How many M&M’s are in the jar?

Last Thursday, there was a company-wide party. That morning, they put a big jar full of M&M’s (regular, not peanuts) at the lobby of the Truchard Design Center. You were supposed to estimate how many M&M’s were in there. Whoever makes the best guess, wins a $50 Gift Certificate at Best Buy (and everlasting glory).Continue reading for details on the complicated process involved in this chocolatey adventure. Continue reading How many M&M’s are in the jar?

.Mac… To Renew or not to Renew

Today I got the following email:

Dear Marcos,

Thank you for being a part of the first year of .Mac! We introduced .Mac in July 2002 as the set of Internet essentials for your Mac, giving you tools to share, protect, and access your important data. Since then we’ve made enhancements to every major service and introduced new ones like .Mac Address Book and .Mac Bookmarks, both with built-in syncing. We’ve also provided access to over $150 worth of additional member benefits, such as award-winning Mac OS X Jaguar training. And there’s much more to come.

Your membership is scheduled to expire on October 16, 2004 PDT, and we hope you have already decided to continue your service when the time comes. To make sure that happens, click here, log into your Account Page and click the Credit Card Info page to enter your up-to-date credit card information and check the Auto Renew option. Your card won’t be charged until your current subscription expires.

Thank you again and we look forward to another year with you.

Hmmm… should I renew? I only use the iDisk for moving files around (but it’s a pain because my iDisk is almost full and they provide a shamefull 100 MB) and some backups. I use the Homepage feature for photographs (great iPhoto integration!) and the iSync/AddressBook synchronization (which I really like). I don’t use the email.

With Tiger they will introduce .Mac Sync but that’s still a year away.

What should I do?

[UPDATE September 28, 2005] I renewed using a retail .mac box from Buy.com ($69.99). I’m a sucker.

BBClone installed

Last night I installed BBClone. It’s a pretty darn cool counter and statistics package. It’s Open Source.
A counter would have been nice when I first posted the 1984 Side by Side comparison, when traffic peaked.

Now, this counter will help me see whether I write this only for myself or other people actually waste their time in this website (unlikely).

Really, I wanted to learn how BBClone is used in order to see if it is feasable integrating it into my other website. I think it is. Man, we really need good counter statistics over there.

New sidebar link

My friend Assaf Avni practically begged me to add a link on the sidebar of my website in order to increase traffic to his website.

Transcript from conversation:

YES YES YES !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PUT PUT PUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s very cool, go check it out.

You’ve got GMail! (again)

Tonight my GMail account starte working again.
Furthermore… I have one GMail invitation.

Who should I give it to?

Well, of course! A lucky “The Marcos Kirsch Experience” reader.

Just post as a comment why you should get my extra GMail invitation (for a cool and highly desirable 1 GB email account with Google). I will pick the best (out of hundreds of expected responses) and send the invitation in a few days.

Let the games begin!

UPDATE 7/22/2004: Jaco gets the free GMail account. Congratulations!

No ugly people were harmed making this blog.