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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.

Continue reading The MKX® Reader Contest. →

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.

Another year flies by.
This blog has now been online for exactly three years. It has grown from being the little website that could to the big blog no one cares about. I want to thank our wonderful team of editors, writers, illustrators, designers and our marketing department. Without you, none of this would have been possible. And to our readers… who am I kidding. There are no readers.

Damn it. As you can see, the .Mac sidebar thingie is broken, so there are no links to my .Mac albums on this page for now. This happened because Apple changed the way they generate the album pages. I need to fix it, but I don’t know how soon it’ll happen.

[Update 7/19/2005] There is also a warning at the top of the page. Man I suck!
[Update 7/24/2005].Mac sidebar has been fixed. You can now see the links to the albums directly over there.

I haven’t posted in about two weeks. Bad Marcos!
I don’t want this blog to become a digital ghost town. I have just been way too busy. I moved last week so the week before and after have been about that (and work, of course). This long weekend I could stay and do some more work in my new place but instead I’m going to go  to Monterrey.

More about "The Lair/La Guarida" in a future post.

PS: Thanks to everybody that helped with the move – especially my mom, Moi and my cousin Jacobo (official water boy). Without them, I would still be surrounded by boxes.

I installed BAStats, a WordPress plugin for statistics. The old BBClone does not integrate nicely with WordPress apparently.
We’ll see how this one goes.

Migrating servers AND blogging system at the same time. I like to live dangerously.Be back soon…. hopefully.