Furiousmind

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 :)

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 :-)