Hello Blog. It's been such a long time since we've spoken. As you can tell from your IP logging I got a contract renewal until the end of September. It was a real stay of execution but I don't thing I'll get much more out of it after September. I'm sure we'll manage but I'd rather have something more concrete.
Speaking of something more concrete, me and my little Rover Mini were involved in an altercation with a construction truck two weeks ago. I appear to be fine but Mini's wing and other bits were completely shredded. I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs here but I will upload a photo of the damage later. It's very sad.
The Galway Project is coming along with costings coming in and planning moving along nicely. A start date can only be around the corner at this stage.
I haven't been updating Clear of Cloud either but the latest on the flying front is that at the moment it looks like the week of August the sixth will be setting for my flight test. The Heeby Geebies have arrived and I'm doing what I can to keep them at bay.
Well Blog, those are the highlights... I'm sure you'll pick up on the detail as the story progresses.
Me and She went to the blog awards last night. It was good to have been there. Bernie, very generously handed his Contribution to the Bloggershpere to Damien Mulley, and we all applauded loudly. Beaut.ie got a host of awards. Twenty Major turned up and made a good gag about Simon Young, y'had to be there. Rick O'Shea moved disturbingly in Second Life. Some people got awards that I'd question.... Best .... I saw at least two others who deserved it more...... excluding for reasons of bias, my own good lady.
Oh yes, I also discovered that writers of award-winning blogs are not necessarily writers of award-winning acceptance speeches. Actually, while that it sounds like sour grapes on my part, it's not; I just felt that having been recognised by the blogging community, I think some people could have made more of an effort at being gracious.
As we gave up meeting anyone we knew, we walked out the door and straight into North Atlantic Skyline and Candid Soul. A very pleasant chat ensued and we were assured of a welcome in the West. Guess who we met next; the francophile Winds and Breezes. It was really great to meet the people behind the writing and imaging. It was really strange that these people knew who Bumpf was..... and She was even more surprised to be recognised as Endeavour.
Overall, I think I'll be back next year and maybe by then I'll know even more people.
It does seem that I'm not posting much but, actually, I'm making a decent effort at regular updates. I'm back flying again and because I'm only slightly obsessive, Clear of Cloud is getting most of my attention lately.
Aha, this is how I embed a flickr photo..... maybe now I'll post some of my own pictures here.
To get the ball rolling, this one was taken last weekend on Dollymount strand. This one was with my trusty Olympus. I'll post a 400D shot when I get a good one! I think I'll call this one "Signs of Civilisation"
I've realised in recent days that, not only am I not posting as much as as I used to, but I'm not reading as many blogs. I think the former may be related to the latter. Yesterday was my first visit in months to many of the blogs that I used to read on a daily basis.
In something remarkably like a resolution - I'm going to try to get back to writing some more. 2006 was generally a very good year for me which is bad for my writing. I need to be quite introverted when writing but when I'm happy I have less introverted spells so I'm considerably less prolific. Though, I think we've ascertained before that prolific is probably the wrong word - sure you know what I mean.
Now that I've subscribed to Typepad fully, I might actually buy a separate URL for my other blog Clear of Cloud . .... and maybe update Flickr more. I'll stop now before I fall into a resolution spree.
The new blog is up and running and devoid of original posts. So far all I've done is exported my flying posts from here to there and created a new flickrbadge to display flying posts.
The exporting of posts was a little monotonous; exporting to a single text file and then manual find the flying posts. Sometimes I wish I could code.
Okay, this a straight lift from the Irish Times , it's worth reading so I make no apology. All the winners are listed at the end of the piece. If your not already reading the have a wander round the list and see what's happening in the Irish blogosphere - go'wan, shure tis Paddy's week.
Gavin's blog has a great video of the event. Looks like it was good craic. Maybe next year (attending not participating :-) )
"King-size kudos for web author 'Twenty Major' Jon Ihle
An anonymous online writer understood to be from south Dublin won the award for best blog at the first Irish Blog Awards at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin on Saturday.
The blogger, known only by the name of his idiosyncratic website, Twenty Major, also scooped awards for best blog post and most humorous blog post.
A man identifying himself only as Tim, a self-described "childhood friend" of Twenty Major, accepted the awards on behalf of the blog and its author, but declined to offer any comment apart from a brief apology on behalf of the mysterious blogger.
"Twenty couldn't make it tonight," he joked. "Maybe he can next year when there aren't so many people after him."
More than 160 members of the Irish blogging community attended the awards. A total of 1,700 people, not all of them bloggers, submitted votes in an online poll to decide the winners.
Founder and organiser Damien Mulley, a technical writer and chairman of Ireland Offline, a voluntary organisation that lobbies for the development of internet infrastructure, said the idea behind the awards was to expose Irish blogs to a wider audience and "to encourage passionate people to blog themselves".
RTÉ 2fm DJ and blogger Rick O'Shea, the MC for the night, said the awards showed "blogging had gone from something done in dark rooms at 3am to something more mainstream".
Members of the audience were disappointed but not surprised that the man behind Twenty Major - whose anonymity is as much a part of his authorial persona as is his frequently scatological approach to social commentary - chose not to attend.
Other winners included Annette Clancy, a management consultant, whose site Thinking Out Loud was honoured with best fiction and best personal blog awards.
Sinéad Gleeson, winner in the arts and culture category said: "Thank God some women won awards. With these things there's a perception it's male-dominated."
The winner of best use of the Irish language, Conn Ó Muíneacháin, started his blog after getting tired of "looking for content I couldn't find".
"Maybe next year we'll see some Irish language blogs in other categories moving into the mainstream," he said in his acceptance speech.
Mr Ó Muíneacháin, a software engineer, is the first person to begin podcasting in Irish. He recently reached the 100 mark and currently does one podcast per day. Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video online for downloading, often through subscription services.
Microsoft Ireland was the largest sponsor of the awards, having offered €2,000 to pay for the function room at the Alexander after the number of registered attendees exceeded Mr Mulley's estimates for a smaller venue.
"What I'd like is for [ the awards] to show that this isn't just about online diaries," said Mr Mulley. "We had stuff worthy of journalist prizes."
Blogging: a beginner's guide
Blog is short for "weblog", a website or online diary to which items are posted on a regular basis in reverse chronological order.
Blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as politics or technology, although this is not a requirement of the medium.
A key characteristic of blogs is real-time reader interactivity and participation, usually through comment software.
Blog entries typically contain some combination of text, images and links to other websites, but video, photo and audio blogging are becoming increasingly popular as broadband becomes more widespread and multimedia technology becomes more robust and affordable.
There is some dispute as to who was the first blogger - some credit Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, others an American college student named Justin Hall - but it is generally accepted that blogging began in the mid-1990s. Although the term "blog" came into currency in 1997, blogging didn't take off as a mass movement until the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, dramatically expanded the global appetite for political commentary, news and media criticism, which bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) and Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) supplied in abundance.
By the time of the US presidential election in 2004, blogging was cemented in the American media landscape, as bloggers began breaking news stories, most notably discovering a story by CBS news on president George Bush relied on forged documents.
Blogging in Ireland emerged in the wake of this upsurge in the US. Apart from blogs such as best political blog winner Slugger O'Toole, which covers Northern Ireland and has won a loyal global readership, much of the Irish blogosphere steers clear of politics, preferring to focus on overlooked art forms, cultural ephemera or just the vicissitudes of daily life, among a huge range of topics.
Many of the first reports and images of the Dublin riots of last month appeared on blogs.
Annette Clancy, whose site Thinking Out Loud was honoured with best fiction and best personal blog awards describes blogging as the gathering of "communities of interest".
"There's a discourse out there that we're wannabe journalists, but that's a naïve understanding," she says. "Blogs are curatorial spaces, individual statements of voice where sophisticated conversations about identity can take place." -Jon Ihle
Irish blog awards: winners
Best Blog: Twenty Major - twentymajor.blogspot.com
Best Blog Post: Twenty Major - twentymajor.blogspot.com - "New York Diary"
