Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, video game consoles can accurately render many many times more polygons per second. What does this translate to? You got it! Lara Croft now has rounder boobs! See for yourself:
Today’s quote: Steve Jobs
On iTunes for Windows:
It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell!
– Steve Jobs, at D 2007
]Update 6/1/2007] Watch in on video:
Search for faces
This is pretty cool:
Search for “Marcos Kirsch” in Google Image Search and you get tons of random images (click here).
Add “&imgtype=face” at the end and you get only images with faces on them (click here).
Falling with grace
She’s no Edgar though.
The War Against Spam
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…
Moving Hebrew music between Mac and PC iTunes
How annoying.
Last night I ripped my new Shlomo Artzi (Shfuim – not even in iTunes yet) CD in my Mac mini. It retrieved the track and album names from the series of tubes called the Internet just fine, in Hebrew.
I uploaded it to my iDisk, downloaded at work (Windows XP PC), and now track names, album names and file names are reversed (they read from left to right which makes no sense). Arabic and other right-to-left languages surely have the same problem. Any ideas?
gniyonna woH.
[Update 5/22/2007] Here’s a link to the discussion in the Apple Support Forums.
[Update 2 5/22/2007] Ok, problem solved. Windows XP does not support Right to Left languages unless you explicitly install it. This was suggested to me through the Apple Support discussion linked above. I wonder if Vista does any better, but I’m not curious enough to install it on my Vista box, which I avoid as hard as I can. Thanks a lot to philboooo for the suggestion. Click below to see fixed version.
Kayaking
Photo by Jeff Taff.
Through a series of random events, I ended up kayaking in Town Lake yesterday with Mr. Levinson. I think I hadn’t done it since my CYJ days almost ten years ago. I’m happy to report that I can fully move my arms today with no pain despite all the paddling.[Update 5/21/2007]: Ok, I’m in a little bit of pain. Also, I’m not sure kayaking is even a word.
Today’s quote: Jerry Seinfeld
For a Jewish boy growing up on Long Island, to have dinner with Steven Spielberg is like being bar mitzvahed twice.
– Jerry Seinfeld, 2007
Speech impediment
When I speak English, apparently (unbelievably) there is still a hint of a foreign accent somewhere in there. So when I meet new people they usually get curious about it. They can hear I’m foreign, but they can’t ever place me as Mexican, as I don’t look like the average Mexican.
Lately, I have changed my default answers. It’s fun and goes something like this:
Marcos and a new acquaintance are introduced by a third party. A few seconds of smalltalk ensue, followed by the inevitable question.
NA (New acquaintance): So tell me, Marcos. Where are you from?
MK (Marcos): I’m from Chicago.
NA: Oh, O.K. But where are you from originally?
MK: I’m from Chicago.
NA: Really? Where is that accent from then?
MK: Accent? Oh, that’s no accent. I have a speech impediment.
Uncomfortable silence. The look on NA’s face is priceless at this moment. Marcos wishes he had had his camera on him at all time.
More uncomfortable silence. The length of the silence must be carefully controlled, like a stroll over the fine line between being a fearless jokester and an incorrigible asshole.
MK: Jajaja! Just kidding. I’m from Mexico.
Oh, the look on his/her face… I wish I always had a camera on me. If the new acquaintance recovers from this one, you know you’ve made a new friend.
Memory
This morning I forgot my cellphone at home. And my badge. And my wallet. And for the love of me I just can’t remember my middle name. However I did bring a bag of HEB-branded Teriyaki Beef Jerky, which is really odd because I haven’t eaten beef jerky in years. It’s really tasty.