reCAPTCHA seems to be making the rounds quite widely right now, but I thought it was too neat to not mention it. Reminiscent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, reCAPTCHA is a clever way of distributing the word-recognition work involved in scanning old books, and, at the same time, providing humanness-credentials needed to foil spambots. And it’s accessible, too (though there’s no OCR benefits from the audio version)!

We’re going to the Storås Festival (in Finnish) again this year, and you’re invited! We’ve organized a trip to the festival from Finland twice before, and the experience has been fantastic: good people, new friends, a lot of fun, and a great atmosphere. (And this from a person who’s not really all that into rock festivals.)

There’s been a lot of interest in the trip this year, but it’s too early to tell how many’ll end up going. So there’s still room if you’re interested. The bus departs from Helsinki on Monday, July 23. We arrive in Stockholm the next morning, and may pick up more passengers there. We return to Finland on Monday night, the 30th of July. The whole package costs some 150 euros, including bus and ferry passage and a three-day pass to the festival.

The official festival site is in Norwegian, of course.

Trying to stave away the boredom of being home sick, I ran across a few amusing dog stories. When your dog knows quantum physics, you may have some strange conversations, such as the certainty of steak falling and the reasonable expectation of bunnies made of cheese.

Then again, a curious, hungry, and stubborn dog can cause plenty of annoyance without knowing quantum physics. Not to mention dogs in elk.

I’m also learning about lolcats and kitty pidgin. Also see Wikipedia’s entry on lolcats.