The Marcos Kirsch Experience®

Just for kicks, here’s an old photo of Bielas, Nedvedovich and myself building a Mifkad Esh (fire sign) to celebrate a previous Yom Ha’atzmaut back in Monterrey. I’m the one with the pony tail.

A few photos from Saturday’s party have been posted in The MKX® Photo Central.

The photos were collected from several cameras so as usual expect to see some people more frequently than others. The MKX® is not responsible for Andres following the photographer around all night long. Enjoy!

Last Saturday I threw a small gathering at my place together with Totah to celebrate the fact that we both just turned XXX.

Photos will be coming soon. However, it looks like my camera ate my memory card again so I don’t know how many I’ll be able to rescue. If you were there and took any photos, let me know (use the comments or email me) so that I can collect and post them. And expect photos of me running over my camera with my car.

However, I want to use this space to thank everyone who came from out of town. We had people from Dallas, Houston, Monterrey, New York. A record total of miles traveled. I really, really appreciate it, it was great having you all here (Tomer, Arturo, Arturo, Nathán, J.C., Tilón, etc.).

Also, thanks to everyone who helped out with the planning and the cleaning: No parties would happen without your help, can’t emphasize this enough. This year’s hero medal goes to D.J. Fucho who rushed to get a replacement for a burned stereo amplifier at 2 A.M. (with still another four hours of party to go!) and had it all working again with barely a hitch. Amazing stuff.

Read on for the original evite.

[Update 5/6/2008]: Photos posted.

Read the rest of this entry »

It has just been brought to my attention that today is No Pants Day: the day we protest against the tyranny that is pants by not wearing any. I’m not going to to work in my underwear, so I decided to wear a skirt. Downtown should be fun tonight.

Courtesy: Gabriel N.

Good choice.

What laptop does Steve Ballmer use for his presentations? Right…

Originally uploaded by Paint.It.Black.

Microsoft Keynote in Louvain

Originally uploaded by Choubistar.

Last night, sometime in the middle of the night, I very suddenly woke up and literally jumped out of bed. Then I slipped and fell on my butt. Got up and went back to sleep. I can’t remember what the hell it was that I was dreaming.

This morning, at work, I went to the kitchen on my floor to make some coffee. After a minute I realized I changed the filter, washed the pot, turned on the machine - but forgot to add the coffee, ending up with a pot full of hot water.

I can’t wait to see what happens the rest of the day.

I took these two cellphone photos at AVAA’s Life Drawing session last Sunday during one of the breaks.

It’s cool to see the different drawings/paintings by different artists using different techniques, all of them from slightly different angles. It’s also impressive: everyone is very, very talented (and better than me).

All of the artwork is unfinished, shown after only 30 minutes or so of work. Click to enlarge and try to guess which one is mine.

8.94% of the traffic to The MKX® comes from the city of Monterrey (mom? is that you?), so this post is relevant.

• Are you hungry?
• Do you want to eat out?
• Do you want to try a new place?
• Do you have internet access (yes you do, you’re reading this)?
• Are you in Monterrey, México?

If you answered “yes” to all of the questions above, then head over to the redesigned and completely overhauled Qué Comer (by Moi). It’s now geared towards user-generated content, so people can vote and rate and review restaurants. Before, it was more of a “restaurants pay to be here” kind of deal. Which means that places that suck now have bad reviews.

The new Que comer is a very clean, very well designed, and very friendly. What’s impressive is that the whole site is done completely on top of a modified installation of WordPress (our blogging system of choice). This is a testament of the flexibility of WordPress. Really cool. Head over there and flame your least favorite restaurant.

The background song for Stage 1 of the 1982 classic videogame Pooyan (Tomy Tutor port) and the theme for the 1985 classic Commdore 64 game Zorro have been stuck in Marcos’ head for over two decades. If you pay close attention, you can sometimes hear him humming one of them.

I assume most of you have used the website Evite.com. If you haven’t, allow me to summarize it for you: It’s a website in which you create an event invitation and you send it to a list of guests. The guests then RSVP (Yes, Maybe, No) on an event page within their site. The text of the invitation can include anything, including maps, event info, list of things for guests to bring, surveys, etc. It’s extremely handy for both the host and the guests.

While the website is not exactly an example of best design practices, navigation, usability, buzzword-iness, etc., they are quite good about not spamming you or (so far) sharing your email with third parties (so they can spam you instead). For that reason alone they have my respect.

Evite tips:

I’ve been using Evite.com for some time now and have it down to a science by now. There are many subtleties that you should be aware of. It takes years of honing your skills. I’m going to share some of the wisdom with you:

• Do create a user account so…
  • You can create evites.
  • You can see your event history (i.e. you click on someone else and you can see past shared events).
  • You can delete the emails with the link to the event. To get to the event page just log in.
• When writing an evite, make it either funny or brief. Otherwise no one reads the whole thing.
• Add your guests in this format: Name Lastname <user@somedomain.com>, … This way the guest list shows them as Name Lastname instead of some retarded hotmail-esque username no one can relate to an actual human being, like “rizos65” or “misstexas2001” (seriously, what idiot came up with those?).
• For large events, send your invitation a month early in case someone else was planning to throw a party on the same day. They won’t want to compete, no one steals guests from each other, we all remain BFFs. When my parties play chicken with other parties, mine always win.
• If you receive an evite, don’t play the wait-and-see game: “I’ll go if nothing better comes up“, “I’ll go if this person goes/doesn’t go“, and so on. The host can see when it was that you last checked out the site. The host gets annoyed if you checked it but didn’t dignify his efforts with a simple reply. The host knows you’re opening the evite every day. My advice: reply with a Maybe right away, this way the host can’t know you still check out the evite every 2 hours anymore. You can go back and change it to Yes or No whenever.
• Verify that emails from evite.com are not being redirected to your Junk mail folder (Hotmail users take note).

I must confess: I put a lot of effort into my evites. I have a multi-step system for creating them and it’s not a simple one. I will not post the details here, mostly out of embarrassment. But I’ve put together some fine evites and I will publish the text to some of them sometime in future posts. For now, if you have a pending evite from me and haven’t replied, go do it right now.

I hired this guy as entertainment for my upcoming birthday party, he’s great:

Bar-Mitzvah-aged Marcos with his Bubi Florinda, at Bobe Leike’s house (~1991)

Two weeks ago I did a quick trip for Mrs. Florinda Kirsch’s (a.k.a bubi Florinda) 80th birthday party in Monterrey. It was a big one, just like we like them: almost 200 people. I got to say a speech in front of everyone, holding a microphone and all. Since speeches make me nervous, I figured that the best I could do is distract the audience. An open zipper will accomplish just that (feel free to use my advice).

All of the family made it, which is very nice. As an experiment I decided to leave all my electronic devices behind (camera, iPod, Gameboy, laptop, electric shaver) and instead bring only my iPhone as a replacement on this trip. The experiment was a huge success, except for the camera part. I took only a handful of photos and they came out… good for a cell phone cam, nothing more.

So I’m still trying to collect photos taken by everyone else in order to set up a website or something. Not very successful so far. In the meantime, I leave you with the few photos I’ve been able to collect.

Happy birthday and until 120!

See the image above? Is it what you think it is? Why yes, indeed, it is. Just like you suspected, an image of the majestic globular omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky… what else on Earth - or outside of it - could it have been?.

Now, remember those peculiarities observed in it? Of course you do. Turns out that Eva Noyola, who also holds the record of most miles traveled for a Soda Stereo concert (6127) and is one of The MKX® favorite readers, deduced that Omega Centauri harbors an elusive intermediate-mass black hole smack at its center after analyzing some fancy photos taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Well, that explains that. So we’ll update the image for something prettier (artist rendition though):

Congratulations Eva, you are now officially our smartest reader and we hope to hear about (but maybe not fully understand) more high profile astronomy discoveries from you. The other scientist, Karl Gebhardt, I can’t remember, but I’m sure I’ve had beers with him either at Eva’s parties back when she lived in Austin or perhaps at the Crown and Anchor. Congratulations to you as well!

More :

• 15 minutos
• Del agujero
• Gemini observatory article (good images)
• Hubblecast (video interview! Very awesome.)
• Slashdot

Mexico US Absolut Ads
Originally uploaded by deejamahl05.

I bet this got them some free press, that’s for sure. What do you think?

This is the last post.  The MKX® has shut down. It’s been a great five years. The website will remain online for now and then vanish into the great internet graveyard, like many other websites before it.

Thank you for your readership and comments.

The MKX® Staff

Update 4/9/2008: As most of you guessed, this was an April Fool’s joke. The MKX® is here to stay… for now.