Enjoy these two videos of highly skilled dancers: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in Dancing with Stars and The MKX® founder’s nieces at some Purim festival.
Category Archives: From the tubes
Random things in the Internet.
Pseudoscience
I just found out in the most obnoxious way possible(1) about Pseudoscience:
Pseudoscience is a comic published in The Tech, the official newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many posts are local to Cambridge or MIT, but others are not. All readers are welcome. First comic was published February, 2007.
Yes, this blog has been in circulation for two years and I just found out. [Update 2/18/2009: The blog is new, the material is not. I still think we are friends.] This offends me very, very deeply because I was not directly informed by the creator about it. I thought he was my friend. Now I know better.
In any case, this comic showcases what is the most useful application I’ve ever seen for Microsoft Excel. We all know Powerpoint’s main strength lies in porn distribution. Now we just need to figure out what Word is supposed to be used for.
I have added the link to the sidebar, immediately steering millions of websurfers towards Pseudoscience. I hope their servers can handle the traffic influx. It’s extremely funny stuff.
The Vader Project
The Vader Project: 100 Reimagined Darth Vader helmets… Premiering at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Show runs February 13 – May 3, 2009. See the gallery here. See my submissions here and here.
Pizzerola-gate
The Internet is an interesting place. Eva pointed me to this amusing post about Pizzerolas, the Mexican chips from many years ago that were taken off the market.
Turns out they’re back in their original (now retro looking) packaging. No more Doritos-rebranding pseudo-comeback nonsense. These are round, like they should be. And apparently they started quite the Internet phenomenon (Twitter included). Read the amusing original post (surprisingly readable English Google translation).
I am personally more of a Rancheritos person, anyway.
Thundercats
Sometimes people see this blog and tell me: “you must have a lot of free time” (I don’t). Let me show you, my friends, what having a lot of free time really is:
Test your color IQ
I found this little online test for your ability to see and distinguish colors. They present you with four rows of colored tiles that you need to sort by hue. The higher your final score, the worse you did. The perfect score is 0. Since I’ve always thought that I’m perfect and yet I scored a 7, I concluded that the test is flawed.
Still, go ahead and give it a try and post your results in the comments. Whoever beats will make it to The MKX® Hall of Fame if I ever get around to creating it, but email me a screenshot as proof. And no Paint shenanigans please. To take the test, click here.
UPDATE 12/13/2008: Well, looks like a few people have been able to cheat just enough to beat me. Congratulations to Eva (score of 3) and Carolina (perfect score!). That’s ok, I still kicked both my brother’s asses.
UPDATE 12/14/2008 (2): Jaramillo‘s results are in (an impressive 12).
Chacarrón
The word is out
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
Qué Comer
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 science of Evite.com
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.