Sprinkle with Ajax, do not substitute with business plans. Serves 2,000.

So about a week ago, Owen Thomas told me that he bought me a ticket to the Crunchies, and that he wanted me to live-blog it on Valleywag. After 7 days of pissing and moaning about doing work for a ticket that I didn't ask for, he told me to do whatever the hell I wanted. So I went to the thing, and holy shit, was I sorry. What a complete disaster.

I'm Paul Boutin. I Wear Sunglasses At Night And I Can't See Shit.

I would give a recap of the winners, but really, what's the point? Does anybody really care? Luke Nosek from the Founders Fund was handing out awards and didn't know anything about the companies he was calling to the stage. The guy was at the podium, reading notes from a Treo (not a piece of paper, not an index card, but a fucking Treo), stumbling over his words. Have a little respect for yourself and for the people you represent. Stand up straight, eyes toward the audience, and enunciate.

Between these presentations of stupid monkey statues were short video clips sent by the nominees, the responses of questions asked by the embarrassingly vapid Sarah Meyers. Protip: if you're going to be a video personality, learn to read a script. Ghastly.

The audience was split between two groups: startup founders and writers. Never have I been so ashamed of my profession. I lied to most of the people I met, telling them I was a freelance writer. Fact: you get a lot of truth out of members of the legitimate media when they don't think that you're part of the circus. Case in point, the business editor for a major newspaper in the Bay Area, who had the common sense to show up drunk. I was jealous.

Don't Wear A Flickr Sweater If You Don't Want Losers Pitching You Partnerships

The only redeeming part of the ceremony was Dan Lyons's acceptance of the "best device" award on behalf of Steve Jobs for the iPhone. The Richter Scales also performed live, earning the notable distinction of being the only people on the stage with any semblance of talent.

Moving on to the afterparty, I was reminded of why I don't go to these kinds of events. Too many people pitching too many ideas with not enough booze. There was cheap white wine, cheap red wine, and some lame vodka promotion. A lot of people were crowding around Arrington, presumably asking him to cover their startups. When I finally did meet the man, I was surprised. He was polite and complimented Uncov. I think he realizes that it's just the internet, and that he's the only one getting well off of this Web 2.0 frenzy. The dude is more competent than I thought, although I wish I could say the the same for Duncan Riley. Fail.

Oh, right. One more thing. This is the last Uncov. Ever. I have been getting tired of it, and this has been manifesting itself in my writing. After seeing the spectacle at the Crunchies, I think it's finally time to quit.

You know, Ted, it's not nice to say mean things. This is San Francisco, everyone is supposed to be friendly to eachother. Yeah, I know, the world can be a scary place sometimes, but sooner or later, you gotta face facts.

Anywho, Pownce's lead developer has imparted another gem of computing wisdom on us. Hm, what could it be? Empirical evidence that incoming messages can be modeled with a Poisson process, and how this affects capacity planning with a multiserver queue? Maybe not, that could be too academic. Oh, I know. It's got to be some clever database sharding strategy re-implemented in Python because Java is big and scary. Nope, not that. Django methods to avoid because they're inefficient, something determined by judicious use of hotshot? It's not that either. It's how to generate random strings.

It comes as no surprise that this problem has been solved already, better than she or I ever could (It's called APG).

Kevin Rose's Real Name Is Robert

I'm treading of difficult ground here, but there is a point I need to make. I am all for having more women in technology. There's far too much of a disparity between the sexes in this field. To that end, I have met women who are far better engineers than I will ever be. I think that more companies should follow Google's lead and offer scholarships to young women pursuing educations in computing and technology.

But people like Ms. Pownce aren't doing the movement any favors. Wearing your ineptitude around your neck and parading around under the guise of "hot geek" only lowers the opinion of females in the eyes of male engineers who can recognize that you don't know what you're doing.

But hey, this is the internet. Don't take anything you read seriously.

I'm Going To The Crunchies Tonight On Valleywag's Dime

I bet I can even liberate a few cocktails out of Owen Thomas's man-crush on me.

Anywho, even with the recent press, Pownce's numbers are still falling. Their Alexa rating now is lower than when Arrington and I suggested that they were on their way to the deadpool. Fail.

I have been a Dreamhost customer for a few years now. Uncov isn't hosted there, but a few other domains of mine are (MediaWiki fuck yeah). The other day it seems they had some billing fail and bilked $7,500,000 out of unsuspecting customers.

Upgrayedd Gonna Find A Way To Come Get His Money

I only knew this happened when I got the e-mail from them that said they were refunding my $119.40. I got my money back? I don't have to do anything? Yeah, then what the flying shit do I care?

The rest of the world, it seems, had a bit more time on its hands. Dreamhost made a post on their website about how it was all due to a fatfigering error, and they were really sorry. Bloggers, predictably, started the standard issue ball ache about Dreamhost's unprofessional handling of the situation.

This, really, is why I love my blogging brethren. As soon as we see something that's remotely nitpickable, we think I'm gonna post about this on my blog. Once this hits Digg, those guys will know not to mess with me!!

Akismet Is Still Flagging Me As Spam On TechCrunch.com

I'm sure the poor dumb bastard who made the error got in a bit of trouble at work, but I think he deserves to be rewarded. Nothing is more satisfying than setting off a tidal wave of anal pain through the blogosphere.

And now people are even bitching to Valleywag about Dreamhost's fuckup maxing out their credit cards. I've got news for you: if a $100 charge maxes out your credit card, it's not Dreamhost who has failed.

I feel bad enough for Dreamhost having to deal with David Heinemeier Hansson's bullshit (protip: DHH, fuck, man, you are last year's news. We're all tired of you. Consider suicide.). Overbilling? Who cares? They owned up to it and fixed the problem. Movin' on.