Jack The Scribbler

Why Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 may be the newest Twitter app

Oh, the pictures you find if you add "babe" to your search term (Thanks, sucksorrules.com)

I may be exaggerating of course.

And the free T-shirt distributed during the browser’s Philippine launch didn’t make me do it. (By itself, it was cool — in the manner that gifts are cool, save for coffee mugs, pens, and paperweights — except that this lagniappe emphasized the paunch I was trying hard to contain when I tried it out. Moral lesson: Swallow the much-vaunted pride and ask for the XL next time.)

In any case, my love handles didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for IE 9’s Jump List — strong words from someone who has eschewed all things Microsoft ever since a famous Filipino writer “bribed” him with a PowerBook 520 and turned him into a Mac fanatic more than a decade ago. [See: PowerBook 520, which by the way, introduced the use of a trackpad on a laptop]

Using the Jump List, you can tweet, read a tweet, view a mention, among others, all without launching IE 9 beforehand since it works seamlessly with Windows 7 and Vista.

When it was demonstrated during the launch held last Wednesday, September 22, at Microsoft’s Philippine offices, it blew me away.

You could be checking your inbox using a separate email app — say, Thunderbird — and you could post a Tweet, all without visiting Twitter.com or using any of the hundreds of Twitter apps, the best of which, if you ask me, still is Destroy Twitter. [See: Destroy Twitter]

So I guess IE 9 — as a Twitter app — comes second and that’s only because of its Jump List (which, if I’m not mistaken, also allows users to send email and post their respective Facebook status updates).

Except that the use and enjoyment of these apps still remain vicarious as far as I’m concerned.

After all, I’m still using a five or so year old Macintosh PowerBook, appropriated from the same Filipino writer famous enough he wouldn’t mind even if I failed to give him — that’s Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. — credit. (As always, I remain grateful, professor. So how about I buy your Blackberry this time on friendly terms? iPhone? MacBook Air? Mint condition Volkswagen Beetle?) [See: Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.]

Three things I’ve learned on Twitter so far

1) Vinegar is good for cleaning the coffee machine.

Or so says @FrankAdMan, a US-based Twitter user who, for some reason, decided to follow me (and I was prompted to follow him as well, introducing me to the Twitter accounts of Donald Draper, Roger Sterling, and Steve Martin etc.) [See: Donald Draper, Roger Sterling, and Steve Martin]
Run through about a mugful of vinegar to clear the gunk in the machine’s innards, he told me in a tweet. I did that just now, a warm Sunday afternoon, a year after I received the advice. Guess what? Coffee I just made tastes crispier, cleaner, all because of tips shared by users of a platform that uses no more than 140 characters.

2) “What fresh hell is this?” was an original quote from Dorothy Parker

While writing a review of Californication — which was later uploaded in hotmanila.ph in exchange for a hearty lunch — I had the mistaken assumption that the quote was first uttered by Kathleen Turner, who played Barbara Rose, in the War of the Roses. [See: Californication Review]
At that time, I had just bought old Rolling Stone magazines from a neighborhood garage sale. One of those issues featured a review of the movie in which the writer quoted Barbara Rose as saying exactly that, without referring to the feisty female of the Algonquin Round Table. [See: Dorothy Parker, Algonquin Round Table]
In Californication, Hank Moody — played by David Duchovny — uttered that same quote, referring to the cantankerous Sue Collini, also played by Kathleen Turner, the new boss of Moody’s agent, Charlie Runckle. [See: Californication]
I was about to point out that Turner ORIGINALLY uttered the same quote that was later used to describe her in another role.
Fortunately, the oversight was caught in time by @hotmanila and @sleeplessgirl while exchanging various Tweets. So much for my background in literature.

3) Last but not least, Twitter users can teach you a lot more about the world.

You just have to be patient.
Through this microblogging platform, I learned that @meralco — currently the Twitter handle of the Philippines’ largest electric company — was initially held and controlled by @nicknich3, an American electricity price analyst based in Cagayan de Oro by the name of Nick Nichols. [See: Nick Nichols' blog.]
Nichols later agreed to “return” the handle to Meralco during the height of typhoon Ondoy last year. [See: How Meralco got its Twitter name back]
Through his various blog entries — links of which were posted on Twitter — and direct message exchanges on the same platform, I was able to get an idea — however vaguely — of what the term “stranded costs” meant in the arcane world of the Philippine power industry. “Stranded costs” represent the portion of an electric bill that is used to pay for investments of companies that built power plants especially after the value of these generation assets may have changed due to a shift in government policy. [See: Stranded Costs in Energy Dictionary]
See? I’m learning something.

How Meralco got its Twitter name back


Thanks, slakker9.blogspot.com, geekandpoke.typepad.com.

Two famous typhoons of 2009 — Ondoy and Pepeng — forced the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) to use Twitter.
Problem was, the Twitter handle @meralco, was already taken.
And someone else on the platform — @manilaelectric — was tweeting information different from the official version.
Here’s the link to what now appears to be the first in a series of Twitter-related stories I plan to write for GMANews.TV, the website that employs me.

See Jack fail miserably at selling web ads

See Jack tweet in exactly 140 characters