Friday, September 16, 2011

Are you a glombrob?

Just now, I posted a comment on one of my students' discussions blogs, and the CAPTCHA word that came up was "glombrob."  First, doesn't that sound like it should really be a word?  Glombrob:  would it be a noun or a verb?  n.  a brob, or blob with some definition (because of the hard r sound), that gloms on to...a person?  v.  the act of a mob of bees glomming on to a person or idea...no, probably not.  I'm going with noun for now.

I often cannot read these CAPTCHA phrases, and therefore am sometimes mistaken for a spambot.  Ok.  How does that last sentence even make sense?  In my effort to write this blog, I searched for the term used for those nonsense words that you have to type in to prove you're not a computer.  CAPTCHA actually stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart," hence the all caps. Didja know that?  Kind of convenient that it also sounds like "capture."  Then I had to look up the word "turing" which I will not attempt to explain in this post.  Then there's the fact that there are actually such things as spambots, and that I can be mistaken for one if I fail to read the word "glombrob" and correctly type it in.  Perhaps I'm showing my age a bit, but really?  I'm picturing a bunch of tiny robots that smell like potted meat running around, breaking into people's blogs and posting things like "Your mama dresses you funny." 

And by the way, spambots are web crawlers that harvest email addresses which are then sold and used to send spam.  Let's look at the language here:  web crawlers and harvest.  Forgive me for tangenting (and yes, I'm giving tangent verb status) to the Matrix.  Wherein Keanu Reeves is the chosen one.  Yikes-o-rama.

So...make an effort to use your CAPTCHA phrase today, and you, too can be a glombrob:  n.  a person who gloms on to a blog and/or blog topic that contains numerous misspellings and/or mistaken ideas.

1 comment:

  1. Love this one! I had to look up the word Turing out of curiosity.

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