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, though there were [...]

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 on this [...]

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 head all [...]

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 air pistol after [...]

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 something ridiculous in [...]

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 to [...]