The opening of Pepper Lunch in the Philippines (which happened the other Friday, May 16) has been eagerly awaited by my officemates ever since word that it would come to the Philippines was circulated last year. (See the blog entry by Chuvaness, the owner of the Philippine franchise.) Well, I haven’t eaten in the Rockwell outlet yet and I’ve only passed by it (and took the photo below) when I went to Power Plant Mall last Monday, but my sister and I definitely have plans to try it out one of these days.

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Do you think it’s sad that I recognize too much of the YouTube memes featured in the newly released music video to Weezer’s “Pork and Beans”?

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One of the photo-bloggers that I admire most is Ferdz Decena. He has a travel blog over at Ironwulf.net Ver 6: En Route where he shares photos and his observations as he travels in the Philippines and abroad. While I have a pseudo-travel blog in Vista Pinas, Ferdz has done the actual traveling to many of the places I’ve featured in my blog. The photos he takes are excellent and I am a first-hand witness to his dedication to his craft when he and I were together in the January Boracay weekend.

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It’s been seven months since new high-resolution satellite imagery was released in Google Earth for the Philippines. So on May 13, Google updated their Google Earth data with tons of new and updated satellite imagery for our country via their usual question and answer blog posts.

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While browsing around the blogosphere, I came across this interesting website called AideRSS on one of the comments on Google Blogoscoped’s article “Tips For Dealing With Information Overload”. AideRSS is apparently a free tool that takes an RSS or Atom feed, collects some statistics, and then gives each post in the feed a PostRank, which seems to be an objective measure of a post’s quality, based on “relevance and reaction.” (You might say that PostRank is similar in name and function to Google’s PageRank.) Among the metrics it uses are the number of comments, Delicious links, Digg votes (?), and Google Blogsearch backlinks. You can then use PostRank to filter a feed for the best posts if you so desire.

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The ASUS Eee PC 900 Press Launch this morning was the first time that I’ve attended a PR event that’s not primarily for bloggers. Thanks to Abe for the spur-of-the-moment endorsement of invitation. The press launch was held at the swanky Makati Shangri-La Hotel in Ayala Center Makati and its basically what you expect it to be: basically a series of presentations (including one from Intel and Microsoft each) showing of the drool-worth ASUS Eee PC 900, a worthy successor to the wildly popular Eee PC 701 (which I still don’t have). And the answer to the grand question? The Eee PC 900 costs 25 thousand pesos in the Philippines (about US$590).

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Belated entry as always, but as they say, it’s “better to not be on time than to not be there at all” right? (Yeah, yeah, I just made that up.) After the iBlog4 Summit, bloggers of all shapes and sizes donned their costumes and headed over to Katips Bar along Katipunan Avenue to join the Bloggers’ Night sponsored by 88DB.com. Basically, 88DB.com is the freelancer/entrepreneur equivalent to the slave workers’ JobsDB.com, which is a sister site.

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かわいい! Meet Wikipe-tan. She’s the unofficial mascot and moe anthropomorph of Wikipedia. Here, she’s wearing the baro’t saya, the female national costume of the Philippines. Isn’t that cute?

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Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to catch all of the sessions since I attended a baptism in the morning with a reception during lunch. So it was in the middle of Manolo’s talk that I barged into iBlog4. I’m glad I caught Manolo speak (and it’s the first time I heard him give a speech) since he was very engaging and funny. He’s probably one of the few bloggers that’s able to translate his online eloquence into the real world.

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The big news that’s rocking the physics, electrical and electronics engineering fields is the proof of the existence of the memristor. “Mem-what?” Well, that’s what my initial reaction was, too. The memristor is apparently the missing fourth fundamental basic element of electrical circuits, alongside the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. And the cool thing about this is that the memristor was first hypothesized in 1971 by Leon Chua, a Filipino-American professor at the University of California at Berkeley who got his degree in B.S. Electrical Engineering at the Mapúa Institute of Technology in 1959, here in the Philippines! Yay, Pinoy!

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