Well, after spending an hour typing meaningless text, I decided to stop. There’s still plenty of money left, but it’s just not worth my time to sit here on a work day doing a totally boring task, over and over and over and over just to get $100. To all the rest of you, I wish you the best. But, honestly, this year’s contest was just completely uninspired, in my opinion. The system seemed to work ok, which I guess is an advance, but typing in Capchas was not only tedious, but completely frustrating for several reasons. One, I’m not a touch typist (yes, Mom, I should have practiced.) Two, many of the images presented to me ([perhaps 30%), were so garbled that could only guess at what I was being asked to type. Three, Capchas? Really? Geez. Maybe some electronic trivia, or something interesting to think about. But, Capchas? Sorry, that’s just a completely stupid idea.
Captchas are kind of dull - they could have made a way to alternate between those, trivia questions, taking them to a random page - asking the user if they have purchased one before, novel kind of things like that. People -do- seem to be winning, but perhaps some ideas for next time?
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The captchas are such poor quality, I have gotten eye strain and I am getting a headache. I get that your trying to avoid machine reading, but bhy in the world do they have to use captchas that even humans can not read!?
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There is a way to game their supposedly randomizer. Apparently if you watch the webcam there is a train in the office with red paint that triggers the geiger counter when it goes by. Of course those of us behind a work firewall today have no chance to see that train or the ustream feed at all.
Kinda lame actually.
I keep getting images that are equations, formulas, or in foreign languages…
/mike
Yeah, it was no fun, but after 2 1/2 hours and about 2500 captcha tries I finally won. First time I’ve won in the 3 years that I’ve tried. I was starting to get depressed that I might not win.
Part of the reason for using captcha was so the site didn’t get so lagged down like it did in previous years. Last year I tried for like 5 hours, got 2 trivia questions answered and had won $20, but then I could not load the page again and somehow I lost the $20 that I had won. I was pretty ticked off because of it, but now I am happy again.
Thank you SparkFun!!!
DeadlyFoez:
Yeah, it was no fun, but after 2 1/2 hours and about 2500 captcha tries I finally won. First time I’ve won in the 3 years that I’ve tried. I was starting to get depressed that I might not win.Part of the reason for using captcha was so the site didn’t get so lagged down like it did in previous years. Last year I tried for like 5 hours, got 2 trivia questions answered and had won $20, but then I could not load the page again and somehow I lost the $20 that I had won. I was pretty ticked off because of it, but now I am happy again.
Thank you SparkFun!!!
Congratulations - you earned it. I think what we are trying to constructively say is there needs to be a more -fun- and fair way to do it - Endless CAPTCHAs of Death is so boring - it’s very fair…but terribly terribly boring. I won’t be doing Free Day in the future if this is what it will be from now on.
Comrad_Durandal:
… if this is what it will be from now on.
It definitely won’t be like this again. Assuming there are future Free Days, to change it up every time is a rule.
I have to agree on this,
It wasn’t fun at all… In total I spend more than 3 hours without luck. If I made some research I might have doubled the speed of typing and also my chance on winning. To be honest I find that you guys haven’t made it fair to most of us.
For those who are not familiar with what I’m talking: apparently you only need to type the word that is less visible and for the other one you can simply type 1 letter.
In total my speeds could have gone up by 40% at least. Not counting the times I just skipped cause of the formulas or unknown symbols.
You guys should have posted this on the front page where you had the recaptcha.
Congratz though to those who won 
mutsop:
To be honest I find that you guys haven’t made it fair to most of us.
Considering the requirements were the same for anyone trying to get a bite of the Free Day pie, I fail to see how the system could be unfair to anyone let alone be unfair to most but not all.
-Bill
phalanx:
Considering the requirements were the same for anyone trying to get a bite of the Free Day pie, I fail to see how the system could be unfair to anyone let alone be unfair to most but not all.-Bill
might be, but it’s kind of disappointing thought to know you might have doubled the chances on winning
I’m not here to argue or anything, I mean you guys are great don’t get me wrong… I mean giving away 200k$ 
Regards