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Sod the oscars – the rebel county was the place to be this weekend at the 4th annual Irish Blog Awards in the Cork International Airport Hotel. I was in attendance and it was a crackin’ night!

Massive kudos to Damien Mulley for organising an incredible event. There’s loads of photos online already, and I’m sure, plenty more to come.

I, along with many others, was posting updates and pictures to twitter (mostly under the tag #iba09) including the results as they happened! (Full winners list is now online). After the awards ceremony itself, I was wandering around with my recorder, looking for victims to be interviewed briefly – and I nabbed the following:

	Suzy Byrne (Maman Poulet) – winner, Best News & Current Affairs Blog & Grand Prix winner, Best Blog (05:23)
	Grandad/Richard O’Connor (Head Rambles) – past winner & nominee for Best Personal Blog (02:36)
	Rick O’Shea – Past winner, 2FM daytime DJ and Irish Blog Awards MC (03:26)

Thanks a million to these three for the interviews. To the others I was chatting to and recording, many many thanks also!… I just haven’t gotten around to editing that little mountain of audio down just yet.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting new people and catching up with people I’d met before. The hotel itself is awesome and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Jason is absolutely right to want people to write up a good review for it and, of course to vote for Rick in the Meteors!

I’m sure there’s loads of IBA’09 stories yet to be told – including the tale of the Ryanair plane-load of speed-tweeting bloggers stuck on the tarmac in Dublin – and the various anecdotes of the Twitster (Twitterers playing Twister) on a bouncy castle while the DJ pumped out the tunes … but I’ll leave those accounts for other bloggers to report on. I got a LOT of sleep once I got home today… now I’m off to get some more.

Hello SDLP Youth… How are you?

It was nice to get a link from the SDLP Youth web site.

I only got it because I linked to a video on YouTube where two Canadian radio comedians prank Sarah Palin – and the youngsters in the SDLP saw it (-and apparrently, that’s the kind of thing the SDLP Youth enjoy!).

Quick lesson in “image etiquette” on the interwebs.

If you’re going to use an image from someone elses site (e.g.: mine) – as long as you’re sure they won’t have a problem with it, of course, there’s two things you should do.

1. Download it from their site, upload it to your own – meaning you’re using your own bandwidth, not theirs.

2. Credit them for the image.

Thanks on both these counts to the lovely lecraic.

Boo hiss! on both counts to Amanda’s Growing Pains. Here’s a screenshot. Her blog entry DID have a picture looking like THIS in it:

… and okay, granted- that’s not MY original photo, but it’s hosted on my server and she directly linked to it, using my bandwidth (albeit a small amount) – so I changed the file so it looks like this:

(I also posted a reply there linking her to here). I guess that’ll show her…

Blogging is going to be fairly “thin on the ground” here for a wee while as my laptop is basically dying.

There’s a fault with the power input section of the motherboard and it’s only charging the battery when the power is OFF. When it’s ON, the battery discharges fully within about 20 minutes and the machine shuts down. It won’t run off the mains alone. I’ve tried a few things to get this fixed myself but to no avail and frankly, as it’s over 5 years old and well out of warranty by now, it looks like it’s time to put it “out to pasture”, as it were.

Will be a wee while before I can afford to shell out for a new one though, so blogging will be light for now. For your blogtertainment (suuuuure, it can be a word…), why not check out Rick, Damien, Ken, Twenty or Ruairí? G’wan…