GoneWacko’s Blog

20th birthday and new hair

I’ve finally got some pictures to show people, so it’s about time I blog about my 20th birthday and my new hair style.

Unpacking presents
Click for a bigger version.

On the 20th of June, I turned 20 years old. Because of various reasons, we celebrated my birthday on the evening of the 19th. Sander and Roel tricked me into coming along to the local Irish pub, Molly’s, to watch the football match (Portugal - Germany).
All my friends from Salo were in the pub with me. Then at 12:00 AM “Happy Birthday” was sung and I was presented with some presents.

Not much later we all headed on home, and whilst sitting in the living room of one of the apartments (the replacement Common Room ever since the janitor locked our actual common room due to ‘mischief’), it turned out that Aida had baked pie!

All in all a very good birthday, especially considering the fact that I did not expect any celebrations whatsoever.

Then, on Monday, I went to the hairdresser. Forced by my friends here in Finland, I let said hairdresser cut off a considerable amount of hair.
Unlike last time, I did get the chance to take ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.

Before and after pictures. Click to enlarge.

reCAPTCHA

Akismet is a lovely plugin that blocks a lot of comment spam.
For some reason, however, I’m lately getting increased amounts of comments that slip through; Either to the level where I at least have to review them myself, or to the level where they just appear on the website without any kind of moderation.

So today I decided that it was time to add another line of defence. Yes, I’ve added CAPTCHAs to the website.

I know that many people find these annoying. Especially the ones on such websites as RapidShare are thoroughly annoying and sometimes in fact impossible.
This one, however, is not so bad. For starters, the images are actually quite readable. This may make it easier for bots to automatically solve them as well, but in that case I still have Akismet to catch them in the act.

What really makes the CAPTCHAs I use better than most, however, is that I’ve gone for reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a captcha system (by the original inventor of CAPTCHAs) where the users actually help with digitizing books.

At school, I once attended a presentation by the inventor of CAPTCHAs, and he spoke of the various plans he had for ‘Human Computation’. One of these what is now known as reCAPTCHA, but another one of these was what is now known as the Google Image Labeler - a game which is addictive to play and provides google with labels to images for their image search at the same time.

So I hope these CAPTCHAs won’t annoy anyone. It’s not like there are that many people posting comments on here anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

Early birthday present

Recently we were talking about teddy bears in #tycoon. It turned out quite many people in the channel actually still had teddy bears. I said I had never had one (which is true; Although I did have various plushies as a child) and that I didn’t understand why so many still had them as (relatively) adult people.

Spencer Bear.
Click for a bigger version.

I may also have said something about setting one on fire if I did still have a teddy bear…

As you may or may not know, I’m turning 20 years old on Friday the 20th of June.
Today someone rang the doorbell, and when I opened it it turned out to be the mail man with a package.

After opening it I found the object you see to the right (unless you’re reading this on planet.tt-forums.net in which case it’s somewhere above this text; Screw you!), together with the note you see below:

The card that came with it. Nice HTML escaping!

Thank you Tenebrae for your gift! And after noticing how incredibly soft it is, I promise not to set it on fire

New TV

Whilst I sit here in my 12 m² room in Finland, my parents went and bought a new TV with virtually the same dimensions…

A 46″ Sony Bravia is now making the living room in the Netherlands so much more aesthetically pleasing…

The box the TV came in. Humongous! Click for a bigger version.

And here it is in the living room! Click for a bigger version.

The furniture under it is of course a temporary piece.