Happy Friday to me, OR: Thanks for reminding me why I love my job

For the past three weeks, ever since the applications closed on March 15th, I have been reviewing the vExpert entries for this year. We got close to 600 of those this year, and I took it upon myself to personally review every single one, in addition to getting each one also looked at by at least one other person. Usually more like three more people. But I digress.

The key to this is that this week I have been spending five hours or more each day reviewing the entries: visiting people's blogs, checking their references, and thanking ze Google for Chrome integrating with Translate, so that I can actually evaluate content in any language our awesome community members use.

At 5pm on Friday, I am getting slightly blasé from staring at the intartubes for so long, when this gem crosses my screen and wakes me up:

• Name: FCoTR User Group
• Twitter handle: @FCoTRUserGroup
• Have you been a vExpert before? Not yet
• Please list your blogging activities: All of my blogs are readily available on Prodigy and CompuServe. They were on Geocities, too, but I can't remember where.
• Please list your other writing contributions: I wrote a Wikipedia article. It must have been very popular, because people were very quick to "flag" it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/FCoTR
• Did you make any multimedia contributions? I've got T-shirts: http://www.cafepress.com/weathershenker, License plates from the same state that brought you J.R. Ewing: http://fcotr.org/2011/10/07/fcotr-vehicular-awesomeness/; and, of course, my button [not TSA approved for domestic travel]: http://theshiningrayofdarkness.com/2011/08/13/fcotr-takes-on-tsa/
• Please list any events and speaking gigs: Thanks to the likes of Steve Foskett and Bob Plankers, I was all over this year -- VMworld (US, Europe, and Antarctica), Interop, the East St. Louis Left Handed Barber Extravaganza '2011, and at least one other place. I once nearly saw Wil Wheaton, too. So I should get bonus points for that.
• Have you made any contributions to online communities? To be honest, I've never visited the "web". I only use fibre channel over token ring equipment. Networking vendors have thus far refused to build the necessary bridging gear to allow me online. I did watch the movie "The Net" with Sandra Bullock. That's not very good promotional material for the Internet, let me tell you.
• Did you publish any tools and resources? http://fcotr.org/

Well, thanks for the treat guys!

I am even creating a new tag for this post: "awesomeness."