The Marcos Kirsch Experience®

As you know, there will be no Europolla.

Last polla winner has invited a bunch of us (interested? leave a comment) to join an ESPN Fantasy League for the Euro.

I tried joining, but apparently the internet has finally caught up to me and they have me flagged me as a filthy word. I called customer support and they verified that I’m filthy. In order to play, I need to come up with a fake user name and last name. I’ll make sure to teach them a lesson and come up with something truly filthy, like “poo” or “vomit” or “dirt”. Click on the screenshot below to see the full error message.

Additionally, the following processing errors were encountered. These are listed below in order to help you determine the problem. If you feel that you cannot fix these errors, please call ESPN Member Services at 1-888-549-ESPN.

• INVALID_LASTNAME - The LastName provided matches a filthy word in the system
• INVALID_USERNAME - The Username provided matches a filthy word in the system

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.

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:

Mexico US Absolut Ads
Originally uploaded by deejamahl05.

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

Recently, at a dinner party, I learned about Yelp. Yelp is a website where people review all sorts of things. I’m particularly interested in restaurants because I like to eat. So I started making bookmarks of restaurants I want to try and I started reviewing restaurants I know. You can see my Yelp profile here.

In this week’s Yelp newsletter, I was granted the honor of being a Top Yelper. This distinction lies somewhere between a Nobel prize and getting a root canal. Even my photo made it to the newsletter:

If you think I photoshopped this (right, like I can do that), then I’m greatly disappointed in your lack of faith. Just see for yourself. If you design to sign up yourself, please be my friend. I could use a friend.

The website for the reunion of the Zack family we had a few weeks ago is now finished. It’s cool, it even has a guestbook - have you left a note yet?. And a PDF with every birthday and anniversary in the family. And other wonderful surprises.Above is the logo used on the beautiful t-shirt we all received for the occasion (as seen here). I use it every Saturday night to go out to clubs. It’s a big hit with the ladies. For the few readers who cannot read Yidish transliterated using Spanish phonetics: You’re out of luck. I will leave you wondering what amazingly clever joke it says.

I was looking for a game show theme song last night for a personal thing I’m working on (more on that next week). I needed to be able to convert to other formats, so the iTunes Store was a no go (they didn’t have it in the DRM-free iTunes Plus format).

So I decided to give AmazonMP3 Store a try, since all the music they sell is unprotected, plain MP3.

Overall the experience was very good. You browse the (limited, I hear) selection and preview the songs all through your web browser. I use Amazon a lot so I know my way around well.

Then, the first time you buy something, it makes you download a little application that handles your purchases (see image). This program is available for Mac and is surprisingly simple, Mac-like and works as advertised.

My song got downloaded and added to my iTunes library in seconds. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole experience and can see myself shopping there often. The track I bought sounds like one of those demos that come with your $30 Casio keyboard we all had when we were 10, but that’s a different story (and is the original album’s fault, not the MP3 format).

See the previous post The War Against Spam I if you haven’t (and you care).

La Polla Defaced

Yes, comment spam hits popular blogging systems such as Wordpress all the time. But how about little, innocent, low traffic, 100% custom coded websites made by some random little guy? Surely, these websites are not targeted by spammers. It’s not worth the effort.

Wrong.

My two little soccer pool websites FIFA 2006 World Cup Polla and La Polla America were hit by comment spam. Not kidding. In order to post to these forums, someone (a spambot, I’m sure) had to go in there, open an account with a password using fake info and then go back and post. Unbelievable. I deleted the spam, but captured a screenshot to prove it. It’s both flattering and annoying. Click to zoom in.

Next on this series… Jinuj.net, Akismet, and a worthy CAPTCHA.
to be continued…

Sure, I mentioned it before. But still no one will complain.
Best website ever.

This is how you can use your MSN Messenger nick to piss off your friends:

Excerpts of a real IM conversation, a few minutes ago (no English translation provided):

adi says:
www.Bloockoo.net , para mirar quienes te tienen bloqueado en el Msn
La Polla America says:
a ver
La Polla America says:
jala?
adi says:
tu me lo mandaste o Rony?
La Polla America says:
?
adi says:
No mames Iuval me tiene bloqueado, mi propio hermano!!!!!!!!!!!!
La Polla America says:
puedo postearlo en mi pagina?
adi says:
okay]
La Polla America says:
excelente

Side note: three more hours until the Copa America starts and you can’t sign up anymore to La Polla America.

This is my cousin Alan Kirsch singing Don’t Cry by Guns N’ Roses. The video was shot around the time people last heard about Guns N’ Roses: 1991 or so. I may start a petition to get Alan to go back to the haircut he had in the video.

While browsing the World Wide Web, I bumped into this old website.

In one of the pages there is a list of contacts, each one of them with a mailto: link. This is the online equivalent of having unprotected group sex at a Gay Parade afterparty in Botswana.
Now, I don’t know who is the schmuck that put that website up there in the first place (he probably listed himself first). According to the HTML source, that thing has been there for a while:

META NAME=”GENERATOR” CONTENT=”Adobe PageMill 2.0 Mac” and

This file created 12/24/96 12:56 AM by Claris Home Page version 2.0 

To the defense of the schmuck, he created the website waaay before the spam epidemic really started.