May 22 — Captcha hell

After Maker Faire Robin flew back to Canada and I went home and put all the buckets in the basement, and all the rest of the stuff in my room.

I sent out an email to all the addresses I had collected with the seed germination kit instructions, and a message saying to look out for the mailing list sign up email, meaning to get everyone the sign up email before morning.

Unfortunately, the poor WiFi at Maker Faire meant that instead of using my prepared Google Form that had a yes / no option for mailing list sign up, I had to get people to type their emails in.

I had told people that I would send them the digital instructions for the seed kits and give them the OPTION of signing up for my mailing list, so it wasn’t ethical to just import all the email addresses into the mailing list. So I started entering all the email addresses into my Subscribe form to make sure they would have the opportunity to confirm or decline, only to find that I kept having to fill out captchas to prove that I wasn’t a robot! I looked into alternatives and couldn’t find any. I fell asleep while trying to finish this last night and woke up this morning super stressed out and sad. I called Robin and he helped me finish the last 70 out of 210 emails since it was Victoria Day in Canada and he didn’t have work.

A lot of the captchas were about street signs and vehicles and hills so at the very least I’m probably helping some self driving cars.