Just when I thought my favorite locally circulated tech magazine has gone defunct, I went inside our neighborhood 7-11 to buy a bottle of my favorite apple-flavored green tea and, lo and behold, I saw copies of the March 2009 issue of Tomorrow's Technology Today, or T3.

I was totally stoked. I searched far and wide for the non-existent February issue last month and was convinced that the mag's local franchise has indeed been buried six feet under. But there it was. Megan Fox Young holding the Palm Pre on the cover. T3. Resuscitated. Hallelujah.

The comeback issue, as already mentioned, features the Palm Pre, touted as the ultimate iPhone killer. Really now? If anything, it only reinforces the iPhone's reputation as a piece of technology to be reckoned with. I find it quite amusing that in this issue bearing a so-called iPhone killer on the cover, the iPhone makes an appearance every five or so pages.

Between its features on the new wristphone from LG and its showdown of handheld game consoles, the article on tech gone horribly wrong entitled When Gadgets Attack was a particularly fun read. It recounts the story of the Y2K Bug, the ZTE-NBN scandal and the man who was arrested for shooting his allegedly sluggish laptop in the middle of a bar. Those stories pale in comparison though to that of America's Got Talent judge Piers Morgan, former US president George W. Bush and the gyroscopically geeky Segway.

Segway tumbles
After George W Bush fell from his Segway in 2003, former Mirror editor Piers Morgan ran the headline: "You'd have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn't you Mr President?" Three years on, Morgan fell from a Segway, breaking three ribs. Takes one to know one, Morgan. (T3 Philippines, March 2009, p. 74)

Watch Piers Morgan and his trusty Segway in action through the tube below.

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In this first ever paperplurk...

dal, ROOOOON, ZOHAN, KhrysCyril, gawbler (the plurked, not the plurker) and adams_cute (one of dal's plurkemons).

Props to my plurkpals (the first four in above series) for yet another plurkthrough. (woot) You guys (rock)! (dance)

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28 March 2009
7.00AM - 7.45AM General instructions, filling out of forms
8.00AM - 12.00PM Mathematics (20%)
1.00PM - 6.00PM Electronics Engineering (30%)

29 March 2009
8.00AM - 12.00PM General Engineering and Applied Sciences (20%)
1.00PM - 6.00PM Electronics Systems and Technologies (30%)

Thank God this is not my schedule for the weekend. I've been through all of that, thank you very much. But for those of you whose planners include the above table, I wish you all good luck and hope your sanity remains intact as you take the Electronics Engineer (ECE) Licensure Exams. (Special shout-outs go to my good friends Earl and Jenny and to my fellow Louisians. You know the drill: Go SLU!)

In related news, the Institute of Electronics Engineers of the Philippines (IECEP), the Accredited Professional Organization (APO) for ECEs, has just launched a member blog. I'm not entirely sure though if it's supposed to be this one here or this one here. Either way, for an org that's supposed to represent innovation, I found the blog(s) to be less than appealing. The main IECEP site isn't remotely interesting either. Perhaps they could hire Web-savvy ECEs (such as myself *LOL*) to help design their pages. ECEs are not called designers for nothing, you know.

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Art on lunch bags. Lunch bag art. Made every day by one uber-talented dad for his uber-lucky kids.

Click here to check out his awesome collection. For certain, as soon as you do, you'll be wishing he was your dad, too.

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One of this week's Urban Dictionary words of the day was this:

March 23: Facebookemon

The term used for the collection of people, on your Facebook friends list, that you don't actually talk to or know in real life. Related to popular tv program and game Pokemon, where the aim is to collect as many different Pocket Monsters as possible.

Dave - "Hey, my friends collection is getting up to two hundred"

Steve - "How many do you really know? Go admit it, most of them are Facebookemon"

John - "Gotta catch em all, gotta catch em all"

This word then inspired me to coin a term that is similar in meaning: Plurkemon.

In a nutshell, a Plurkemon is one of your fans on Plurk, as opposed to somebody on your Plurk friends list. Plurkemons are supposedly plurkers who by some wonderful or wicked (it all depends on what ensues) twist or fate landed on your Plurk page, found you quite interesting and asked you to add them up. You add them as fans of course. But it doesn't stop there.

Some of the more interesting Plurkemons I've come to know over the last few days actually aren't "mine." They're fans of a close friend and fellow plurker who currently goes by the Plurk display name, dal. I was going to link her name to her Plurk profile but I reckon she doesn't need the plug at all. She just informed me that today alone, 140 37 new Plurkemons were added to her account!

Anyhoo, what makes these Plurkemons interesting (read: by turns entertaining and annoying) are the incredible manner in which they manage to pop up with unintentionally funny replies and totally out-of-this-world comments to dal's often interrogative plurks. Case in point:

dal [says] how do you like your egg? scrambled.poached.. :-))
...
plurkemon1 [says] mas masarap ata ang scramble f ur, alone
...
plurkemon1 [says] masarap na kahit d mo na iluto, scramble mo lng ng mabilis.

Tsk, tsk. Taking a shot at a double entendre, are we now?

dal [asks] would you rather be invisible or invincible?
plurkemon2 [says] i rather be invincible..
plurkemon2 [says] but not for God..
plurkemon3 [says] none of the above..
plurkemon3 [says] God is the most powerful of all..

Er, Amen?

Gotta catch em all! On second thought, maybe not. :-P

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