in the vast vast minority, the fault has to lie with me.

Then again, perhaps I should thank the great masses for killing off my shows.  I like ideas more than I like reality.  Ideas are always fresh and crisp and grand.  Reality is hard and dusty and sometimes a little boring.  Maybe it’s better for shows to die when they’re closer to ideas (Kings) then when they’re full-on reality (Battlestar Galactica).

Well, either way it looks like I’m going to end up freeing up time to discover other new shows to kill.

I was signing up for a free account with some Mind-Mapping software, when I was presented with a familiar site:  a captcha.

For those of you out there with less background in computer mumbo-jumbo, a captcah is a small computer generated image of numbers and letters.  Usually the image has some “noise” in it (random specks of varying colors preventing it from being a perfect image of text), or letters in wierd locations relative to each other (some up high in the image or down low), or random phrases, or whatever.

The point of the captcha is verification.  Not so much verification that you are who you say you are.  Verification that you are what you say you are:  that you are human, and not just some bot-program signing up for free accounts or sending random comments and emails, etc.

Recently I’ve noticed a lot more captchas using phrases of real words rather than random numbers and letters.   There’s a usability component at work here.  Today I was presented with the phrase “Coyest Sunday”.

There’s something about that phrase that just hit a note with me.  Beyond their basic definition and use, i’m not that familiar with the algorithms behind captchas.   I’m sure there’s some dictionary out there, and maybe there’s a bit of logic that randomly matches an acceptable adjective to an acceptable noun.

It’s hard to believe that a random algorithm could create something that’s so striking to me.   It’s seems rather poetical.

Maybe I should change the name of this blog.