2006 The Year In Review: Friend’s Blogs

Being an annual assemblage of sundry content from within my nano-quadrant of the blogosphere.
Partly to redress the navel-gazing aspect of my previous post, and mostly because it would be fun to do. I decided I would share some of my personal highlights from my friend’s collective bloggings and flickrings over the previous twelve months. Seeing as Time magazine has made “You” (yes, they do mean you) their Person Of The Year for 2006 and that we are all now participants of the great Web 2.0 social-networking group-consciousness uber-mind, then it is worth celebrating that in some way at the year’s end. Anyway, who says that link-lists are still the lowest form of blogging?
Benny has two pretty prolific blogs, so I will start with him. I really liked this Tarantino illustration he did for BennyPix. While over on the darker side, at his alter-ego’s site Metal Ruins Lives, he gave us this happy little pastoral scene. Yes, Quite, Indeed. Also, while not strictly much of a website, his moody electronia is available for listening here.
Daragh’s roving camera eye gave us this neat photo of me and Ethan, and I do kinda like this cool little doodle.
Hilary Kenna kick-started Type4Screen this year (she built it in WordPress too: we’re not worthy, we’re so not worthy). I find her posts looking at the characteristics of individual typefaces most interesting. Dave Suttle’s post ‘from the coalface’ was noteworthy as it addressed some of the day-to-day realities of designing for electronic media. Can we have some more of that please? Hilary also flickred this photo which still totally cracks me up every time I look at it. Sumo-tastic. Dave’s photo of Sam covered in dinosaurs also gets an honourable mention for general creepy-crawleyness.
John Maguire writes weekly movie reviews, which a least gives him some sort of schedule which the rest of us lack. Always a great man for turning a phrase, he is at his most enjoyable whenever taking a hatchet to the more crass outputs of the Hollywood machine. His critique of this particular cultural crime being an appropriate example: “I remember there were lots of colours and loud noises.”
Ruth and Eoghan were kept busy with baby Killian for most of this year, but he still made it online too. Photogenic or what?
Declan and Barb were in London, where Dec took this neat photo of Big Ben and this one of a Polish-Mexican restaurant, Yum! (They did lots of other stuff too.)
Claire and Michael went to Korea and Japan this year, their photos only make me want to go back east again. Jealous much? Indeed.
And finally, just to tire you out, there was Luke’s exhausting account of his successful completion of the Devizes to Westminster race last April. I think that I need to lie down after that one.
While I hope I did not miss anyone, no doubt I have. Lets see how many of the rest of my friends make it into my blogroll by this time next year.

Benny Award Winner

Ian’s short film: ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ won the top award in the New Irish Short Animation category at the Galway Film Fleadh yesterday. This is wonderful news on many different levels. Not least of which being that I can now legitimately use the phrase “my brother, the award-winning director” in conversation.

Congratulations to Ian and his team. It is great to see all of their hard work being recognised and heartening to see that such a boot-strapped short film can stand its own against better funded productions.

Obviously, winning this award makes Ian somewhat of a hot property. We could see a career upswing if Boulder put some appropriate PR resources behind this win, or equally if the animation headhunters come a-calling. Now is the time to get started on a treatment for Pixar, Benny!

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Boy Bashes Box of Beer Bottles in Ballinasloe

Presented for my mild amusement. (Not simply because Daragh had already posted some video over on his blog.) Not sure why this is appearing sideways here in TP, it is the right way around on the home PC.

Busy Benny Blogs, Builds Better Site

Does this man ever sleep at all? In a multi-pronged internet land-grab, my brother Ian is launching a shiny new blog featuring drawings of work-in-progress with notes and commentary. (Check out the sketches that he ‘knocked out while watching the TV’. Presumably he included those to keep the rest of us doodlers in our rightful place.)
He has simultaneously launched a fully-revised edition of his personal site: KKF v2.0. (“Here is a short film that I made.” and “I hope to have this book published soon”, etc.) Although, I do think his site has lost a certain something now that it does not include Elvis shooting into a pile of televisions.
If you still have any browsing time left after crawling that site, then there is always his pseudonymous side-project: ‘Metal Ruins Lives’. And no, before you ask, those are not found album covers. Surprise, surprise, they have all been custom-created for the site. Rock on Benny.
Any rumours that Benny is changing his name to ‘MediaEngineOne Kenny’ are only mildly exaggerated.

Son And Heir

Ethan Edward Kenny made his arrival at 6:14 on Monday evening, weighting in at a co-incidental 6 pounds and 14 ounces. More information forthcoming once my frazzled brain restarts itself.

Arrival delayed

Well the nineteenth has come and gone (more or less, there are still 1.75 hours to go) and Aiden jr./Valerie jr. has declined to make her/his grand entrance. So we are officially into overdue territory. The due-date is a major mental milestone and now that it has passed all we can do is still wait and see. Watch This Space.

Kenny Family Photo History

We were in Ballinasloe for the weekend, attending Cora’s surprise sixtieth meal. I came upon a long-mislaid facet of our family’s photo archive.

During the latest phase of the, now ongoing, de-clutterization of the parental attic, Claire discovered a box of old transparencies from the seventies. They were stored away with this battery-powered, magnifying, handheld viewer, which was still stored in its original, hippy aesthetic, packaging – groovey or what?

Some of the benefits of analogue kit like this viewer are its simplicity and resilience. Once we stripped out the ancient corroded batteries, cleaned up the inside and bended some pliable metal pressure-sensitive connections, we were good to go.

The transparencies were a mixed lot from the mid-seventies. They are particularly interesting as they fill a lacuna within the family photo albums where transparencies were popular for a brief period in the seventies.

I intend to clean them up and scan them, so that Cora has digital archive copies and I can get some new prints made for her. You never know, I may even post some of the less mortifying images on my Flickr page...

Tribble Definition

OK, time to clarify this tribble question which has been baffling the greatest minds of our generation, or something.
It is all about twins. Val’s brother and sister are twins. My dad is an identical twin. Given all of the Irish folk wisdom that we were being helpfully informed of – advice like: “it skips a generation” and/or “it is from the mother’s side” and so forth, our own little in-joke was that we would be having twins-cubed or twins-to-the-power-of-whatever. Then, as we were obviously fated to have a litter of twelve or so, we started referring to the imminent arrivals as ‘The Tribbles’. And if you do not pick up on that particular sci-fi reference then you are not as much of a nerd as Val and I evidently are.
When – with sighs of relief all round and clink of champagne glasses – our baby-scans ultimately revealed that we are actually only expecting the arrival of ‘uno bambino’ (well 97% sure, or whatever the relevant margin of error is) the collective appellation was duly shortened to ‘The Tribble’. Which it remains to this day, as we are nowhere near any idea of what to call our little person. Only three months remain to sort that out.

It Is Valerie’s Birthday Today

My beautiful wife celebrates her birthday today. And now the world (or at least all of the automated search engine spiders that crawl this web site) can know about it.

Happy Birthday Honey!

(Posted from the train.)