I won the Herts24 Web Award for Personal / Family / Blog Website. I couldn’t believe it when in the ceremony it got to the category and I was announced as the winner.

I would like to thank everyone who voted for me, the judges who selected me from the final five, and to Teresa and Craig who look after me, take me on travels around the world and who help me to put together my blog. I don’t think it would be possible without them.

If you would like to watch the ceremony then you can on the Herts24 website.

www.herts24.co.uk/webawards

I was going to say that I built the polar bear on my own, but it is obvious that I am too small. I needed a little help. I am hoping that the weather stays cold enough so that he stays around for a while. They are saying that the wheather should be around 2c tomorrow. The snow continues to fall which is promising.

There was so much snow in the garden that we grabbed two buckets and built a polar bear out of snow. He borrowed a scarf and we gave him coins for a nose and eyes. There is so much snow left in the garden that we might go and build something else later.

I am not a very big bear, so when I started to walk in the snow I fell deep into it. I couldn’t move my legs and had to get pulled out of the snow. If I hadn’t got pulled out then before not too long I could have been a small snow man.

We had a small amount of snow a few weeks ago, not enough to make a snowman or to play in. I wasn’t expecting anymore snow this year, but they had predicted snow for today and late last night it started snowing. When I woke this morning there was a wonderful blanket of snow. There are now several inches of snow. The garden is covered and the streets look really pretty. There are children playing outside in the snow, so I am guessing that they closed the school for the day. I have even seen people getting around on skis.

The WSJ reported on Friday 12th January 2007 “Bad Parking, loud talking – no transgression is too trivial to document online.”

“Last Month, Eva Burgess was eating breakfast at the Rose Cafe in Venice, Calif., when she remembered she needed to make an appointment with her eye doctor. So the New York theater director got on her cellphone and booked a date.”

“Almost immediately, she started receiving ‘weird and creepy’ calls directing her to a blog. There, under the posting ‘Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!’ her name, cellphone number and other details mentioned in her call to the doctor’s office were posted, along with the admonition, ‘next time, you might take your business outside.’ The offended blogger had been sitting next to Ms. Burgess in the cafe.”

“It used to be the worst you could get for a petty wrong in public was a rude look. Now it’s not just brutal police officers, panty-free celebrities and wayward politicians who are being outed online. The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking (Caughtya.org) and leering (HollaBackNYC.com) to littering (LitterButt.com) and general bad behavior (RudePeople.com). One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre.”

It seems that anyone can be vigilante and strive to make their community a better place, although I disagree with snooping on calls to a doctor and I think a stern look would be far more appropriate then posting their private details on a blog.

Whilst we were in Florida, I sent a postcard home to the teddies who weren’t able to join us. I was a little upset when it arrived today because it looked as if something had taken a bite out of the corner. We were surprised that it arrived as part of the address has gone. The postcode was missing and only United was left of the country United Kingdom.

I was browsing through the Google Labs projects earlier today and came across a collaboration between NASA and Google, Google Mars. They have mapped the planet Mars similar to how they have mapped Earth. It is really neat; you can see where all spacecraft have landed or crashed, and read all the stories related to the red planet. I did wonder whether it is the precursor to setting up a colony on the planet and Google being the only website to have a map.

http://www.google.com/mars/