taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Somehow or other, I seem to have won the 2009 Irish Blog Award for Best Technology Blog/Blogger! To be honest, for the last year I haven’t been spending as much time on the blog as before, due mainly to a rather compelling distraction, so I’m doubly grateful for winning.

Unfortunately, I was out of the country, at Nishad and Janet’s wedding, so missed my chance to get up on stage and thank my fellow bloggers in person — but I asked John to do so instead. Seems he in turn got stage fright and delegated to his missus, who picked up the trophy. Thanks Fiona! That’s probably just as well, since I’m pretty incoherent in that kind of situation myself.

Cheers to my fellow nominees, Eoghan, Robin, Michele and Pat. One of you guys should totally have won ;)

And last of all — cheers to BitBuzz for sponsoring the category, and Mulley for the whole bash. I definitely have to turn up next year!

Now I need to put more time in this year to really earn that award…

Tags: awards, blogging, iba09, ireland, meta

Blimey, I’m a finalist for one of this year’s Blog Awards:

Best Technology Blog/Blogger – Sponsored by Bitbuzz

• contrast.ie/blog
• taint.org
• bytesurgery.com/blog
• mneylon.com/blog
• patphelan.net

Unfortunately I’m going to be in LA this weekend, so I’ll need to give a written message to John, just in case the impossible happens ;)

Tags: awards, blog-awards, iba2009

I didn’t win a Web Award — but then, given the competition from a couple of very professional news organisations, I really wasn’t expecting to ;) Silicon Republic won, and rightly so. Good on ‘em.

I had a great night nonetheless, hanging out with Vishal, Walter (who won his category!), Conor O’Neill, Jason and a bunch of others.

Thanks to Moviestar.ie and BH Consulting for their sponsorship of a great event — marketing money well-spent, I suspect. Extra thanks to Moviestar for the freebie DVD player. And thanks of course to the mighty Mulley for organising the whole thing — at this stage he’s a finely-honed events machine!

Tags: awards, events, ireland, iwa08

So, the Irish Web Awards are happening on Saturday night — I’m booked and looking forward to it! Say “hi” if you’re there and spot my ugly mug ;)

Tags: awards, ireland, irish-web-awards, iwa2008

Crazy! Somehow or other, this blog has made the shortlist for “Best Technology Site” at the Irish Web Awards 2008, up against TechCentral, Silicon Republic, Camara, and Robin Blandford’s ByteSurgery blog. I have no idea how this happened, given the quality of the sites I’m up against — two of them are even proper news sites, with journalists! ;)

I’ve registered for the Oct 11 event; looking forward to it now…

Tags: awards, ireland, irishwebawards2008, meta, taint.org

A quick note; the Irish Blog Awards shortlisting votes are about to end later today. I’ve been nominated in the long list (thanks!), for best technology blog — feel free to vote for me if you like ;)

Update: boo, no shortlisting. Still, probably my own fault, I was a bit too wishy-washy with the vote hustling! Maybe next year…

Tags: awards, blogging, blogs, irish-blog-awards, irishblogs, meta

Plug plug plug: next week is the 2007 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival — some great movies being shown, I’m looking forward to it. Most of all, though, I want to recommend Small Engine Repair, which I’ve written about before. It’s being shown in the festival at 6:20 PM on Wed 21st Feb in IFI 1 — tickets can be booked online here, at EUR 9 apiece.

Writer and director, Niall Heery, won the Breakthrough Talent Award at this year’s Irish Film and Television Awards at the weekend. Nice one Niall!

Go see it if you get a chance — it’s a fantastic movie, in my opinion. And be sure to vote for it for the festival’s Audience Award…

Tags: awards, dublin, film, friends, ifta, ireland, movies, niall-heery, small-engine-repair

W00t!

Tags: awards, linux-new-media-awards, spamassassin, w00t, yay

Last Friday, I visited the Galway Film Fleadh to see the Irish premiere of a new feature-length movie called Small Engine Repair, which was directed by a mate of mine called Niall Heery.

I loved it — funny, extremely black comedy, reminded me a lot of The Deer Hunter in visual style, but unmistakably Irish at the same time. (Blog movie reviews seem to be out of favour right now, so I’ll leave it at that.)

Here’s hoping it picks up wider distribution very soon — it deserves to be big, I think. Nice one, Niall! Happily, the voters of the Fleadh agreed – it went on to win the Best First Feature award.

Actually, it’s been a good year for friends and family at the Fleadh — I note that my cousin, Eoin Ryan, picked up first prize for Best Irish Short Animation with his excellent short, Demon. cool!

Tags: awards, demon, eoin-ryan, family, films, fleadh, friends, galway, movies, niall-heery, small-engine-repair

SpamAssassin: The 2003 OSDir.com Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source. Woo!

Editor’s Choice for Best Application (Top 5 environments):

Email: SpamAssassin (Double Winner)

SpamAssassin keeps keeps me out of Anger Management classes. If you are not running SpamAssassin get thee to SpamAssassin.org. Now. If you need your friendly neighborhood system administrator to do it.. start sending flowers or Scotch today with a nice little note asking to get SpamAssassin going medieval on your mail server.

Miscellaneous Editor’s Choice:

Can’t Live Without: SpamAssassin

The fact that this doesn’t have to be explained says it all.

Tags: application, awards, choice, com, editor, open, osdir, source, spamassassin, woo