This blog has received it’s share of (mostly) non-official awards and recognitions, Lord knows why, but never has it received such as a recognition as this…

The “Dog’s Bollocks” award! An Irish flavored recognition if there ever was one and as far as I know…I’m the first. Now that’s special alright.

The award and the subsequent logo is the creation of one K8 the GR8, daughter of Grandad, (scourge of whatever Irish county, town and/or village he happens to live in or at least that’s what his blog depicts anyway) who is known to be “…not as green as she cabbage-looking”. Personally I think she looks rather like a youngish, Irish (very), red-headed type female, somewhat rebellious in nature and quite pretty actually in my opinion but self images being what they are and all that…

The first time I noticed that she had called my blog the “Dog’s Bollocks” was on a meme she stuck me with (which I’m a bit behind on getting done actually) as a “description” following the link to Just Thinkin’. And although my lineage is rather heavy on the English, Scottish, Gaelic end of things I simply had no idea what a “bollocks” was (but I had a damn good guess) so of course I had to look it up. It was then I became worried:

1. (UK, vulgar) The testicles (sometimes used in the singular) Yup, I was right.
2. (UK, vulgar) Nonsense or information deliberately intended to mislead. Uh… 
3. (Ireland, vulgar) An idiot, an ignorant or disagreeable person. Whut…huh? I am not!  
     “Don’t mind him; he’s only an oul’ bollocks!” So this is an award?

Looking at the above definitions, this seemed like recognition of a rather dubious nature at best. But upon asking her about this the dear lady thankfully set me straight (probably had a good chuckle over it as well I’d imagine):

Dog’s Bollocks:
Lit. Canine Testicles Uh…not the last time I looked…
Adjective phrase meaning excellent, or being of excellent quality. Usually applied to workmanship or build quality. Now that’s more like it! 
“That car is the dog’s bollocks mate”

I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt and going with the Adjective phrase rather than the literal definition in this case. Makes me feel better anyway.

Of course I had to ask K8 if there was a logo of some kind that went with this fine award (I just had to have one you see) that I could proudly hang in my sidebar and in a day or so she whipped me up that most excellent logo you see above and in the sidebar along with 2 of the previous ones which were all I managed to find.

I am a bit concerned about the SOB award I received from ( the ever wonderful) Liz Strauss before this blog…uh…”evolved” into what it is today, whatever the hell that may be. It’s not that I’m not the same lovable, ‘community oriented’, ‘help your neighbor’ type of guy that I guess earned me that award in the first place but let’s just say I’ve let more of myself come through within the last year or so—tends to add a bit of crust/grit/salt into the mix shall we say. Perhaps I wouldn’t qualify as an SOB these days…or at least not in the “Successful and Outstanding Blogger” way she means it too be, who knows?

Either way, I’m proud to hang both on on the “wall” here at “JT” (Man! I just love having my own acronym!). Kinda’ shows me that I’m still able to be diversified without alienating one set of folks from another. I love being able be myself without folks tossing yesterday’s veggies in my general direction.

Thanks K8! I’ll endeavor to live up to being a “Dog’s Bollocks” as well as an “SOB”. It’s a hard job indeed but someone has to do it. And I promise to get that meme done. Shouldn’t be hard seein’ as how complaining is one of my specialities.

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Yup, I got me a tin foil hat now. I resisted it as long as I could but it was all in vain, I finally had to give in. It was the dreaded Murphy Signal! (AAAGGGHHHH!!), the straw that finally broke this camel’s back.

The Murphy Signal! (AAAGGGHHHH!!)…That miserable wireless Internet connection killer that takes out my connection with the virtual work world and all my special friends out there(hey Sixty, hey Grandad), the one that cuts me off from the outside world and then makes me run around in a blind panic rebooting wireless routers and computers until it finally gets tired of my antics and wanders off to make somebody else’s life miserable.

I came out here this morning and powered up ol’ reliable and went back to the kitchen for that all important first coffee and a pop tart (I never got over those). Upon returning I noticed that I had that little warning balloon hovering over the System Tray that told me my wireless signal was way too low. Oh crap, here we go again. Next step is losing it all together which was ridiculous since the router putting out the signal was in the next room. But wait!!! I checked the available wireless networks and there it was! The Murphy Signal! (AAAGGGHHHH!!).

It’s caused by aliens, I just know it. Either that or it’s the people from Connecticut who bought the house across the street—same thing.

My wife did the honors, I just couldn’t bring myself to admit failure in resisting the tin foil hat. But much to my surprise she placed it not on my head, but around the wireless receiver instead (she was always smarter than me anyway). After the deed was done and I was sitting there with a dumbfounded look on my face, she turned to me with a look of profound sympathy and love, kissed me and went back to her computer in the other room.

I was saved.

The Murphy Signal! (AAAGGGHHHH!!) was finally gone and my connection to the outer world was once again strong and healthy. And I could walk still outside with my head held high and without looking like a fool wearing a tin foil hat.

Life is good.

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Web 1.0 refers to the state of the World Wide Web, and website design style before the Web 2.0 craze, and included most websites in the period between 1994 and 2004. It is important to note that “Web 1.0″ is a retronym. That is to say that it has been retroactively named only after the introduction of the term “Web 2.0″, and has very loosely defined boundaries. For the most part websites were a strictly one-way published media, similar to the Gopher protocol that came before it.

So would you do it? Would you take the money and accept that the fact that the Internet was just a one-way street for you, a read-only situation? Let her know what you think and I’ll be over there myself, looking forward to seeing your answer.

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Yeah, I lost a few plugins due to obvious compatibility issues but it’s way early in that game yet since the authors are still currently working on updating their plugins to work with WP 2.5 which hasn’t been released as a beta yet. As I said previously, I couldn’t wait any longer.

More on this later since I just barely got back on my somewhat shaky feet after a go around with a rather nasty bug which had me laid out for over two weeks now and I’m still a might dizzy. More than usual that is.

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Then one day I dropped in and lo, there was Raven. It was still very much an egg at that time but there was a lot of noise surrounding it as far as the loyal followers were concerned of which I one although my loyalty was best described as latent to be sure. But there was always the appreciation of the first local editor I ever used when I first began blogging.

There’s a lot in this editor to like for instance downloading and displaying all the tags from a WordPress based blog for example. And adding the ability to link highlighted text to various reference, search and blogging/bookmarking sites. For example the Windows Live Writer link above submits the linked text to Technorati as a search and the results page is the link itself. I also like how Raven breaks down a blog into it’s separate parts as in Posts, Links, Images and Tags, these being listed as “folders” in the left sidebar of the main window. Clicking on any one of these folders displays quite a lot of information about your posts, links, images and tags depending on which “folder” you click on. I was quite surprised to find that selecting a single post from the list displays that post in the bottom preview window using your selected template that you downloaded from your blog via the built in template manager. Nice touch that.

I won’t be leaving Windows Live Writer for this anytime soon since Raven still has those bugs and quirks you’d expect from any beta like automatically adding Technorati tags for any tags I type into the Tags field. For WordPress blogger’s that means that the Tag field automatically adds any new tags that you don’t currently have in your database (good) but automatically adds these tags as Technorati tags at the end of the post (bad). There are times when you don’t want to necessarily add Technorati tags to a post but by what I understand there’s a additional tagging option in the works that will allow the user to select any additional services in which to add tags to such as Technorati.

One thing that I still don’t see is an inline spell checker which is an absolute must for me. Otherwise how else will I be distracted from focusing on my writing? I guess I’ll just have to make do with the old style spell checker and just find another way to be distracted.

I’ll be posting more on this at a later date.

Technorati : blogging software, windows live writer, zoundry raven

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