I survived the February 27th 2008 Earthquake. Did you?

February 27th, 2008 by Alexandra

Dear Friends, you can now stop sending sms, telegrams, emails, pigeons, etc. We are ok! We’ve survived the earthquake! :) For those that haven’t heard about it, today, at 1am, we were shaken out of bed by an earthquake of 5.2 magnitude. We were sleeping sooo well. Damm you earthquake! Couldn’t you shake at 7am? It would be more helpful.

At least, we can now make other people jealous. If they say: “I’ve been in England as well” we reply: “Have you? And have you been there at 1am on the 27th February 2008? No?”. If this one doesn’t work, we can always ask: “And what about July 2007? No?”. Yes, we’ve been lucky enough to experience the worst floodings that have been recorded in England’s history and also the worst earthquake in 24 years. Wanna be like us? Then probably you’ll have to wait another 24 years!

The only thing missing here is Hurricanes… Oh… that’s right! England was hit by Hurricanes in 2007 as well :)


The first smiley :-)

January 12th, 2008 by João
Smiley 25th birthday (Scott E. Fahlman)

While Alexandra has the task of writing the more serious and useful stuff (see previous post), I entitle myself as the person who writes the superfluous and useless posts.To honour the title I’ve just designated for myself, I write this post to tell you that the smiley :-) was first used by professor Scott E. Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University (see picture above). Fahlman posted it in a message to an online bulletin board at 11:44 AM on September 19, 1982. Here is Scott’s original post:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

:-(

You can find much more information about this fact in this Mike Jone’s page.

If you didn’t know this, you can now impress your friends by telling them this useless, yet interesting, piece of information :-)

Happy New Year!

January 11th, 2008 by Alexandra

Yes, it’s true! We are already in 2008 and, as usual, we were too lazy to write a post earlier to wish you a happy new year. Anyway, here it is:

Happy New Year to all of you!

Now it’s time to make a summary of all the posts that I should have written in 2007 and I didn’t. The most important are the ones about the new places that we have visited. As we have written in our first post, we wanted this blog to register, between other things, the trips that we did. So, I will now leave here a list of some of the new places that we have visited and maybe I’ll get the motivation to write the posts about them in the near future :)

So here’s the list and a picture of each of these places:

1. Newstead Abbey and Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire;
Newstead Abbey

2. Cambridge;
Cambridge

3. Halkidiki (Greece) ;
Halkidiki

4. Amesterdam (The Netherlands);
Amesterdao

5. Sealife, Birmingham;
SeaLife

6. Chatsworth House, Derbyshire;
Chatsworth House

7. and finally, Prague (Czech Republic).
Prague

Also, I should write a post about Oxford, which we have visited in 2006.

Will I write these posts? Stay tuned to find out :)

Part boy-scout. Part genius. All hero.

December 12th, 2007 by João

I really wanted to be consistent with the true nature of this blog and not publish anything soon, but I’ve stumbled across something that must be shared with all of you. As some of you already know, one of my childhood heroes is MacGyver, “the right man when things go wrong”!

MacGyver

Well, today I found, arguably, the best entry on Wikipedia: List of problems solved by MacGyver.

Six seasons of incredible inventions and solutions by someone who only used a Swiss Army knife and duct tape, condensed in a single page. Now, that’s what I call a public service!

Happy Halloween!

October 31st, 2007 by Alexandra
Halloween

Today is Halloween, the day where the youngsters are all happy knocking on the doors asking for sweets and the adults are in the dark doing their best to hide from the kids…

Oops there’s a kid coming in this direction! Turn the lights off!!! TURN THE LIGHTS OFF!!!

What a nice day :)

Question for friends

October 30th, 2007 by João

My dear friends, I have a simple question for all of you:

If I get arrested, would you hijack a helicopter, fly into the yard of the prison and pick me up? 

If the friends of this guy did it, then I can just expect the same from all of you!

(Wow! This is the second post today! I think I’m becoming a vexing real blogger!)

Happy birthday, dear blog!

October 30th, 2007 by João
Sheep celebrating our birthday

Yesterday this blog celebrated one year of existence! Alone, of course. The authors (yeah, we!) did not join the party and did not post anything! But that’s not new: if you count the number of posts that we did in the last 12 months, then you can easily see that we are not real bloggers — this is the third post of 2007 and we are in October!

It’s not that our life is not exciting. We think that the reason is perfectionism together with lack of motivation to write. We always want to write long and interesting posts, and since that is not easy, we end up postponing things.

Maybe we should do like all very productive bloggers and write about every little and insignificant detail of our lives. Just like this post, see?

PS: The sheep is not ours. It belongs to Sheep Poo Paper (TM) and you can even buy postcards with this sheep on them!

Schmap Oxford Guide included my photo!

September 15th, 2007 by João

The guys from the Schmap Oxford Guide have included my photo of Oxford’s Town Hall in their newly released third edition. The photo, displayed below, is published under the section named “The Walk”.

Oxford Town Hall

It is a bit surprising, since the photo is not that good (and I don’t even use Flickr anymore!). Anyway, I just feel like telling everybody, and I guess the best way is to publish it here :)

See you soon!

Scrubs

January 5th, 2007 by João

We love the TV-series Scrubs . And we love it so much that this week we ordered the first 4 seasons! Isn’t this the perfect New Year present? :-)

Anyway, this post is to show you 2 fantastic (and hilarious) Scrubs videos.
The first one is a special thing the cast did to their fans. We think it’s a lovely Christmas present :)
The second is a sneak peak at the musical episode they shot. It highlights JD and Turk’s gayest moments!

Here are the videos:

Charlie Brown Christmas

Guy Love

So, did you like them? If so, drop us a comment and tell us what are your favourite things about Scrubs. Thank you!

A day in London

January 4th, 2007 by Alexandra

On the 25th of November, we’ve visited London for the first time. We’ve been to London several times but we’ve never visited the city - only the airports. We went with our good friend Sarawut who is a excellent guide :) Thank you Sarawut for showing us so many beautiful things in one day!

We’ve started our day very early: we left Nottingham at 7.30am and arrived at London around 10.50am. The post is organised by place of visit.

London Eye

London Eye

The first thing we did was buying a ticket for the underground. Then, we went to see the London Eye. It’s impressive to see such a big wheel in the middle of a city. We’ve also seen the River Thames (the London Eye is on the South Bank of the River). By the way, do you know that it is also called the Millenium Wheel and it is the largest observation wheel in the world?

Big Ben

Big BenAfter that, we’ve walked to the Big Ben and Westminster Palace (the Big Ben is a tower of the palace). It’s beautiful and it’s nice to see it with our own eyes. Then, it started to rain a lot! :) But that was not a problem for us. To avoid the rain, we caught the underground to the Trafalgar Square.

Read the rest of this entry »

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