Saturday night found us at the previously mentioned and now infamous 2009 Blog Awards, where for those of us attending the Ladies Tea Party, copious amounts of food were wonderfully catered by Fuel at the Cork Airport Hotel.

Score one for not having to cook.

Next morning, it was breakfast ala hotel with about 100 other hungover bloggers, and God bless whoever was back there in the kitchen, because it meant I didn’t have to cook it. Hurrah.

That afternoon, in an act of unprecedented forward planning and sheer genius, I had booked Bite Size to cater a family luncheon to celebrate John’s birthday. Not, you understand, because I fail at domesticity; I am perfectly capable of turning out Sunday lunch for 12 people. I am not, however, remotely capable of turning out as much as toast on four hours of sleep and a massive booze and debauchery fuelled hangover.

In fact, I couldn’t even manage coffee (which is just as well as we didn’t have any). In answer to my prayers and a public plea on Twitter, the absolutely god-like Sam Kidd from Sam and Dan’s actually brought me a huge steaming carryout of java. To my door. With a smile. I nearly wept into the cup.

The catering from Bite Size turned up an hour later, when I was just about ready to face the world again, and it was tremendous. Their canapés are like little works of art, the dinner was massive, and we ate gloriously well on Sunday. The guests all ooh’d and ahh’d and dug in, and I have to say that for a dozen well-fed eaters, it was excellent value for money.

Not to mention that we also feasted on leftovers all day Monday, thus escaping yet another day of cooking, which was just as well because I seriously needed the entire day for additional recovery time. (I think I drank my own body weight in tea, water and 7 UP in a futile attempt to re-hydrate.)

Alas, today all systems returned to normal. The last leftovers went to the dog, the last cupcakes went into various happy eaters, and the last of the manky bits went down the insinkerator, thus ending my three day kitchen holiday.

But if I win the lottery, let me tell you: personal chef. All the way.

Back from the Irish Blog Awards, and as the song says, “Oh what a night.”

Major props to the Cork Airport Hotel, which in addition to being stellar hosts for the IBAs, did a stupendous job for the Ladies Tea Party. The apartment was stunning, the catering was abundant and beautifully presented, and the Tea Party was a great vibe with tons of women, much mingling, and abundant consumption of gorgeous cupcakes and copoius amounts of organic wine.

(The official count was that we started with five cases and ended up with four bottles left over. That turned out to be slightly inaccurate but we did do a hell of a good job.)

As for the Awards themselves, I did not win in my category – Michele Neylon scooped Best Business Blog. Despite knowing I was a most unlikely contender, I was extremely grumpy about this and could briefly be heard threatening to burn one of the polystyrene Blacknight horse heads in effigy or possibly put it in his bed. This shameful, booze fuelled mini-strop stopped the moment Suzy was named for Best Current Affairs Blog and then again for the Grand Prix – I was so delighted for her, I cried. An entirely noble and well-deserved victory, that one.

I knew more people this year than I did last year, so there were fewer revelations, but in the tradition of last year’s Awards, I hereby submit the following 2009 Unofficial Blog Awards:

• Best Badges: Will Knott, for “Ledgebag.” Absolutely legend.
• Hottest Husband: Gingerpixel. Woah, mama. You go girl.
• Hottest Missus: Walter Higgins. (Seriously, have you seen Mrs Walter?)
• Most Aptly Named: The Sexy Pedestrian who is indeed smokin’. (And frankly, you wouldn’t chuck Mr. Sexy Pedestrian out either.)
• Most Adorable: Elfinamsterdam, who to my great surprise, actually is the size of an elf. I thought she just gave out random gifts or something.
• Best Swag: CuriousWines, who did swapable badges that were so popular, people were stealing them out of other people’s booty bags.
• Best Tune: John Handelaar, who spun How Sweet it Is with Marvin Gaye covering his own song in German. (If you ask @handelaar, he’ll probably share it.)
• Sorest Loser: Joe Scanlon, who was not happy to be defeated in Inflatable Twister.
• Best Dressed: Ciara Crossan. Because the bride is always the best dressed woman in the room. Hilarious.
• Biggest Sucker Dote: Niall Harbison, who bought the afterpartiers in Room 201 a bottle of Absolute from the hotel bar. For €80.

Many of these people, and many more, ended up in Apartment 201 for the impromptu afterparty, which carried on until I finally chucked everyone out at 5:30 in the morning.

I smell like a pub floor before the smoking ban, my headache is undefeated, there are not enough cups of tea on all the world right now, and hilariously I have 12 people coming for a full-on Sunday lunch in 2 hours, but I would not have changed a thing. This night was EPIC. Thanks as always, Damien and crew.

PS: Remember, people – what happens at the after party, stays at the after party. And no, I do not have your clothes / phone / shoe / camera / shit – call hotel reception, ye langers.

I love The Proofreading Girl, probably because I got to use one of my favourite fonts and a cute illustration for the header and matching business identity. I think it’s a friendly representation of a professional service that’s obviously backed by a real human, and we had a lot of fun building in content to help visitors understand the real value of outsourced proofreading. (Why Hire a Proofreader still cracks me up.)

I lied. I completely cared if we won, which is good, because we did – CuriousWines.ie took home a gong for Best Commercial Website at the 2009 Digital Media Awards, beating out major national brands like Toyota Ireland, Three and Argus Car Hire. It was a stunning moment, and indeed, I was stunned and delighted.

I went with Michael Kane, who practically knocked me out with a right hook that turned into a giddy hug when his company name was called out. The Curious guys are over the moon, and fair play to them – their heart and souls are in this business and they deserve every success. They earn it, every day.

It was an interesting evening in other regards, too. I’m not overkeen on agencies as a general rule, and spending the night packed into a room with new media kids and multinational corporates is not really my idea of a good time. These people travel in packs (like wolves) and it’s more like going to 20 office parties all in the same room, none of which you’ve actually been invited to.

That said, Jermain Williams and the guys from Dialogue were great craic (and won, for Podge and Rog), Nick McGivney from Adland Ireland was an unexpected find and an utter delight, and AislingMcMahon from Strata3 was increadibly friendly and nice (and looked particularly fresh and lovely for a woman who’d been in heels since 6 AM.)

And of course, you can’t pull together three people and a pint in Dublin without Conor Lynch showing up. I keep telling him he should rename his company Shmoozer.ie because he does this with more grace and more class than anyone I know. Whenever I meet him these days, I just offer to hand him my knickers and skip to the fag, because he’s that good. I’m entirely unclear what he wants vis a vis Connector but whatever it is, I’m confident he gets it.

The absolute highlight of my evening, however, was going back to my hotel room just in time to hear the couple next door scoring. She was giving it the full throttle, porn star soundtrack treatment, and was either having a really good night or getting paid by the hour. Hers was the orgasm heard ’round the world, or at least throughout the hotel, and it was quite something.

Then it was his turn. I was completely prepared for the standard Uh uh uh or possibly UhhHUUUgh or even, you know, Go Munster! What I was not prepared for, however, was:

Arf arf arf! Arf arf arf! AAAAAAAARF!

And this, kids, is why you should be respectful of your neighbours and not have loud, raucous sex in hotels. Unless, of course, you want the internet to know that you bark like a seal.

Mike Kane called me on Wednesday night to say he’d bought tickets, was dateless, and since I was the designer of his shortlisted site, we were going to the Digital Media Awards. On Friday.

Far from being excited, I was deeply irritated. Because here’s the thing: if you’re a woman, you can’t just get a buzz cut and turn up in a penguin suit. Black tie events require Herculean amounts of effort, and I now had one day – Thursday – to do all of the following:

• Buy a frock
• Buy a dress bag for said frock
• Buy shoes
• Buy a wrap
• Get a haircut
• Get my nails done
• Unpack 16 boxes to find my grown up coat
• Remember how to put on make-up

Also, I hate this shit because I do not have a magical fairy godmother, and there’s always a very real danger that unless the shopping gods are on my side, I’ll arrive at the ball looking like a Teletubby wrapped in tulle.

Luckily, the stars aligned and Debenham’s had the perfect frock, the haircut doesn’t suck, and the shoes are truly ace.

Now I’m excited. I don’t even care if we win.

“Site launch” is a bit of a misnomer, as the functional but fugly Twitter Mosaic was up and running and already getting loads of attention when Walter Higgins asked “What’s your availability? Can you make Twitter Mosaic pretty?” My answer was “My availability is shit, but yes.”

There’s no time like the present, so Guillermo Moreno and I sat down at midnight to see just how fast we could get design, XHTML and CSS out the door, and Walter woke up six hours later to a brand new Twitter Mosaic.

The end of April will find me in London, speaking at Future of Web Design.  Nobody is more surprised I was invited than I am, but more to the point: nobody could possibly be more terrified.

I’m not usually nervous about speaking in public; I do it pretty often, at all kinds of events. However, having thrown a huge strop about the state of the “Future of” conference series, I’m putting myself under a lot of pressure not to completely bomb this one. After mulling it over for a few months, however, I have finally concluded that the best way to pull this off and avoid vomiting all over my (very tasteful) Ferragamos is to just go ahead and be my normal foul-mouthed, acerbic self.

Thus, I will be presenting Throwing Client Collaboration Out the Window: The Stalinist Web Design Model.

Web designers and agencies of all sizes almost universally promote themselves as agreeable team players in a collaborative partnership. But what happens when you throw that practice out the window and adopt a process that isn’t a collaborative creation, a model where you don’t give the client choices, and a project management style where you constantly say No to the customer? Sabrina Dent argues that the clients are just as happy, the end users are better off, and the design and build takes less time with fewer tears.

I may never work again, but at least I’ll have something to talk about.

This afternoon, I received an email off my contact form from the unfortunately named Elias Shams at the unfortunately named Searchles. According to the email footer, “Searchles” rhymes with “circles.” I can’t help thinking, though, that there’s a fundamental problem with you brand when you have to point out to people that it does not rhyme with words like artless, tactless and clueless.

Anyway, the email just smelled spammy; it was not addressed to me personally, and not about anything I’ve ever expressed any interest in. So I double-checked with Twitter and indeed: Suzy got it once, Damien twice, Darragh twice, Lexia twice, and Redmum also twice.

I believe, campers, that we call this Yahtzee!

Just to be clear, I don’t mind at all when people use my contact form to contact me. I do mind, however, when people use it as a dumbwaiter for delivering piping hot spam direct to a random Inbox. And I particularly mind it when the communication attempt is as wildly inept as Elias’ was:

• If you want to contact me, have the courtesy to actually figure out my name and address me. (BIG HINT: My name is IN MY URL.) It helps to foster the illusion that this is at least a little bit about me and not all about you.
• The email has six links to six different sites within it. You have my attention for less than thirty seconds; give me ONE PLACE to go.
• It has no specific call to action. Again, you have my attention for less than thirty seconds; give me ONE THING to do.

A good pitch email just isn’t that hard to put together. And when you’re sending it to hundreds or thousands of bloggers, each one vocal and each one carting around their own personal soapbox, it’s particularly important that you get it right.

As I pointed out to Elias when I wrote back to him, if you spend half as much time copywriting your email as you do trawling for random bloggers to send it to, you’re much more likely to end up with a pitch that doesn’t suck out loud.

Elias replied to tell me that this wasn’t spam, that he picked me to write to because of the Ladies Tea party post; apparently, he loves women and thinks we’re the best thing ever. (I’m sure Damien and Darragh will be totally flattered to hear that.) And apparently, my little missive has broken him as a man:

I can’t believe you think my pitch suck :-( u just put a huge crack on my heart :-(

And so, courtesy of Suzy, I leave this as consolation for poor Elias: