Maharlika Electronica

In honor of the birthday of one of the founding fathers of modern day electronics, Lee De Forest, I decided to come up with the theme "Maharlika Electronica" for the weekly meeting of the Maharlika Toastmasters Club. Unfortunately, because of the heavy rains and the long weekend before the meeting, there were only a few members present in the meeting. In fact, if Kai decided to bail out of her speech on the last minute, I would be the lone prepared speaker, not to mention the Toastmaster of the Evening!

But the club carried on, true to its tradition. Long-time Maharlikan CTM Edwin Suson made a surprising comeback for the meeting. He brought along a guest and the Maharlikans were obviously excited to see their most prolific recruiter of members return. I brought a guest of my own and there was another returning guest making the total number of warm bodies present in the meeting was 14.

ACB Edvil started the educational portion with the Table Topics. He had four questions regarding electronics and our daily dependence on most electronic gadgets. The prepared speech portion was started by Kai when she delivered her 9th Basic Speech. She persuaded everyone (who has relatives or friends in the United States or Canada for that matter) to try the latest innovation in long distance telecommunications, the Magic Jack. It's a VOIP device that connects right into our computers and allows the user to make telephone calls to anywhere North America for a minimal rate compared to conventional international direct dialing.

I then delivered my speech about the Filipino inventor who claims to have solved the fuel crisis by inventing the water-powered car. ACB Odessa acted as the GE in the absence of the pre-assigned GE. For the first time, TM Peter handled the Table Topics evaluation and by the reckoning of Des, Peter did an admirable job considering his experience as an evaluator. CTM Edwin then evaluated Kai while ACS Ed evaluated me.

All in all, the meeting was still successful in spite of the absence of the many members the club usually has.