Yay! Here’s the fifth installment of my irregular Groovee Playlist™ series (see the previous one). As before, I’ll link to the Wikipedia article about the song (if it exists) as “[W]”, and to the YouTube search (or official music video) for the song as “[U]” so that you can sample the song and see if you like it as well.

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There’s nothing like the loss of Internet connection to confirm that you’re an Internet addict.

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I grew up being taught that Filipinos hate the Philippines and that we have this stupid colonial mentality sickness. It’s been said that Filipinos prefer products made by industrialized companies over local products and that our countrymen prefer to migrate elsewhere to escape the hellhole that the Philippines had become. It’s also been said that Pinoy immigrants to the U.S. and Europe are afflicted with the so-called IMSCF syndrome ("I’m Spanish/Chinese-Filipino”), where they downplay their Filipino heritage and promote, possibly invented, foreign ancestors.

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My friend Imman got irritated with many of his friends praising the arrival of Firefox 3 so he decided to try the darned thing to see for himself what the hype is all about. He is already using Maxthon, a powerful tabbed-browsing shell to the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Read his assessment where he disses Firefox 3 out-of-the-box. He understands that Firefox can be extended in functionality but he prefers a powerful default browser (e.g., Maxthon has mouse gestures by default). And just like Firefox, Maxthon has a mature add-on community to further make Maxthon more powerful.

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In lieu of yet another Mozilla Firefox 3 review (there are thousands out there if you want) and instead of encouraging you to download it (I’m sure I would’ve been preaching to the choir here), I’ll just give my first-time impressions of the latest version of the browser that I’ve come to love. (If you’re curious about this article’s title, you should check out my blog posts for Firefox 2 and Firefox 1. Hehehe.)

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Here are a couple of pictures with me in it back in my U.P. Diliman days. Hope you won’t get shocked. Hehehe.

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Shown above is the Cebu International Convention Center in Mandaue City where the first ever Philippine Open Source Summit will be held. The Summit will happen on June 23 to 24—that’s next week, Monday and Tuesday. Surprisingly, Microsoft Philippines is a major sponsor of the said summit so it’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft can contribute to the Open Source Community. (It’s also expected that there will be discussions and debates regarding Microsoft’s Office Open XML, an XML-based format for office documents that got ISO standardization early this year amid numerous controversies.)

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First of all, read Ferdz’ blog post. Then, if you have Google Earth, open this KML. Or if you don’t have Google Earth, you can check the KML out in Google Maps but take note that Google Maps doesn’t rotate image overlays so what you’ll see there won’t be accurate. Anyway, a screenshot of the KML as seen in Google Earth is shown to the side.

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Or at least the first one based in the Philippines? If you don’t know what Plurk is, it’s a Twitter wannabe but apparently cuter and more fun with its innovative timeline presentation of “plurks” and its grouping of responses into threads. (I don’t use Twitter, Pownce, nor Jaiku, so I wouldn’t really know the difference. Yeah, such a boring life I lead.) See Andrew’s post for a view of Plurk from the Twitter perspective.

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A little less than two weeks ago, I and several other bloggers were invited by Nokia Philippines to a discussion over dinner at Sugi in Greenbelt 2. There, Nokia presented the global company’s future direction and solicited fedback and insights from us. Representing Nokia were William Hamilton-Whyte, General Manager, Rhomel Marcojos, head of various marketing stuff, and Nikka Singson-Abes, Corporate Communications Manager. William is actually a quite a fascinating expatriate. He’s Scottish-French, born in Kenya, and has lived in about a dozen countries before taking the country General Manager position for the Philippines’ most successful mobile phone brand.

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Wow! There’s no official word yet from Google but it seems that they have updated their satellite imagery data in both Google Earth and Google Maps at the same time early tonight. Usually, there’s a lag time: Google first updates the imagery in Google Earth before porting it over to Google Maps between a week to a month later. I only recall one time that they pushed data at the same time. Well, this update is the second time this month. Update: well, the data seemed to have appeared in Google Earth about at least three days ago and was updated in Google Maps tonight.

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