The Marcos Kirsch Experience®

It’s been quite a journey. This is the 500th post to The Marcos Kirsch Experience®. Looking forward to another 500 random, pointless, eclectic, poorly redacted entries.

Thank you for reading!

The MKX® is proud to introduce a novel way to stay updated on what goes on here: email subscriptions!

So now, on top of our popular RSS feed, you can get a daily digest of all the posts in The MKX® conveniently delivered to your cozy little inbox. Even if you still use Hotmail. And trust us, we fight spam to the death and we vow to never spam you. Never.

Use this page to subscribe. A permanent link intuitively titled “Subscribe to The MKX®” can be found in the sidebar.

You are welcome.

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.

I did a little bit of reorganization in the site. There were a good amount of posts mostly under Keep Austin Weird and Austin Nights that didn’t really fit in so well.So I created Life of Marcos and moved a bunch of old posts there.In case you care, which you don’t. 

Faithful RSS and email subscribers may have noticed a bunch of posts that came up and went away last night.

I’ve been testing a new (but not ready for prime time) very cool feature for The MKX® that will automatically insert my del.icio.us links as posts, instead of secluding them to the no-man’s-land that is the sidebar (does anyone notice those links on the side?).

I apologize for the fake entries you may have been notified of. Stay tuned for this to go live very soon. I hope.

The MKX® is five years old as of today. That’s a whopping 35 years in dog years.

The world was a very different place back when we started: No Facebook. Only monochrome iPods. A world in which Britney Spears was a wholesome young role model and presumably still a virgin (yeah, right). Even the Ugly Nun wasn’t famous yet! How did we ever manage to live like that?!

Yes, it’s been a wild ride and everyone in the team is thankful for your loyal readership. Have a happy 2008 and let’s share many more adventures.

I updated The MKX® Photo Central to the latest version of Zenphoto (1.1).

The template is newer too, and a little better IMO. One of the cool new features is the publication of an RSS feed, for that small subset of readers that a. Want to find out whenever new photos are added and b. Know what RSS is an use some sort of RSS reader (Google Reader is quite nice, you should check it out). There’s also a search box and the ability to tag. I don’t know how useful that’s going to be.

Let me know if you find any problems. So far it appears to work well, but it feels a little slow and I don’t know if it is Zenphoto’s fault or my hosting service’s. We’ll see.

For those keeping track:

I broke up the now non-existent category Austin at night (and day) into two more specific, not very cleverly named ones: Keep Austin Weird and Austin nights. I think I might do some more breaking up in order to keep things more on-topic. I’ll sleep on it.

Also, I’ve added a new link to the sidebar: La Parolis. I’m not sure whose it is but from the looks of it, it must be one of the split personalities of an otherwise normal girl (or maybe it’s a guy?!). She uses proper punctuation and receives way more comments than The MKX® does. It’s in Spanish.

And I removed a bunch of blogs that are not being updated anymore. Shame on the authors. You’ve been un-Experienced®. Boom!

To be honest, The MKX® Gift Shop has not exactly overtaken Wal-Mart in sheer sales volume yet.

However, a big step in the right direction happened this morning when I received an invoice for and order of one of our most popular items: Ugly Nun Thon (pictured below), placed by a Susan from California… whom I’ve never met but is listed in IMDB as an actress (could it be the same Susan?).

That’s pretty cool by itself, but there’s more: This order was not for 1, but for 7 (yes, seven) thongs. The mere idea of Susan and six of her Hollywood actresses or Victoria’s Secret model friends wearing underwear with my face on it is mind blowing. The idea that maybe she bought them all for herself so she can wear them every day is, frankly, creeping me out, but exciting nonetheless.

Susan, I’m not revealing your full name here but if you ever happen to bump into this blog, we’d love to hear what you thought of our fine products.

Incidentally, last Saturday the Ugly Nun herself re-emerged at a Brazilian party (proof).

Note from the Editor: The staff of The MKX® is held to the highest journalistic standards. The information presented here is authentic and not a ploy to generate more sales.

I’ve been waging a relentless war against spam for year on multiple fronts. And I’m losing.
My brilliant catch-all strategy/use hundreds of email addresses so I can identify the bastards that give up my email and then do who knows what backfired on me. I had to switch gears and it’s been a lot of work. You don’t want to know the details.

My previous email addresses became unusable long ago. I recently had to ask the owner of the kirsch.net domain to kill it. Sad. Don’t send me email there, it hasn’t been in use for years anyway. All spam.
I use spam filters. I train them. On both Mail.app and on Thunderbird.
And still, the Viagra advertisements will not stop!

Ok, I’m not alone here, and sadly many have learned to live with it. But this is not the point of this post (just some venting). I want to talk about a different kind of spam. Not the kind you get in your email mailbox, but the kind us bloggers and webmasters need to deal with in our websites.

Yes, The MKX® has comment spam problems. I’ve tried things before and they helped a lot but did not eliminate the problem. I still get many spam comments that I just delete. Sure, they never make it to the website but I’d say that roughly 80% of the comments made on this blog are spam. A real pain in the ass for me.

Now, I use the excellent Wordpress for this website, and so do millions of others (even my mom uses it!) so I can imagine thousands of russian hackers putting together perl scripts to spam the hell out of every Wordpress blog out there. Fair enough, more bang for the buck.

But how, oh how in the world did it ever get to this?

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

As of today, a new and exciting product hits The MKX® Gift Shop.

This beautiful 100% cotton t-shirt is printed with original art by “engineer by day, sound asleep by night” Marcos. It depicts a completely fictitious character based on no actual person, living or otherwise. Comes only in “Queensryche black” that hides tomato sauce stains better than any other color, except for red. You can buy it for man or for woman,. although for the life of me I can’t imagine why a woman would ever want to wear this (or a man for that matter… consider this item part of a larger social experiment).

Don’t delay, buy now! Gift it to any one of the many enemies of the person the drawing is based on. All profits (which are slimmer than you’d think, even though the t-shirt is quite expensive to the consumer) go to the Buy Marcos Some New Videogames Foundation.

On April 22nd we announced our first reader contest. It was a huge success with over four participants! (read all about it).

Here are the entries:

• Edy: $125
• J Kings: $195
• Jaquito: $250
• Jack: $255
• Moi: $504
• Marcos S: $446
• Zepeda: $99
• Manuel: $268
• Picho $138.5
• Isaac: $287.75
• ME: $163
• Pastor: $240
• Sofia: $182.50
• Daniel Jaramillo: $558
• Carlos Slim: Poquito.
• Thelma Says: $354
• Neil Feiereisel: $347.50
• Arturo: $555
• Amit: $72

Keep on reading to see the winner!

(more…)

WIN A FABULOUS PRIZE
READ ON FOR DETAILS

I wasn’t sure what to do with all these coins… I knew I wanted to get something cool with the money (an iPod, a TV, a trip to the moon). Cashing the money was another thing…

This is where Coinstar comes in.

The greedy bastards charge an 8.9% coin counting fee, but you can get, for no fee, an Amazon Gift Card. So I drove to the closest Albertson’s, and spent what were perhaps the most soothing 15 minutes I’ve had in a long time inserting quarters into a machine.

Are you wondering how much money I got? Take a guess. Below are photos of my Superman piggy bank and Moi’s lose change box, pictured next to a penny to convey a sense of proportion. Write in the comments how much money you think I cashed. Whoever is closest to the actual figure will win a cool prize. I’m serious. I don’t know what it will be yet, it depends on who wins. But it will be cool. And no… it won’t be a trip to the moon. Those are still too expensive.

Guess how much money I cashed in a Coinstar machine for an Amazon gift card. The best guess (and it has to be within $5.00 USD) wins a prize! (I promise). Read more to see the pictures! Contest ends whenever I say so.

(more…)

According to Computerworld, Firefox has reached for the first time a 10% market share last month. That’s very good.

For educational purposes only, let’s compare the figures presented by Computerworld, which represent the total Internet usage patterns against the usage patterns of you, the enlightened Marcos Kirsch Experience® visitor. Just for kicks, let’s also see how that other little website I have (which is now getting around 2,500 pageviews per day - yup, that is not a typo) is doing:

Now, here’s some interesting (to me, but I doubt to anyone else) observations:

• Most people are dumb. Most people use IE. Therefore, dumb people use IE.
• As you can see, readers of The Marcos Kirsch Experience® are smarter than the average Internet person.
• Jinuj.net users are dumber than the average person. That sucks. This wouldn’t surprise you if you saw the messages we get. Maybe I’ll write about that one day.
• I personally use Camino at home and Firefox at work. Camino gets 0.85% on this website and 0.08% on Jinuj.net.
• Apparently, people still use Netscape. I can’t really explain that one.

I am terrible at remembering birthdays. I’m great at remembering the words for the spanish-version theme songs of early 80’s cartoons.

I know my birthday, both my brother’s birthday, one of my cousin’s birthday (Jan 1 - easy), and then a bunch more that I remember by association (i.e. Jorge Guttman - a day after Jaco, Ricky Hemilon - three days after me, Chaparro and Correa - the same day, I don’t know which) and that’s pretty much it. I’m pretty sure both my parent’s birthday is in June or July, roughly.

However, I’ve become very fond of my quite up-to-date Addressbook (which contains 660 entries as of today, many of them with the person’s photo and all! I have it on my computer, I sync it up and down to my iPod, to .Mac, to my cellphone, to Moi’s computer, etc.

Today, I learned that you can add the person’s birthday to their card. I also learned you can use iCal to automatically show all the birthday’s as a calendar. I already knew you can use .Mac to publish calendars as webpages from iCal (and others can even subscribe to them so that they show up in their own iCal)… Put these things together and we get:

It sounds like a lot of work, but it’s actually is not that bad. I already had many birthdays in iCal so I’ll need to put them in the Addressbook. It may take me a year but I’ll do it.

In the meantime, you can post your birthday (year and all) in the comments. That will get you in my calendar and will guarantee a birthday present from me. Check it out, you may already be there!

[Update Jan 14, 2006]: Credit goes to Samuel Sandler. He sends a list of all the birthdays of everyone in the Sandler side of my family every year. I copied them into this calendar. That’s why there are so many Sandlers, not because I love them more than the others. I’m missing pretty much all the Kirsch side. Your input is welcome.