The hottest in the gadgets market these days? Gotta be this one:

Gee, an iPad! The first time I heard about it, I thought it was a joke. That is until I saw a picture of Steve Jobs holding a prototype and an article to prove that that is what it’s called truly.

My Twitter stream was filled with “tweets” from satisfied customers and many more would-be owners. And there I was salivating over the new MacBook Pros with core i5 and i7 processors. I thought I was over my gadget-loving days. These new Apple products better not lure me. I might find myself shopping for iphone accessories soon. Well, that’s the  cheapest option.

You think people are consulting Google only for things as trivial as diet pill reviews? I’m not sure if it was from the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy or House (or maybe it was from something I was reading) where it was stated that people are actually a lot more informed these days when it comes to their medical conditions. They consult doctors now armed with a few researched facts about their symptoms and/or possible ailments. Must be annoying, to say the least, for the medical professionals sometimes, though I believe that it does more good than harm. Well, at least as long as the patient is well informed and the doctor is actually an expert that the patient can place his full trust to the latter in the end.

I’ve always been a fan of instant messaging, although I’m a bit wary of its use as a way of chatting with strangers, for whatever purpose it may serve the user. But that warrants another post. As a way of communicating with family members and friends, instant messaging is such a huge help. That you can even use your mobile phone to connect, as mobile marketing ploys will tell you, is a really useful feature especially if you’re always mobile or always on the go. Text message services are OK, too, but web SMS is sometimes cheaper. Also, if you’re going out of the country, for instance, and your mobile phone provider failed to activate your roaming services for some reason, using the Internet to send instant messages will come in handy. Personally,  I prefer to use the Gmail integrated chat because it allows me to check e-mails and chat with a number of contacts simultaneously.  But because several of my other friends prefer to use Yahoo messenger, I still log-in to my YM account occasionally just to check if somebody left an offline message. Truth is, if your intent is to exchange short messages alone, both Gmail and YM serve this purpose, although Gmail chat do not have the Web cam and audio functionality just yet (I think you’ll have to set this up). More than these two, there are plenty more instant messaging services  in the World Wide Web.  You just have to find which one suits your need best.

I decided to log in to my Yahoo messenger one time and was happy to see that a college friend I haven’t spoken to for a long time was online. So I sent a hello message, only to be replied to with “password?” I was so baffled by the reply that I wasn’t able to say anything for a while. So my friend decided to explain that she thinks I (my account “handle”) am an impostor because apparently she chatted with me before and it was like, according to my friend, I was an entirely different person. That made me LOL because I’m sure I’m the only one using my own account on my own PC and I was never drunk nor drugged to chat without knowing what I’m saying; then it occurred to me that maybe my account was hacked, just like the other people in my friends list, whose accounts sometimes send me adverts like acai berry stuff and phenphedrine review or some useless links. We were never able to figure out what happened there and I became a little more vigilant about using my YM since then.  Some people just don’t have better things to do.

Comparatively speaking, I don’t think I can call myself a Twitterholic … yet. But I totally get its appeal now, compared with a few months ago when I created an account just to see what the heck that thing is about.

Among other things, I get CNN breaking news headlines (@cnnbrk), Hollywood gossip (@justjared), grammar pointers (@GrammarGirl), blogging/tech tips (@problogger), and writer/celebrity tweets (@neilhimself, @paolocoelho, @amber_benson, @feliciaday) all in one stream.  If only I have anything clever to say, I can even drop a message to any of these people.  And if I’m lucky, I may even get a reply. But I’m actually having fun just reading their conversations with other “tweeple”, fans and other celebrities alike. I even get to exchange messages with fellow Buffyverse (and Whedonverse) fanatics.

Anyway, here’s an awesome string of Twitter articles from Felicia Day.

Not that Twitter isn’t riddled with spammers and posers. There are plenty of fake celebrity pages, and if you’re looking for someone in particular, it may be wise to be a little more discerning before you actually “follow” them.  But I’m following @TinaFey although I’m not entirely sure it’s her. The number of followers can sometimes be a good indication of the validity of a well-known person’s Twitter page. I think this is already an ongoing craze, although I doubt celebrities would seriously consider identity theft protection measures for this medium anytime soon.

Do you think this is the real Darth Vader, though?

I once saw this job ad saying that the person who should apply must be Internet savvy. I didn’t know what that meant so, naturally, I didn’t apply for the position. How time can change a person – for better or for worse. Now the only thing I need to be truly savvy is a Rackmount lcd.

Yesterday, I had an interesting Internet experience. I’m still a bit pudified about it because I think I brought hordes of people to a particular site I was looking out for. It’s not really a bad thing because visibility and promotion is good (and it may actually be the point of the site) but I kinda felt like an online stalker just because I discovered something before hundreds of others did.

Anyway, here’s another something I want to spread the word about. If you noticed the italicized word somewhere in the above paragraph, it’s a word I adopted from http://www.savethewords.org/. Go save some words now. Adopt some and use them, K?