All posts by kirsch

Mexico vs Poland

A 0-0 tie in which Mexico was better and deserved to win. This is a terrible result when combined with Argentina’s loss to Saudi Arabia.

The match was held at the 974 Stadium, built using 974 shipping containers and will allegedly be disassembled and reassembled in another country. Mark my words: it won’t happen. It’s a very nice stadium though.

National Anthems before the match
Memo Ochoa stops a penalty kick by Robert Lawansowski and the crowd goes wild

Netherlands vs Senegal

Fresh(er) after a quick nap, we headed out to Al Thumama Stadium to watch Netherlands vs Senegal and then USA vs Wales. If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. Originally we had plenty of time between both games but things got rescheduled after we purchased the tickets leaving us very little time to go from one game to the next.

This was a good match. Unlike past World Cups where I’ve seen Netherlands play, there were few Clockwork Orange fans and they were oddly subdued. There were lots of Mexican fans though. In a sad twist of irony, we had to leave a bit early while the score was 0-0 so we can catch the USA vs Wales game.

Netherlands won 2-0. 🤷

¡Nos vamos al Mundial!

It was a rough first day.

My flights were: AUS-DFW, DFW-LHR, LHR-DOH.

American Airlines was quick to mess with my plans by delaying the AUS-DFW flight. But only 10 minutes at a time so that I can’t look for alternatives before missing a connection. I made it to the gate of my connecting flight 3 minutes after it closed.

The saddest photo.

I was instead forced to stay the night in Dallas (not the airline’s fault of course, so hotel’s on me) and put on a flight that lands me in Doha with barely enough time to get to my first match with suitcase and all.

Thankfully, I went to the airport early and straight to beg to a really nice AA lady, using my best sad kitten eyes face 🥹. She got me on an earlier flight direct to Doha! That gave me enough time to go to the apartment, shower, eat, nap, then to the two matches! Sure, it was a middle seat all the way to the back in a 15 hour flight. But I was going to make it! No complaints.

Left to right: Marcos, very nice Qatar Airways flight attendant, and Fred – former player for San Jose Earthquakes and Bora’s close friend with the best soccer stories.

I was impressed at the big and modern airport. And most impressed at the speed and efficiency of immigration. Wow! Will everything in Qatar be this fast and efficient? (Narrator: no, it won’t).

The apartment we got is in a small building that is definitely not new in some random Doha neighborhood. It absolutely demolished my expectations though. It is simple with no luxury, but perfect: Large, comfortable, newly renovated. Two bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, kitchen, fridge, washing machine, TV. Everything looks fairly new. AC works like a champ. There’s several places to eat and buy groceries around it that are quite cheap. Everyone speaks serviceable English – probably better than Arabic.

Polla Qatari 2022

With this post, I am proud to announce Polla Qatari 2022. This is the fifth FIFA World Cup pool / game / quiniela in a row I’ve organized and the sixth polla overall (since I did Polla América 2007).

With a little over 36 days until kickoff, I think this can be the best and largest polla ever!

I do this for fun and for learning. I find that it makes me enjoy the tournament, which is exciting on its own, a lot more. And my friends do as well. And I find that it forces me to play with corners of the software worlds I don’t get to use at work.

But it is a lot of work. The code is 100% custom written by me. Back in 2006 I wrote the original polla in a few coding all-nighters. Since then, every polla has started from the same codebase as the last one but goes through a lot of work and improvements on each iteration.

For this year, I had pondered a big rewrite using Python and microservices and other cool newer technologies (I do this for learning, remember?) but adulting (those pesky children! that pesky job) got in the way. I ended up reusing the same old codebase which actually required a lot of work to get back up and running with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL.

I set up Docker, Docker Compose, and hosted the code in a private GitHub repo. I’m using a package manager for dependencies. This is a nice improvement on my workflow and makes development and deployment a lot easier. It should make the code easier to maintain. And after getting it all working I made many small and big improvements both internal and external.

I am adding a few new features to the game: Winner selection, filters.

There are three things all readers should do right now:

  1. Register at https://fifa2022.kirsch.mx. Bookmark it while you’re there.
  2. “Like” the Facebook page so you can keep up with announcements.
  3. Invite your friends to join. Tell them to use your user name as referral and maybe you play for free.

Good luck!

2022 Panini World Cup Sticker album

Once again, the World Cup is coming. Qatar welcomes the world in a message of peace, love, and tolerance <ahem>.

It also means there’s a new Panini Sticker Album, and any self-respecting long time reader of The MKX®  knows I collect them.

Unlike in previous tournaments, my kids are old enough to tag team with me. Fortunately, my kids don’t “like” things. They are either absolutely obsessed with something or they are completely indifferent. The Panini World Cup album fell into the first category.

So they did most of the work and they did it very quickly. As in: they’d wake up at 5 AM to work on it every day. Our album was completed with 2+ months to spare. You can read all about it on Ilán’s website, I highly recommend it.

Hard at work.
This is what the kitchen trashcan looked like every morning during most of September.

Shana Tova

On behalf of the staff of The MKX® we want to wish you a Happy New Year 5783.

May the new year find us all with less (in no particular order):

  • Pandemics
  • Dicators and dictator wannabes
  • Intolerance
  • War
  • Poor sleep

And more:

  • Neat gadgets
  • Health
  • Poppy seed cake
  • Fútbol
  • Family
  • Blog posts
Shana Tova u’metukah!

Bonus: Mexico does well in the World Cup.

iPhone 14 Pro impressions

As in every year, I upgraded my phone. Here are some of the things that stand out to me so far and may not be covered by all the reviews done by pros.

Screen

It’s brighter. This is in the specs and it was mentioned in the announcement. But I haven’t heard anyone talk much about it and few factor this in when making purchasing decisions

It makes a big difference. Specifically when I’m outdoors – either when recording video at one of my kids’ soccer games or reading news during their practice. This is a pretty good quality of life improvement.

The always-on display is neat and still something I’m getting used to.

Camera

The camera is the main excuse I tell myself for upgrading every year. The phone is the only camera I use nowadays and I want my photos to be as good as they can reasonably be. I’m quite happy with what I’ve seen so far.

Low light performance

Low-light performance is a lot better. When taking the same photo with an iPhone 14 Pro and an iPhone 12 Pro at a bar, the iPhone 14 Pro took it in about 0.5 seconds (dark mode) vs the ~3 seconds it took on the older iPhone. And the photo came out better.

48 Megapixels Raw

Every match I go to at Q2 Stadium, I take a photo with the field behind me. This is a textbook challenging photo: Lots of bright light behind the main subjects.

As an experiment, last game I set the camera to take 48 Megapixels ProRAW, then I played with the colors on Pixelmator Pro for all of 5 minutes – something I have little experience with.

Compared with a similar photo taken using regular settings on an iPhone 13 Pro, the difference is striking. I assume the difference would be less had I taken ProRAW photo with the iPhone 13 Pro and I get it that this is a one-off cherry-picked result. But still…

Taken with iPhone 13 Pro.
Taken as 48 Megapixel ProRAW on iPhone 14 Pro, then tweaked using Pixelmator Pro.
iPhone 13 Pro detail
iPhone 14 Pro (ProRAW) detail

Action Mode

The video camera setting that removes shaking… it’s wild. I used it while recording my kid’s soccer game and it looks like I’m on a tripod. Really cool.

I made the video smaller than the original recording, which already trades off some resolution in order to do the stabilization. But see how smooth it is…

Performance

It’s a bit faster and smoother overall. Enough that you can feel it but not enough that it makes a huge difference. You really notice if you go back to an older phone though.

Other

Dynamic Island

It’s a nice feature and I’d rather have it than not. But it’s not earth-shattering. Maybe as it gains uses once third parties update their apps to take better advantage of it.