This is my cousin <deleted>. Look at his proud smile. His elegant posture. His neat hair. His expressive hand gesture.
He literally begged me to take this picture of him. Little did he imagine that soon it’d be posted online for the world to see. Click on the photo for a full size version.
Update (October 27 2011): upon request, I have made the photo private and removed references to my cousin.
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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.
Photos taken by me during that horrible Mexico VS Colombia match last year in Houston are now featured in the very famous polish website stadiony.net – prezentacje stadionów piłkarskich.
Cool… go check it out!
May you not become too constipated.
So the product page for the thing I have been working on the last many months is finally up! (why do I get the feeling you are not as excited as I am?).
Meet the new NI-5406 and NI-5402 Function Generators. Marvel at the sight of these technological wonders.
And finally, check out the product and bookmark the page for the Signal Generators Group… you never know when you may need an arbitrary waveform generator, or something.
We didn’t take a photo of the team during the Fall Division 1 season of the Austin City League. I’m partially to blame for that.
In any case, we played a friendly match today, a few weeks before the summer season starts, against a team from some chinese church (I’ll try to find more details about them). The NI-Eagles won 3-0. Here’s the photo of the guys who made it to the game. Click for larger version.
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:
| Browser | Internet | The Marcos Kirsch Experience® | Jinuj.net |
| Internet Explorer | 84.7% | 59.32% | 92.37% |
| Firefox | 10.05% | 27.12% | 5.51% |
| Safari | 3.19% | 9.32% | 0.86% |
| Netscape | 1.05% | 0.85% | 0.18% |
| Opera | 0.54% | 2.54% | 0.66% |
| Mozilla | 0.34% | No data | 0.28% |
Now, here’s some interesting (to me, but I doubt to anyone else) observations:
Once again, I went to Monterrey last Friday. Joana was there with Liat and Joelle (who are now 13 months old). The girls are awesome but they like Moi more than they like me. That’s not surprising, most people like Moi more than they like me.
The drive home was quite an adventure, including a trip to downtown San Antonio to pick my cousing Becky up, a nice chat with a law enforcement officer in Pearsall Texas, a trip to the 26th km inside of Mexico, then back to Nuevo Laredo to get a tourist visa for Shaina, then back to the 26th km, and a burned alternator.
On Saturday, I got to go to Ilana and Yoni’s wedding which was very nice. There were a ton of Monterrey Exiles (a group I’m proudly a member of) that made the trip for what was the first wedding in the community in three or four years (how sad is that?). Very nice seeing them all, and also very nice to hear some of them actually read this blog (yeah, there’s a good chance that I’m talking about you). The photo of my dad sitting in a shoestore holding my mom’s purse seemed to be especially popular.
Last, but not least, on Sunday I bought 70 tacos from the always tasty Tacos Lara (proudly clogging arteries since 1968). I don’t remember the exact breakdown but we bought everything except for carnitas. I didn’t eat all of them by myself though. If I had, the drive back would have been rough for the other passengers.
This one is every bit as disturbing as finding out that your dad is really the “Tooth Mouse” (the Mexican version of the Tooth Fairy), that and that wrestling is fake.
I grew up thinking that the delicious israeli Mekupelet chocolate was made with this ultra-secret process that no one could duplicate (but many had tried). I even heard the legends about how you could tour the Elite factory and see how all their chocolates are made, except for Mekupelet, which was their most important secret.
So I was shocked when I gave a Mekupelet bar to Nisha Ganwani, who was born and grew up in Dubai (and knows a ton about chocolate)… and she said it is exactly like a british chocolate bar sold over there: the Cadbury Flake.
A shipment of Cadbury Flakes is now on its way from the United Arab Emirates, so that I can verify her claim. I will update you on this – because I know you are just dying to know. But for now… all the same… another part of my inner child has died.
[Update 3/27/2006]: Nisha has just informed me that a shipment of Cadbury Flake bars is in transit from Dubai to Austin and should be arriving on April 28th. I guess a guy is swimming accross the ocean with a bag full of it.
[Update 4/4/2006]: The Marcos Kirsch Experience® exclusive correspondant in England, Jessica Lechner, has just informed me that the Flake tastes more sour, and is worse. This matches another report by Sarai Melichar, who is a chemical engineer in Houston TX and specializes in eating chocolate. She describes the Flake as “gross“. She repeated the word “gross” and “yuck” many times throughout the report. We are still awaiting the tests that will be performed at the main labs, in Austin, TX.
It was a beautiful day at Estadio Universitario where Monterrey beat it’s arch-rival Tigres in their own home (2-1, goals by Sergio Verdirame and Luis Miguel Salvador) and mathematically sent them to the next division. Half the city cried, and the other half realized their town had just become a better place.
