Archive for August, 2008

World Accent Game

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

I came up with a few interesting “Life in Norway” insights to share over the weekend, but I seem to have forgotten them.  So instead, I’ll post another interesting link I’ve come across recently: The World Accent Game See how well you can identify speakers’ accents from all over the world. I did surprisingly badly, [...]

LEGO Meg

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

I found this on Lorry’s blog, and decided to play around with it. The Lego-Mizers There are a few different varieties, for almost endless time-wasting! If Lucas an I ever showed up in a pre-packaged Lego tie-in set, I guess we’d end up looking something like this:    So would LEGO Meg be “MEGO”?

It Pays (Literally) to Read the Fine Print

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

I subscribe to a bunch of airline mailing lists so that I can keep an eye on their sales and promotions, and last week I got an email announcing RyanAir’s fall sale.  Anyone who’s ever dealt with RyanAir (or most discount airlines for that matter) knows to take a discount air fare with a grain [...]

My Tummy Hurts

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

There are a lot of things I miss about living in Beijing, but every once in a while, something will remind me of one of the reasons that I’m very happy not to be in China anymore.  Last night was one of these occasions.  I was fast asleep and dreaming, when I suddenly awoke at [...]

Random Awesome Album Generator

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Over the weekend, Lucas shared with me the Random Awesome Album Generator algorithm, which does a surprisingly good job at creating a random band name and debut album, based on the oh-so-fabulous Wikipedia RandomPost function: Band Name – The tile of this article Album Title – The last four words of the very last quote [...]

Standup Guys

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

Lucas and I quote stand-up comedy the same way some people quote movie lines!  (Okay, I admit I quote movie lines, too…) In case you haven’t seen them, here are links to a few things that we watched when Erin & Mike were here: Stephen Lynch Nothing like getting a comedy singer stuck in your [...]

Crazy News Friday

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Today is Crazy News Friday! First up – The results are in!  We have a winner in the 2008 Olympics Doping Pool.  The first sport to have a medal taken away for a failed drug test is….. …..Shooting? Yes, the North Korean double medalist lost his silver medal in 50-meter air pistol and bronze medal in 10-meter [...]

Cake Wrecks

Friday, August 15th, 2008

A few days ago, I came across a particularly entertaining blog to share: Cake Wrecks When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong. The blog is a gallery of professionally decorated cakes (and cake sculptures) that all have something fundamentally and amusingly wrong with them.  In some cases, it’s the fault of the client, who requested [...]

My Bus Got Lost!?!

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Today was one of those “everything that can run late, will run late” mornings.  I slept in a litt, but I wasn’t particularly rushing, since I put in a long day yesterday.  I had a meeting at 10, but I figured that as long as I made it in by then, I’d be fine (Okay, [...]

Confusion “Over” Quotation Marks

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Floating around in my head, and slowly fading from memory, there are still a few classic tales from Beijing that I should really share. One of the unintentionally funny things about our office in China is that the local Chinese employees were still a bit unsteady in their grasp of daily English usage.  Their eagerness [...]